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

by Scott H. Young

Answering “How?”

I suggest following two methods to answer how you’ll learn something: Benchmarking and the Emphasize/Exclude Method.

Benchmarking

The way to start any learning project is by finding the common ways in which people learn the skill or subject.

recommendations for how to learn it. Investing the

The Emphasize/Exclude Method

The Emphasize/Exclude Method involves first finding areas of study that align with the goals you identified in the first part of your research.

The second part of the Emphasize/Exclude Method is to omit or delay elements of your benchmarked curriculum that don’t align with your goals.

will always be some uncertainty in your approach, so it’s important to find the sweet spot between insufficient research and analysis paralysis.

A good rule of thumb is that you should invest approximately 10 percent of your total expected learning time into research prior to starting.

Principle 2 Focus Sharpen Your Knife

The struggles with focus that people have generally come in three broad varieties: starting, sustaining, and optimizing the quality of one’s focus.

Problem 1: Failing to Start Focusing (aka Procrastinating)

Why do we procrastinate? The simple answer is that at some level there’s a craving that drives you to do something else, there’s an aversion to doing the task itself, or both.

behavior—you don’t want to do the thing you need to be focusing on, either because you are directly averse to doing it or because there’s something else you want to do more. Recognizing that you’re procrastinating is the first step to avoiding it.

Make a mental habit of every time you procrastinate; try to recognize that you are feeling some desire not to do that task or a stronger desire to do something else.

you should be doing because you imagine it will be uncomfortable, painful, or frustrating? This awareness is necessary for progress to be made, so if you feel as though procrastination is a weakness of yours, make building this awareness your first priority before you try to fix the problem.

a good first crutch is to convince yourself to get over just the few minutes of maximal unpleasantness before you take a break.

However, once you start, you may end up continuing for longer without wanting to take the break.

try something a little harder, say the Pomodoro Technique: twenty-five minutes of focus followed by a five-minute break.

deliberately block out time for the study of particular subjects.

Problem 2: Failing to Sustain Focus (aka Getting Distracted)

Flow, a concept pioneered by the psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, is often used as the model for what ideal focus looks like. This is the state of mind you associate with being “in the zone.” You stop being interrupted by distracting thoughts, and your mind becomes completely absorbed in the task at hand.

My own thought is that a flow state is not impossible during ultralearning.

Researchers generally find that people retain more of what they learn when practice is broken into different studying periods than when it is crammed together.

Similarly, the phenomenon of interleaving suggests that even within a solid block of focus, it can make sense to alternate between different aspects of the skill or knowledge to be remembered.

Therefore, if you have several hours to study, you’re possibly better off covering a few topics

fifty minutes to an hour is a good length of time for many learning tasks.

find what works best for you,

flow. For some people, as little as twenty minutes might fit their lives best; others may prefer to spend an entire day learning.

Distraction Source 1: Your Environment

Multitasking may feel like fun, but it’s unsuitable for ultralearning,

I will often make an effort to jot down notes that reexplain hard concepts for me.

Distraction Source 3: Your Mind

First, it’s obvious that a clear, calm mind is best for focusing on almost all learning problems.

when we are engaging in a behavior, our typical reaction is to try to suppress distracting thoughts. If instead you “learn to let it arise, note it, and release it or let it go,” this can diminish the behavior you’re trying to avoid.

Problem 3: Failing to Create the Right Kind of Focus

High arousal creates a feeling of keen alertness,

This can be very good for focusing on relatively simple tasks or ones that require intense concentration toward a small target.

More complex tasks, such as solving math problems or writing essays, tend to benefit from a more relaxed kind of focus.

Taking a break from the problem can widen the space of focus enough that possibilities that were not in your consciousness earlier can conjoin and you can make new discoveries.

Directness Go Straight Ahead

Directness is the idea of learning being tied closely to the situation or context you want to use it in.

Directness is the hallmark of most ultralearning projects.* Roger Craig did his Jeopardy! testing on the actual questions from past shows.

The easiest way to learn directly is to simply spend a lot of time doing the thing you want to become good at.

Transfer: Education’s Dirty Secret

Transfer has been called the “Holy Grail of education.” It happens when you learn something in one context, say in a classroom, and are able to use it in another context, say in real life.

“Transfer is paradoxical. When we want it, we do not get it. Yet it occurs all the time.”

transfer tends to be harder when our knowledge is more limited. As we develop more knowledge and skill in an area, they become more flexible and easier to apply outside the narrow contexts in which they were learned.

Overcoming the Problem of Transfer with Directness