Some of the most important lessons I learned in college came from one professor, Michael Mitzenmacher. Now, this was a guy with a lot of papers to his name, tenured at Harvard, working on some pretty darn complicated computer science theory (I took his algorithms class). So you'd expect that I'd learn something important. But as it turned out, the biggest lessons I learned from him weren't on the topics he taught. I learned a secret that helped me learn much more effectively.
