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

by Scott H. Young

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.

Principle #1: Metalearning—I started by examining other popular bloggers and authors.

Principle #2: Focus—I went full-time as a writer nearly from the start.

Principle #3: Directness—I learned writing by writing.

Principle #4: Drill—I systematically broke down each aspect of writing articles—the headline, the introductory sentence, the transitions, the storytelling, and more—and

Principle #6: Feedback—I personally emailed nearly all of my first ten thousand subscribers to say hello and to ask for feedback on my writing.

First, deep learning provides a sense of purpose in life.

Second, deep learning is how you get outsized returns.

Finally, deep learning is possible.

Ultralearning is a fascinating and inspiring read.

this wasn’t the only class MIT offered for free. MIT had uploaded the materials from hundreds of different classes.

Technology has made learning easier than ever,

idiosyncrasies, the ultralearners had a lot of shared traits. They usually worked alone, often toiling for months and years without much more than a blog entry to announce their efforts. Their interests tended toward obsession. They were aggressive about optimizing their strategies,

Ultralearning isn’t easy. It’s hard and frustrating and requires stretching outside the limits of where you feel comfortable. However, the things you can accomplish make it worth the effort.

Ultralearning: A strategy for acquiring skills and knowledge that is both self-directed and intense.

First, ultralearning is a strategy.

Second, ultralearning is self-directed.

Finally, ultralearning is intense. All of the ultralearners I met took unusual steps to maximize their effectiveness in learning.

systematically drilling

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.

connection. Top universities such as Harvard, MIT, and Yale are publishing their best courses for free online.

nightmare. Today’s learner has spaced-repetition systems to memorize

voluminous podcast libraries

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

The core of the ultralearning strategy is intensity and a willingness to prioritize effectiveness.

Whether this happens on a full-time schedule or just a couple hours per week is completely up to you.

The third way is to integrate ultralearning principles into the time and energy you already devote to learning.

ultralearning challenges. There are nine universal principles that underlie the ultralearning

Metalearning: First Draw a Map. Start by learning how to learn the subject or skill you want to tackle. Discover how to do good

research and how to draw on your past competencies to learn new skills more easily. Focus: Sharpen Your Knife. Cultivate the ability to concentrate. Carve out chunks of time when you can focus on learning, and make it easy to just do it. Directness: Go Straight Ahead. Learn by doing the thing you want to become good at. Don’t trade it off for other tasks, just because those are more convenient or comfortable. Drill: Attack Your Weakest Point. Be ruthless in improving your weakest points. Break down complex skills into small parts; then master those parts and build them back together again. Retrieval: Test to Learn. Testing isn’t simply a way of assessing knowledge but a way of creating it. Test yourself before you feel confident, and push yourself to actively

recall information rather than passively review it. Feedback: Don’t Dodge the Punches. Feedback is harsh and uncomfortable. Know how to use it without letting your ego get in the way. Extract the signal from the noise, so you know what to pay attention to and what to ignore. Retention: Don’t Fill a Leaky Bucket. Understand what you forget and why. Learn to remember things not just for now but forever. Intuition: Dig Deep Before Building Up. Develop your intuition through play and exploration of concepts...

Experimentation: Explore Outside Your Comfort Zone. All of these principles are only starting points. True mastery comes not just from following the path trodden by others but from ...

of taking responsibility for your own learning: deciding what you want to learn, how you want to learn it, and crafting your own plan to learn what you need to.

case metalearning means learning about learning.

chapter, I’m going to devote most of the next section to short-term research strategies, since they will probably benefit you the most. However, this emphasis shouldn’t undermine the importance of the long-term effects of metalearning.

find it useful to break down metalearning research that you do for a specific project into three questions: “Why?,” “What?,” and “How?” “Why?” refers to understanding your motivation to learn. If you know exactly why you want to learn a skill or subject, you can save a lot of time by focusing your project on exactly what matters most to you. “What?” refers to the knowledge and abilities you’ll need to acquire in order to be successful.

“How?” refers to the resources, environment, and methods you’ll use when

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.

The main way you can do research of this kind is to talk to people who have already achieved what you want to achieve.

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.”

Concepts

In the first column, write down anything that needs to be understood.

Facts

In the second column, write down anything that needs to be memorized.

Procedures

In the third column, write down anything that needs to be practiced.

underline the concepts, facts, and procedures that are going to be most challenging.