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

by Scott H. Young

Scott had already been on my radar by the time we met at that conference in 2013. He had catapulted to internet fame one year prior by learning the entire MIT undergraduate computer science curriculum and passing all of the final tests in less than a year—four years’ worth of classes in under twelve months. I had seen the TEDx Talk summarizing his experience, and I read a few of his articles on learning and self-improvement before tracking him down at the conference.

I certainly found these bold projects fascinating. But there was something else about Scott’s projects that resonated with me on a deeper level: he had a bias toward action.

Directness is the practice of learning by directly doing the thing you want to learn. Basically, it’s improvement through active practice rather than through passive learning. The phrases learning something new and practicing something new may seem similar, but these two methods can produce profoundly different results. Passive learning creates knowledge. Active practice creates skill.

Principle #4: Drill—I systematically broke down each aspect of writing articles—the headline, the introductory sentence, the transitions, the storytelling, and more—and put together spreadsheets filled with examples of each segment. Then I set about testing and refining my ability to perform each small aspect of the larger task.

Second, deep learning is how you get outsized returns. The simple truth is most people will never intensely study your area of interest. Doing so—even if it’s just for a few months—will help you stand out.

“It seems to be SVO, a subject-verb-object language, that’s not terribly shocking.”

From this jargon we can see that when Everett evokes a word or phrase from his interlocutor, he isn’t just parroting back the sounds; he’s drawing a map with theories and hypotheses about how the language works grounded on years of experience learning languages.

Once you’ve gotten a handle on why you’re learning, you can start looking at how the knowledge in your subject is structured. A good way to do this is to write down on a sheet of paper three columns with the headings “Concepts,” “Facts,” and “Procedures.” Then brainstorm all the things you’ll need to learn. It doesn’t matter if the list is perfectly complete or accurate at this stage. You can always revise it later. Your goal here is to get a rough first pass. Once you start learning, you can adjust the list if you discover that your categories aren’t quite right.

Once you’ve finished your brainstorm, underline the concepts, facts, and procedures that are going to be most challenging. This will give you a good idea what the major learning bottlenecks are going to be and can start you searching for methods and resources to overcome those difficulties. You might recognize that learning medicine requires a lot of memorization, so you may invest in a system such as spaced-repetition software.

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

Right method minimize weaknesses