Ultralearning: Master Hard Skills, Outsmart the Competition, and Accelerate Your Career

by Scott H. Young

The idea of taking on an ambitious project—like studying MIT’s undergraduate curriculum in one year or learning a new language every three months—is inspirational to many people.

Maybe people who dont understand subject mastery or long term memory formation

But there was something else about Scott’s projects that resonated with me on a deeper level: he had a bias toward action.

He has intense ADHD hyperfocus. I know. I have it too. He just has the freedom to go jaunting around the world for a year at a time.

I learned photography through a variety of methods. I studied the portfolios of famous photographers. I scouted locations and searched for compelling perspectives. But, most of all, I learned through one simple method: I took over 100,000 photos that first year. I never enrolled in a photography class. I didn’t read books on how to become a better photographer. I just committed to relentless experimentation. This “learning by doing” approach embodies one of my favorite chapters in this book and Scott’s third principle of ultralearning: directness.

This...this is not new information. It wasnt new 40 years ago. It forms the entire basis of modern educational pedagogy

Principle #4: Drill—I systematically broke down each aspect of writing articles—the headline, the introductory sentence, the transitions, the storytelling, and more—and put together spreadsheets filled with examples of each segment. Then I set about testing and refining my ability to perform each small aspect of the larger task.

This only worked because you don't write fiction. Frankly, good nonfiction--especially short-form like articles--is much easier to effectively mimic

First, deep learning provides a sense of purpose in life. Developing skills is meaningful. It feels good to get good at something. Ultralearning is a path to prove to yourself that you have the ability to improve and to make the most of your life. It gives you the confidence that you can accomplish ambitious things.

Ambitious, yes. But joyful? Thoughtful? Sustaining? I'm not sure about those.

Second, deep learning is how you get outsized returns. The simple truth is most people will never intensely study your area of interest. Doing so—even if it’s just for a few months—will help you stand out. And once you stand out, you can get a better job, negotiate for a higher salary or more free time, network with more interesting people, and otherwise level up your personal and professional life. Ultralearning helps you develop leverage that you can use elsewhere.

And there it is. Ultralearning is a tool to survive the capitalist hellscape. Joy and passion are quashed beneath utility and financial advantage

The truth is, despite the success of my writing and photography pursuits, these projects were haphazard. I did them intensely but without guidance or direction. I made a lot of mistakes. I wish I had this book when I was starting out. I can only imagine how much wasted time and energy I would have saved.

1: Mistakes are *part* of learning 2: Maybe you might have been more efficient, but would you have had as much fun? Would you have enjoyed it enough to keep trying? Or would you have burnt out from turning a hobby into a task list?

Chapter I Can You Get an MIT Education Without Going to MIT?

Of course you can, but it doesnt do you much good without the "I R Smart" paper

And although an MIT student typically covers the entirety of multivariate calculus over a semester, I had started only five days before.

Honestly, for most people that would be an advantage. For all that professors say not to cram the final, the reality is that *short* term memory is such that a week of focused, structured cramming will get you through most exams. You might even manage a reasonably high grade if you can keep your anxiety down well enough (which is where most students fall apart because for them it actually matters). It's not until youre sitting in the next class a month or three later that it comes back to bite you in the ass.

I wanted to be an entrepreneur and so had studied business, thinking that would be the best route to becoming my own boss. Four years later, I discovered that a business major was largely a finishing school for entrants into the world of big corporations, gray suits, and standard operating procedures.

In fairness, I can see how you might make this mistake

Computer science, in contrast, was a major where you actually learned to make things. Programs, websites, algorithms, and artificial intelligence were what had interested me in entrepreneurship in the first place, and I was struggling to decide what to do about it.

If you wanted to code shit you'd have been better off picking a project you wanted and jumping in. Half of a comp sci degree is weeder math and theory that, while interesting, serves little practical purpose if youre not going into academia

This focus on final exams later expanded to include programming projects for the classes that had them. These two criteria formed the skeleton of an MIT degree, covering most of the knowledge and skills I wanted to learn, with none of the frills. No mandatory attendance policy. No due dates on assignments. The final exams could be taken whenever I was ready and retaken with an alternate exam if I happened to fail one. Suddenly what had initially seemed like a disadvantage—not having physical access to MIT—became an advantage. I could approximate the education of an MIT student for a fraction of the cost, time, and constraints.

its so cute that thats what you think you did

Exploring this possibility further, I even did a test class using the new approach. Instead of showing up to prescheduled lectures, I watched downloaded videos for the class at twice the normal speed. Instead of meticulously doing each assignment and waiting weeks to learn my results, I could test myself on the material one question at a time, quickly learning from my mistakes. Using these and other methods, I found I could scrape through a class in as little as a week’s time. Doing some quick calculations and adding some room for error, I decided it might be possible to tackle the remaining thirty-two classes in under a year.

