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

by Scott H. Young

As the saying goes, “In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But in practice, there is.”*

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.

Benchmarking and the Emphasize/Exclude Method.

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

The best research, resources, and strategies are useless unless you follow up with concentrated efforts to learn. That brings us to the next principle of ultralearning: focus.

starting, sustaining, and optimizing the quality of one’s focus.

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.

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

I think there are lots of potential ways the declarative-to-procedural transition of knowledge might be applied by clever ultralearners in the future.