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

by Scott H. Young

A second reason for the value of experimentation as you approach mastery is that abilities are more likely to stagnate after you’ve mastered the basics. Learning in the early phases of a skill is an act of accumulation.

increasingly becomes an act of unlearning;

many skills reward not only proficiency but originality.

Three Types of Experimentation

1. Experimenting with Learning Resources

A good strategy to take is to pick a resource (maybe a book, class, or method of learning) and apply it rigorously for a predetermined period of time. Once you apply yourself aggressively to that new method, you can step back and evaluate how well it is working

2. Experimenting with Technique

the options for what to learn next expand faster and faster, so the question becomes not “How can I learn this?” but “What should I learn next?”

3. Experimenting with Style

Once you master the basics, there is no longer one “right” way to do everything but many different possibilities, all of which have different strengths and weaknesses.

The Mindset of Experimentation

There are parallels between the mindset required to experiment and what the Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck refers to as growth mindset.

In a growth mindset, in contrast, learners see their own capacity for learning as something that can be actively improved.

How to Experiment

Tactic 1: Copy, Then Create

Copying simplifies the problem of experimentation somewhat because it gives you a starting point for making decisions.

Tactic 2: Compare Methods Side-by-Side

trying two different approaches and varying only a single condition to see what the impact is.

Tactic 3: Introduce New Constraints

The challenge of learning in the end is that you think you already know what to do.

Tactic 4: Find Your Superpower in the Hybrid of Unrelated Skills

The traditional path to mastery is to take a well-defined skill and practice it relentlessly until you have become insanely good at it.

Tactic 5: Explore the Extremes

Step 2: Schedule Your Time

The first decision you should make is how much time you’re going to commit.

The second decision you need to make is when you are going to learn.

you may want to optimize it. Shorter, spaced time chunks are better for memory than crammed chunks are.

take all this information and put it into your calendar.

Step 3: Execute Your Plan

Focus. Am I focused when I spend time learning,

Drill. Am I spending time focusing on the weakest points of my performance?

Retrieval. Am I spending most of my time reading and reviewing, or am I solving problems and recalling things from memory

Feedback. Am I getting honest feedback about my performance early on,

Retention. Do I have a plan in place to remember what I’m learning long term? Am I spacing my exposure to information so it will stick longer? Am I turning factual knowledge into procedures that I’ll retain? Am I overlearning the most critical aspects of the skill?

Intuition. Do I deeply understand the things I’m learning, or am I just memorizing?

enjoyment tends to come from being good at things.