I hate to break this to you, but to say that this approach allowed you to learn the material is inaccurate bordering on outright lie. What you did was become reasonably good at cramming for tests. Every gifted kid with ADHD manages the same before high school. It does not in any way equate to true, enduring learning

I was living in France as part of a student exchange program. I had left home with high hopes of ending the year speaking effortless French, but things didn’t seem to be turning out that way. Most of my friends spoke to me in English, including the French ones, and it was starting to feel as though one year wouldn’t be enough.

Yeah, the French are just Like That

Normally, he challenged himself to reach the equivalent of a B2 level in a language after three months. The B2 level—the fourth out of six levels beginning A1, A2, B1, and so on—is described by the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) as upper intermediate, allowing the speaker to “interact with a degree of fluency and spontaneity that makes regular interaction with native speakers quite possible without strain for either party.”

Yeah, mate, that's not considered fluency in language circles. It's great, don't get me wrong. People study languages for years without reaching that level. But it's not fluent, it's conversational--and early conversational at that. The kind of chitchat you might make with a shop clerk or new acquaintance. Most countries require a minimum of C1 for citizenship and university entrance because that's the point at which you're likely to manage all necessary daily tasks without too much strain. At B2 you're still getting confused by common idioms and flailing when trying to discuss the latest movie because you don't have the necessary vocabulary or advanced grammar to fully participate in society.

Thus the great champions of Jeopardy! tend to be brainy know-it-alls who have spent a lifetime amassing the huge library of factual knowledge needed to spit out answers on any topic.

Nah, theres been a pattern to teasing out the clues for at least my entire lifetime. General knowledge is helpful, but you can guess with reasonable accuracy if you can learn to decode the clues

One could hunt out the valuable Doubles by hopping between categories and focusing on high-point clues, breaking the conventional approach to the show of sticking within a single category until it was completed.

I loathe this form of gameplay. Dudes going on my list of people Id like to punch

Craig employed spaced-repetition software to maximize his efficiency. Spaced-repetition software is an advanced flash card algorithm first developed by the Polish researcher Piotr Woźniak in the 1980s.4 Woźniak’s algorithm was designed to optimally time when you need to review material in order to remember it. Given a large database of facts, most people will forget what they learn first, needing to remind themselves of it again and again for it to stick. The algorithm fixes this problem by calculating the optimal time for reviewing each fact so you don’t waste energy overdrilling the same information, but also so you don’t forget what you’ve already learned.

I do love my Anki decks for efficient drilling

Throughout the five-year development process, Barone avoided seeking employment as a computer programmer. “I didn’t want to get involved in something substantial,” he said. “I wouldn’t have had the time, and I wanted to give game development my best shot.” Instead, he worked as a theater usher, earning minimum wage so that he wouldn’t get distracted. His meager earnings from his job, combined with support from his girlfriend, allowed Barone to get by as he focused on his passion.

Way to minimise the girlfriend's impact there asshole

For years, I had thought the only way to learn things deeply was to push through school.

We have found your first mistake. School is necessary, but what it really teaches you is how to be good at school

The initial surge of attention led to other requests. An employee at Microsoft wanted to set me up for a job interview. A new startup asked me to join its team. A publishing house in China offered me a book deal to share some studying tips with beleaguered Chinese students. However, those weren’t the reasons I had done the project. I was already happy working as a writer online, which had supported me financially throughout my project and would continue to do so afterward. My goal for the project wasn’t to get a job but to see what was possible. After just a few months of finishing my first big project, ideas for new ones were already bubbling up inside my head.

1: Its good that you weren't aiming to get a job because you very likely would have fallen on your face in the first week 2: "Whats possible" is great cramming strategy, not content mastery 3: Seriously, man, look up ADHD

Our first stop was Valencia, Spain. We had just landed in the airport when we encountered our first obstacle. Two attractive British girls came up to us, asking for directions. We looked at each other and awkwardly sputtered out the little Spanish we knew, pretending we didn’t speak any English.

1: Latin America is cheaper. Try Argentina if you're worried about culture shock, it's very Euro 2: All you had to do was shrug and shake your heads

Despite that inauspicious beginning, our Spanish ability grew even faster than I had anticipated. After two months in Spain, we were interacting in Spanish beyond what I had achieved in an entire year of partial immersion in France. We would go to our tutor in the morning, study a little at home, and spend the rest of the day hanging out with friends, chatting at restaurants, and soaking up the Spanish sun. My friend, despite his earlier doubts, was also a convert to this new approach to learning things. Although he didn’t care to study grammar and vocabulary as aggressively as I did, by the end of our stay, he too was integrating seamlessly into life in Spain. The method worked far better than we had hoped, and we were now believers.

