Top 80 Barbara Oakley Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The Law of Serendipity: Lady Luck favors the one who tries.”

— Barbara Oakley

2. “Process, Not Product If you find yourself avoiding certain tasks because they make you uncomfortable, there is a great way to reframe things: Learn to focus on process, not product.”

— Barbara Oakley

3. “Persistence is often more important than intelligence. Approaching material with a goal of learning it on your own gives you a unique path to mastery.”

— Barbara Oakley

4. “This is where the Law of Serendipity comes to play: Lady Luck favors the one who tries.”

— Barbara Oakley

5. “The biggest lie ever is that practice makes perfect. Not true – practice makes you better.”

— Barbara Oakley

6. “The only way to walk a journey of a thousand miles is to take one step at a time.”

— Barbara Oakley

7. “Learning is often paradoxical. The very thing we need in order to learn impedes our ability to learn. We need to focus intently to be able to solve problems – yet that focus can also block us from accessing the fresh approach we may need. Success is important, but critically, so is failure. Persistence is key – but misplaced persistence causes needless frustration.”

— Barbara Oakley

8. “Also remember that the better you get at something, the more enjoyable it can become.”

— Barbara Oakley

9. “A Mind for Numbers is an excellent book about how to approach mathematics, science, or any realm where problem solving plays a prominent role.”

— Barbara Oakley

10. “Thiss sentence contains threee errors.”

— Barbara Oakley

11. “Psychopaths know intellectually what is immoral they just don’t have a feeling of immorality about it.”

— Barbara Oakley

12. “It’s important to transform distant deadlines into daily ones. Attack them bit by bit. Big tasks need to be translated into smaller ones that show up on your daily task list. The only way to walk a journey of a thousand miles is to take one step at a time.”

— Barbara Oakley

13. “The harder you push your brain to come up with something creative, the less creative your ideas will be.”

— Barbara Oakley

14. “Remember, research has shown that the more effort you put into recalling material, the deeper it embeds itself into your memory.”

— Barbara Oakley

15. “It can take a lot of hard focused-mode work beforehand, but the sudden, unexpected solution that emerges from the diffuse mode can make it feel almost like the “aha!” mode.”

— Barbara Oakley

16. “Tomorrow is another day, we rather hope it will be better but better it won’t be unless self-foibles are examined.”

— Barbara Oakley

17. “Procrastination expert Rita Emmett explains: “The dread of doing a task uses up more time and energy than doing the task itself.”

— Barbara Oakley

18. “Welcome to the psychiatric hotline: if you are obsessive compulsive press one repeatedly. If you are schizophrenic listen closely and a little voice will tell you which number to press. If you have borderline personality disorder hang up; you have already pushed everybody’s buttons.”

— Barbara Oakley

19. “If you protect your routine, eventually it will protect you.”

— Barbara Oakley

20. “Multitasking is like constantly pulling up a plant. This kind of constant shifting of your attention means that new ideas and concepts have no chance to take root and flourish.”

— Barbara Oakley

21. “Multitasking means that you are not able to make full, rich connections in your thinking, because the part of your brain that helps make connections is constantly being pulled away before neural connections can be firmed up.”

— Barbara Oakley

22. “Procrastination is like addiction. It offers temporary excitement and relief from boring reality.”

— Barbara Oakley

23. “To be a successful problem solver, focus first. We get stuck in problem solving when we don’t first prepare our brain by focusing on the basics. Don’t just dive into problem solving without studying the explanations first. You need to lay some basic trails on the focused pinball table.”

— Barbara Oakley

24. “One of the single most important pieces of advice I can give you on dealing with procrastination is to ignore distractions!”

— Barbara Oakley

25. “The trick to overwriting a habit is to look for the pressure point – your reaction to a cue. The only place you need to apply willpower is to change your reaction to the cue.”

— Barbara Oakley

26. “Just focus on whatever section you are studying. You’ll find that once you put the first problem or concept in your library, whatever it is, then the second concept will go in a bit more easily. And the third more easily still. Not that all of this is a snap, but it does get easier.”

— Barbara Oakley

27. “The Three Key Steps to Powerful Reading Picture walk Read with care Use active recall.”

