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January 31 - February 9, 2025
Directness solves the problem of transfer in two ways. The first and most obvious is that if you learn with a direct connection to the area in which you eventually want to apply the skill, the need for far transfer is significantly reduced.
as learners, we must accept that initial learning efforts often stick stubbornly to the situations we learn them in.
When we learn new things, therefore, we should always strive to tie them directly to the contexts we want to use them in.
How Ultralearners Avoid the Problem of Transfer and Learn Directly
The simplest way to be direct is to learn by doing. Whenever possible, if you can spend a good portion of your learning time just doing the thing you want to get better at, the problem of directness will likely go away.
If this isn’t possible, you may need to create an artificial project or environment to test your skills.
Many ultralearners who have specialized in a smaller subset of fields are masters at transfer; no doubt this is largely due to their depth of knowledge, which makes transfer easier to accomplish.
How to Learn Directly
failed attempts at self-education? The answer is that learning directly is hard. It is often more frustrating, challenging, and intense than reading a book or sitting through a lecture. But this very difficulty creates a potent source of competitive advantage for any would-be ultralearner. If you’re willing to apply tactics that exploit directness despite these difficulties, you will end up learning much more effectively.
Tactic 1: Project-Based Learning
Many ultralearners opt for projects rather than classes to learn the skills they need.
Learning to program by creating your own computer game is a perfect example of project-based learning.
Tactic 2: Immersive Learning
Immersion is the process of surrounding yourself with the target environment in which the skill is practiced. This has the advantage of requiring much larger amounts of practice than would be typical,
Learning a language is the canonical example of where immersion works.
Tactic 3: The Flight Simulator Method
when direct practice is impossible, a simulation of the environment will work to the degree to which it remains faithful to the cognitive elements of the task in question.
When evaluating different methods for learning, those that significantly simulate the direct approach will transfer a lot better.
Tactic 4: The Overkill Approach
One way you can overkill a project is to aim for a particular test, performance, or challenge that will be above the skill level you strictly require.
Learn Straight from the Source
Whenever you learn anything new, it’s a good habit to ask yourself where and how the knowledge will manifest itself. If you can answer that, you can then ask whether you’re doing anything to tie what you’re learning to that context.
Principle 4 Drill Attack Your Weakest Point
The way in which he decided to break apart the skill of writing and practice its elements in isolation enabled him to master writing at a young age and apply it to the other pursuits for which he would later become famous. Such careful analysis and deliberate practice forms the basis for the fourth ultralearning principle: drill.
The Chemistry of Learning
certain aspects of the learning problem forming a bottleneck that controls the speed at which you can become more proficient overall.
This is the strategy behind doing drills. By identifying a rate-determining step in your learning reaction, you can isolate it and work on it specifically.
Drills and Cognitive Load
when you are practicing a complex skill, your cognitive resources (attention, memory, effort, etc.) must be spread over many different aspects of the task.
Drills resolve this problem by simplifying a skill enough that you can focus your cognitive resources on a single aspect.
The Direct-Then-Drill Approach
The tension between learning directly and doing drills can be resolved when we see them as being alternating stages in a larger cycle of learning.
The first step is to try to practice the skill directly.
Practice a language by actually speaking it.
The next step is to analyze the direct skill and try to isolate components that are either rate-determining steps in your performance or subskills you find difficult to improve because there are too many other things going on for you to focus on them. From here you can develop drills and practice those components separately until you get better at them.
The final step is to go back to direct practice and integrate what you’ve learned. This has two purposes. The first is that even in well-designed drills, there are going to be transfer hiccups owing to the fact that what was previously an isolated skill must be moved to a new and more complex context.
separately. The second function of this step is as a check on whether your drill was well...
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The earlier you are in the learning process, the faster this cycle should be.
Tactics for Designing Drills
There are three major problems when applying this principle. The first is figuring out when and what to drill. You should focus on what aspects of the skill might be the rate-determining steps in your performance. Which aspect of the skill, if you improved it, would cause the greatest improvement to your abilities overall
The second difficulty with this principle is designing the drill to produce improvement.
Finally, doing drills is hard and often uncomfortable.
Drill 1: Time Slicing
The easiest way to create a drill is to isolate a slice in time of a longer sequence of actions.
Athletes similarly engage in this process when they drill skills that are normally a fraction of total playing time, such as layups or penalty shots.
Drill 2: Cognitive Components
Sometimes what you’ll want to practice isn’t a slice in time of a larger skill but a particular cognitive component. When speaking a language, grammar, pronunciation, and vocabulary occur at all moments, but they form different cognitive aspects that must be managed simultaneously. The tactic here is to find a way to drill only one component
Drill 3: The Copycat
Drill 4: The Magnifying Glass Method
drill? The Magnifying Glass Method is to spend more time on one component of the skill than you would otherwise.