I will grant that its very possible to be able to get to B2 level in three months this way (I've done it in less by ignoring literacy for my poor dyslexic brain's sake), but I just am too antisocial and awkward to enjoy the experience. Focused book drills, listening practice, self-narration, and individual discussion with a single trusted friend or tutor take a bit longer but dont make me want to shoot myself

We continued the trip, going to Brazil to learn Portuguese,

Why on earth did you go from Vancouver to Spain and then back across the Atlantic to Brazil? Just skip Europe and go to Latin America. Save on airfare and cost of living

Asia proved a far harder task than Spain or Brazil. In our preparation, we had assumed those languages would be only a little more difficult than the European ones, although it turned out that they were much harder.

Lmao arrogant idiots. Spanish and Portuguese are not only both Romance languages (and therefore from the same overarching Indo European language branch as English), theyre quite often mutually intelligible to learners after a bit of adjustment. Its quite common for people whose L2 is Spanish to jump into Portuguese for their L3 and attain conversational fluency in less than half the time. You'd have been better off aiming for Farsi as a bridge language to Arabic or Romanian as a bridge to Russian. I'm sure theres also a good bridge to Hungarian and the Uralic group, though I cant think of what. Instead you decided to go from the EASIEST combination to the hardest one because you were too sure of yourself to do basic research

At the end of our year, we could confidently say we spoke four new languages.

Only because you have all the confidence of a mediocre white man

I wondered if the same approach to learning MIT classes and languages could also apply to art.

Youre going to say yes, but the answer is really no. Yes, you can become proficient in the technical aspects of art by immersing yourself in it. Thats just a question of practice hours. No, you cannot develop your own style or innovate or understand what it means to find the humanity in art by spending a few months refining your technique. You can become quite a good mimic, but at the end of the day mimicry doesnt matter without vision. Its just a nice little parlour trick

To overcome these and other biases, I did sketches based on pictures. Then I would take a photo of the sketch with my phone and overlay the original image on top of my drawing. Making the photo semitransparent allowed me to see immediately whether the head was too narrow or wide, the lips too low or too high or whether I had put the eyes in the right spot. I did this hundreds of times, employing the same rapid feedback strategies that had served me well with MIT classes. Applying this and other strategies, I was able to get a lot better at drawing portraits in a short period of time (see below).

Again, you became an incredibly skilled mimic. It's a feat, I will grant that, but to say that you actually improved *as an artist* is another thing entirely. There is a reason the life sketch is a key component of a fine art education. Even photographers and filmmakers are well served by life sketching, as evidenced by how many of the greats were classically trained painters who swore by it

Steve Pavlina is an ultralearner. By optimizing his university schedule, he took a triple course load and completed a computer science degree in three semesters. Pavlina’s challenge long predated my own experiment with MIT courses and was one of the first inspirations that showed me compressing learning time might be possible. Done without the benefit of free online classes, however, Pavlina attended California State University, Northridge, and graduated with actual degrees in computer science and mathematics.

Honestly, that just sounds like hell and a recipe for burnout. I enjoy having time for sleep and hobbies, thanks.

One such poster at Chinese-forums.com, who goes only by the username Tamu, extensively documented his process of studying Chinese from scratch. Devoting “70–80+ hours each week” over four months, he challenged himself to pass the HSK 5, China’s second highest Mandarin proficiency exam.10

Why do you all hate sleep and hobbies. And exercise and healthy eating and family time and chores. If I go more than a week without working on my writing projects or going out for a photo walk or reading something stupid I start to get twitchy

Other ultralearners shed the conventional structures of exams and degrees altogether. Trent Fowler, starting in early 2016, embarked on a yearlong effort to become proficient in engineering and mathematics.11 He titled it the STEMpunk Project, a play on the STEM fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics he wanted to cover and the retrofuturistic steampunk aesthetic. Fowler split his project into modules. Each module covered a particular topic, including computation, robotics, artificial intelligence, and engineering, but was driven by hands-on projects instead of copying formal classes.

Actually, this one was probably reasonably effective

An intense method might also produce a pleasurable state of flow, in which the experience of challenge absorbs your focus and you lose track of time.

I desperately need this man to look up ADHD hyperfocus. Potentially autism + special interest

I want to explain why I think ultralearning matters—because although the examples of ultralearning may seem eccentric, the benefits of this approach to learning are deep and practical.

Let me guess: money

The first reason is for your work. You already expend much of your energy working to earn a living. In comparison, ultralearning is a small investment, even if you went so far as to temporarily make it a full-time commitment. However, rapidly learning hard skills can have a greater impact than years of mediocre striving on the job. Whether you want to change careers, take on new challenges, or accelerate your progress, ultralearning is a powerful tool.

LMAO called it.