— Barbara Oakley

28. “You may think you really have to understand something in order to explain it. But observe what happens when you are talking to other people about what you are studying. You’ll be surprised to see how often understanding arises as a consequence of attempts to explain to others and yourself, rather than the explanation arising out of your previous understanding.”

— Barbara Oakley

29. “They say experience is the best teacher. Instead, it should be that failure is the best teacher. I’ve found that the best learners are the ones who cope best with failure and use it as a learning tool.”

— Barbara Oakley

30. “We develop a passion for what we are good at. The mistake is thinking that if we aren’t good at something, we do not have and can never develop a passion for it.”

— Barbara Oakley

31. “It’s normal to sit down with a few negative feelings about beginning your work. It’s how you handle those feelings that matters.”

— Barbara Oakley

32. “I think most clearly when I’m driving. Sometimes I’ll just take a break and drive around – this helps a lot.”

— Barbara Oakley

33. “Medical imaging studies have shown that mathphobes, for example, appear to avoid math because even just thinking about it seems to hurt. The pain centers of their brains light up when they contemplate working on math.”

— Barbara Oakley

34. “The Click Moment.”

— Barbara Oakley

35. “Gary Noesner notes that we could all learn from the successes and failures of hostage negotiation.7 At the beginning of such situations, emotions run high. Efforts to speed matters along often lead to disaster. Staving off natural desires to react aggressively to emotional provocations allows time for the molecules of emotion to gradually dissipate. The resulting cooler heads save lives.”

— Barbara Oakley

36. “There are chunks related to both concepts and procedures that reinforce one another. Solving a lot of math problems provides an opportunity to learn why the procedure works the way it does or why it works at all. Understanding the underlying concept makes it easier to detect errors when you make them.”

— Barbara Oakley

37. “If you don’t make a point of repeating what you want to remember, your “metabolic vampires” can suck away the neural pattern related to that memory before it can strengthen and solidify.”

— Barbara Oakley

38. “The best way to speed your learning is to avoid lazy learning. If you spend too much time on material you already know, you won’t have time to learn new material. This idea of focusing on the harder stuff is called deliberate practice.2 Deliberate practice is how you become an expert more quickly in whatever you are studying.3.”

— Barbara Oakley

39. “This is precisely why one significant mistake students sometimes make in learning math and science is jumping into the water before they learn to swim.”

— Barbara Oakley

40. “But be wary of the idea that some people are “left-brain” or “right-brain” dominant – research indicates that is simply not true.17.”

— Barbara Oakley

41. “As writing coach Daphne Gray-Grant recommends to her writing clients: “Eat your frogs first thing in the morning.” Do the most important and most disliked jobs first, as soon as you wake up. This is incredibly effective.”

— Barbara Oakley

42. “Habits can be good and bad. Habit, after all, is simply when our brain launches into a preprogrammed “zombie” mode. You will probably not be surprised to learn that chunking, that automatically connected neural pattern that arises from frequent practice, is intimately related to habit.1 Habit is an energy saver for us. It allows us to free our mind for other types of activities.”

— Barbara Oakley

43. “Remember, habits are powerful because they create neurological cravings. It helps to add a new reward if you want to overcome your previous cravings. Only once your brain starts expecting the reward will the important rewiring take place that will allow you to create new habits.”

— Barbara Oakley

44. “Why Trying Too Hard Can Sometimes Be Part of the Problem.”

— Barbara Oakley

45. “Once you are distracted from the problem at hand, the diffuse mode has access and can begin pinging about in its big-picture way to settle on a solution.”

— Barbara Oakley

46. “Complex training environments such as action video game play may actually foster brain plasticity and learning.”

— Barbara Oakley

47. “Focused problem solving in math and science is often more effortful than focused-mode thinking involving language and people.”

— Barbara Oakley

48. “You want your brain to become used to the idea that just knowing how to use a particular problem-solving technique isn’t enough – you also need to know when to use it.”

— Barbara Oakley

49. “Research has confirmed that a special place devoted just to working is particularly helpful.”

— Barbara Oakley

50. “Testing is itself an extraordinarily powerful learning experience.”

— Barbara Oakley