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

by Scott H. Young

Failing to fully proceduralize core skills was a major flaw of my first major self-education effort,

Most skills we learn are incompletely proceduralized. We may be able to do some of them automatically, but other parts require us to actively search our minds.

Memory Mechanism 3—Overlearning: Practice Beyond Perfect

additional practice, beyond what is required to perform adequately, can increase the length of time that memories are stored.

overlearning might have longer-term implications if it is combined with spacing and proceduralization over much longer projects.

There seem to be two main methods I’ve encountered for applying overlearning. The first is core practice, continually practicing and refining the core elements of a skill. This approach often works well paired with some kind of immersion or working on extensive (as opposed to intensive) projects, after the initial ultralearning phase has been completed.

The second strategy is advanced practice, going one level above a certain set of skills so that core parts of the lower-level skills are overlearned as one applies them in a more difficult domain.

Memory Mechanism 4—Mnemonics: A Picture Retains a Thousand Words

book. What they have in common is that they tend to be hyperspecific—that

Second, they usually involve translating abstract or arbitrary information into vivid pictures or spatial maps.

When mnemonics work, the results can be almost diff...

topic, I highly recommend Joshua Foer’s book Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything.

Winning the War Against Forgetting

Intuition Dig Deep Before Building Up

Psychologists theorize that the difference between grand masters and novices is not that grand masters can compute many more moves ahead but that they have built up huge libraries of mental representations that come from playing actual games.

These representations allow them to take a complex chess setup and reduce it to a few key patterns

How to Build Your Intuition

Rule 1: Don’t Give Up on Hard Problems Easily

Rule 2: Prove Things to Understand Them

Here’s a perfect thought experiment to help you understand the problem. Get out a piece of paper, and try, briefly, to sketch how a bicycle looks. It doesn’t need to be a work of art; just try to place the seat, handles, tires, pedals, and bike chain in the right place. Can you do it?

most participants had no idea how the machines were assembled, even though they used them all the time and believed they understood them quite well.

Rule 3: Always Start with a Concrete Example

Human beings don’t learn things very well in the abstract. As the research on transfer demonstrates, most people learn abstract, general rules only after being exposed to many concrete examples. It’s not

possible to simply present a general principle and expect that you can apply it to concrete situations. As if presaging this observation, Feynman himself would supply co...

it isn’t simply how much time you spend paying attention to information that determines what you retain but, crucially, how you think about that information while you pay attention to

Rule 4: Don’t Fool Yourself

The Dunning-Kruger effect occurs when someone with inadequate understanding of a

subject nonetheless believes he or she possesses more knowledge about the subject than the people who actually do.

This can occur because when you lack knowledge about a subject, you also tend to lack the ability to assess your own abilities. It is true that the more you learn about a subject, the more questions arise.

One way to avoid this problem of fooling yourself is simply to ask lots of questions.

himself: “Some people think in the beginning that I’m kind of slow and I don’t understand the problem, because I ask a lot of these ‘dumb’ questions:

The Feynman Technique

The method is quite simple: Write down the concept or problem you want to understand at the top of a piece of paper.

In the space below, explain the idea as if you had to teach it to someone else. If it’s a concept, ask yourself how you would convey the idea to someone who has never heard of it before. If it’s a problem, explain how to solve it and—crucially—why that solution procedure makes sense to you. When you get stuck, meaning your understanding fails to provide a clear answer, go back to your book, notes, teacher, or reference material to find the answer.

Application 1: For Things You Don’t Understand at All

the easiest way is to do it with the book in hand and go back and forth between your explanation and the one in the book.

Application 2: For Problems You Can’t Seem to Solve

it’s very important to go through the problem step by step alongside the explanation

Application 3: For Expanding Your Intuition

A final way to apply this method is to ideas that are so important that it would really help if you had a great intuition about them.

instead of focusing on explaining every detail or going along with the source material, you should try to focus on generating illustrative...

that would make the idea comprehensible to someone who has learned far less than you have. Imagine that instead of trying to teach the idea, you are being paid to write a magazine article explaining the idea. What vis...

Demystifying Intuition

Chapter XII Principle 9 Experimentation Explore Outside Your Comfort Zone

There are two important things to note about van Gogh’s experiments in art. The first is the variety of methods, ideas, and resources he applied. Since he struggled with many aspects of painting,

I believe that variation was important to his eventually finding a style that would work for him—one

The second important thing to note is his intensity. Like all the ultralearners I’ve discussed so far, van Gogh was tenacious in his efforts to become an artist.

Experimentation Is the Key to Mastery

Understanding how a subject breaks down into different elements and seeing how others have learned it previously, thus providing an advantageous starting point.

the early part of learning a skill tends to be the best trodden and supported, as everyone begins at the same place.