The second reason is for your personal life. How many of us have dreams of playing an instrument, speaking a foreign language, becoming a chef, writer, or photographer? Your deepest moments of happiness don’t come from doing easy things; they come from realizing your potential and overcoming your own limiting beliefs about yourself. Ultralearning offers a path to master those things that will bring you deep satisfaction and self-confidence.

1: I need you to understand what mastery actually is 2: Art without joy is just advertising. The point at which you prioritise skill drills over enjoyment or humanity is the point at which you cease to create art

In the words of the economist Tyler Cowen, “Average is over.”1 In his book of the same title, Cowen argues that because of increased computerization, automation, outsourcing, and regionalization, we are increasingly living in a world in which the top performers do a lot better than the rest.

I have never used this phrase before, but my god that is some capitalist boot licker bull shit

It’s well known that income inequality has been increasing in the United States over the last several decades. However, this description ignores a more subtle picture. The MIT economist David Autor has shown that instead of inequality rising across the board, there are actually two different effects: inequality rising at the top and lowering at the bottom.2 This matches Cowen’s thesis of average being over, with the middle part of the income spectrum being compressed into the bottom and stretched out at the top. Autor identifies the role that technology has had in creating this effect. The advance of computerization and automation technologies has meant that many medium-skilled jobs—clerks, travel agents, bookkeepers, and factory workers—have been replaced with new technologies. New jobs have arisen in their place, but those jobs are often one of two types: either they are high-skilled jobs, such as engineers, programmers, managers, and designers, or they are lower-skilled jobs such as retail workers, cleaners, or customer service agents.

You are ignoring the MASSIVE increase in passive wealth accumulation by people who do literally nothing to earn it. You are ignoring stagnating wages, destruction of pension plans, skyrocketing costs of higher education, and requirement inflation that suddenly turned shopkeeping and secretarial work into jobs that require BAs. The issue isnt technology, its a system that views people as expendable

Higher-skilled work is also more resistant to shipping overseas because of the benefits of coordination with management and the market.

It is so cute that you think that

Tuition has increased far faster than the rate of inflation, which means that unless you are well poised to translate that education into a major salary increase, it may not be worth the expense.3

The solution to this is social change, not deluding yourself into believing you're better than others because you can afford to take a year off to indulge your hyperfocus whims

Professional success, however, was rarely the thing that motivated the ultralearners I met—including those who ended up making the most money from their new skills.

Good to know you're the primary idiot in all of this. Also, this chapter is redundant and unnecessary

The best ultralearners are those who blend the practical reasons for learning a skill with an inspiration that comes from something that excites them.

In what universe is creating an alogrithm to beat Jeopardy a 'practical reason'. People were just having fun and you've gone and turned it into work

By age two, he had taught himself to read.

That's not as impressive as people think. I personally know dozens of people who did the same. Nearly all from gifted classes or MENSA/Triple 9 membership as a kid, admittedly, but intellect means little without resources and access to training. Tao is a uniquely qualified mathematical mind because he had access to training almost no one else does. Most of us have to plod our way through regular school no matter how clever we are, eventually becoming thoroughly disenchanted with formal education. And what if Tao had decided to become a photographer? Or a tax accountant? He wouldn't be any less intelligent, only less of a statistical anomaly

As noted in his profile in the New York Times, he coasted on his intelligence so far that, upon reaching his PhD, he fell back “on his usual test-prep strategy: last-minute cramming.”

Lol I'd have done the same if I'd started college before puberty. The confidence of adolescence is astonishing.

The psychologist K. Anders Ericsson argues that particular types of practice can change most attributes necessary for becoming an expert-level performer with the exception of the innate traits of height and body size.

I actually largely agree with this. Some people may have to study longer (and therefore decide they'd rather do other things), but with time and effort most things are possible

Many argue that a substantial proportion, perhaps most, of our intelligence is genetically derived.

I've read those studies. They're flawed. Innate intelligence? Sure. Innate intelligence such that environment is irrelevant? Eugenics.

To test this, I put together a small group of about a dozen people (mostly readers of my blog) who were interested in giving this ultralearning thing a shot. Among them was de Montebello.

And what about the others? Don't pull this cherry picking shit on me, I kicked ass at stats

At that point, his story had two doses of luck.

Keep this in mind. It likely has an outsized influence on the results

The first was that in attendance at the very first meeting for his public speaking project was Michael Gendler. Gendler was a longtime Toastmaster, and de Montebello’s combination of charm and obsessive intensity to become good at public speaking convinced him to help coach de Montebello through his project.

Gee, I can't imagine how this might make or break a project /s

He talked to a friend who works as a Hollywood director to give feedback on his delivery.

Lmao you don't think having A FUCKING FILM DIRECTOR give him speaking tips wildly impacted his success?

Another friend with a background in theater gave him tips on stage presence. He took de Montebello through his speech and showed how each word and sentence indicated movement that could be translated to where he moved on the stage.

Oh my fucking god