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March 27, 2022 - July 21, 2023
Foreword
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Directness is the practice of learning by directly doing the thing you want to learn. Basically, it’s improvement through active practice rather than through passive learning. The phrases learning something new and practicing something new may seem similar, but these two methods can produce profoundly different results. Passive learning creates knowledge. Active practice creates skill.
Chapter I Can You Get an MIT Education Without Going to MIT?
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Chapter II Why Ultralearning Matters
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Ultralearning: A strategy for acquiring skills and knowledge that is both self-directed and intense.
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.
The best ultralearners are those who blend the practical reasons for learning a skill with an inspiration that comes from something that excites them.
There are three main ways you can apply the ideas of ultralearning, even if you have to manage other commitments and challenges in your life: new part-time projects, learning sabbaticals, and reimagining existing learning efforts.
The core of the ultralearning strategy is intensity and a willingness to prioritize effectiveness.
Chapter III How to Become an Ultralearner
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“Make me care,” Gendler told him after listening to one of de Montebello’s speeches. “I understand why this is important to you, but the audience doesn’t care about you. You have to make me care.”
There are nine universal principles that underlie the ultralearning projects described so far. Each embodies a particular aspect of successful learning, and I describe how ultralearners maximize the effectiveness of the principle through the choices they make in their projects.
Metalearning: First Draw a Map.
Focus: Sharpen Your Knife.
Directness: Go Straight Ahead.
Drill: Attack Your Weakest Point.
Retrieval: Test to Learn.
Feedback: Don’t Dodge the Punches.
Retention: Don’t Fill a Leaky Bucket.
Intuition: Dig Deep Before Building Up.
Experimentation: Explore Outside Your Comfort Zone.
Chapter IV Principle 1 Metalearning First Draw a Map
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Instrumental learning projects are those you’re learning with the purpose of achieving a different, nonlearning result.
Intrinsic projects are those that you’re pursuing for their own sake.
If you’re pursuing a project for mostly instrumental reasons, it’s often a good idea to do an additional step of research: determining whether learning the skill or topic in question will actually help you achieve your goal.
Once you’ve gotten a handle on why you’re learning, you can start looking at how the knowledge in your subject is structured. A good way to do this is to write down on a sheet of paper three columns with the headings “Concepts,” “Facts,” and “Procedures.” Then brainstorm all the things you’ll need to learn.
Concepts are ideas that you need to understand in flexible ways in order for them to be useful.
Facts are anything that suffices if you can remember them at all. You don’t need to understand them too deeply, so long as you can recall them in the right situations.
Procedures are actions that need to be performed and may not involve much conscious thinking at all.
If I’m trying to learn something that is taught in school, say computer science, neurology, or history, one thing I’ll do is look at the curricula used in schools to teach that subject.
A good rule of thumb is that you should invest approximately 10 percent of your total expected learning time into research prior to starting.
Chapter V Principle 2 Focus Sharpen Your Knife
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Problem 1: Failing to Start Focusing (aka Procrastinating)
Problem 2: Failing to Sustain Focus (aka Getting Distracted)
if you have several hours to study, you’re possibly better off covering a few topics rather than focusing exclusively on one. Doing so has trade-offs, however, so if your study time becomes more and more fractured, it may be difficult to learn at all.
Distraction Source 1: Your Environment
Distraction Source 2: Your Task
Whenever you have a choice between using different tools for learning, you may want to consider which is easier to focus on when making that decision.
Distraction Source 3: Your Mind
Problem 3: Failing to Create the Right Kind of Focus
Chapter VI Principle 3 Directness Go Straight Ahead
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Directness is the idea of learning being tied closely to the situation or context you want to use it in.
Tactic 1: Project-Based Learning
Tactic 2: Immersive Learning
Tactic 3: The Flight Simulator Method
Tactic 4: The Overkill Approach
Chapter VII Principle 4 Drill Attack Your Weakest Point
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Drill 1: Time Slicing
Drill 2: Cognitive Components
Drill 3: The Copycat
