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

by Scott H. Young

“In many fields a year of focused work plus caring a lot would be enough.”

Ultralearning: A strategy for acquiring skills and knowledge that is both self-directed and intense.

ultralearning is a strategy. A strategy is not the only solution to a given problem, but it may be a good one. Strategies also tend to be well suited for certain situations and not others, so using them is a choice,

Your deepest moments of happiness don’t come from doing easy things; they come from realizing your potential and overcoming your own limiting beliefs about yourself.

The best ultralearners are those who blend the practical reasons for learning a skill with an inspiration that comes from something that excites them.

The core of the ultralearning strategy is intensity and a willingness to prioritize effectiveness.

Instrumental learning projects are those you’re learning with the purpose of achieving a different, nonlearning result.

However, research can also be a way of procrastinating, particularly if the method of learning is uncomfortable. Just doing a bit more research then becomes a strategy to avoid doing the work of learning.

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

This states that the more time you invest in an activity (such as more research), the weaker and weaker the benefits will be as you get closer and closer to the ideal approach.

What’s needed is a proper balance. To achieve it, fifty minutes to an hour is a good length of time for many learning tasks.

cognitive science researcher Michelene Chi noted that “in almost all the empirical work to date, on the role of example solutions, a student who has studied examples often cannot solve problems that deviate slightly from the example solution.”

Pushing difficulty higher and opting for testing oneself well before you are “ready” is more efficient.

The researchers note that who is giving the feedback can matter, as feedback coming from a peer or teacher has important social dynamics beyond mere information on how to improve one’s abilities.

James A. Kulik and Chen-Lin C. Kulik review the literature on feedback timing and suggest that “Applied studies using actual classroom quizzes and real learning materials have usually found immediate feedback to be more effective than delay.”

Basically, you should try to avoid situations that always make you feel good (or bad) about your performance.

“Don’t fool yourself” was one of Feynman’s most popular aphorisms, to which he added, “and you’re the easiest person to fool.”

Feynman himself did something similar when presented with what he saw to be philosophical gobbledygook: I had this uneasy feeling of “I’m not adequate,” until finally I said to myself, “I’m going to stop, and read one sentence slowly, so I can figure out what the hell it means.” So I stopped—at random—and read the next sentence very carefully. I can’t remember it precisely, but it was very close to this: “The individual member of the social community often receives his information via visual, symbolic channels.” I went back and forth over it, and translated. You know what it means? “People read.”

The beginning is always today. —Mary Shelley

Lifelong Learning The goal of ultralearning is to expand the opportunities available to you, not narrow them. It is to create new avenues for learning and to push yourself to pursue them aggressively rather than timidly waiting by the sidelines. This is not going to be a method suitable for everyone, but for those who feel inspired to use it, I hope it provides a start.