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

by Scott H. Young

Passive learning creates knowledge. Active practice creates skill.

Learning can be very useful, of course, but the danger is that the act of soaking up new facts can be disconnected from the process of refining a new skill.

“In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But in practice, there is.”

Principle #1: Metalearning—I

Principle #2: Focus—I

Principle #3: Directness—I

Principle #4: Drill—I

Principle #6: Feedback—I

Beyond principles and tactics is a broader ultralearning ethos. It’s one of taking responsibility for your own learning: deciding what you want to learn, how you want to learn it, and crafting your own plan to learn what you need to.

A good ultralearning project, with excellent materials and an awareness of what needs to be learned, has the potential to be completed faster than formal schooling.

This is because you can tailor your project to your exact needs

You’ll know what your capacity is for learning, how you can best schedule your time and manage your motivation,

As you learn more things, you’ll acquire more and more confidence, which will allow you to enjoy the process of learning more with less frustration.

“What?” refers to the knowledge and abilities you’ll need to acquire in order to be successful. Breaking things down into concepts, facts, and procedures can enable you to map out what obstacles you’ll face and how best to overcome them.

“How?” refers to the resources, environment, and methods you’ll use when learning. Making careful choices here can make a big difference in your overall effectiveness.

Determine if learning a topic is likely to have the effect you want it to before you get started.5

how the knowledge in your subject is structured.

anything that needs to be understood.

Concepts are ideas that you need to understand in flexible ways in order for them to be useful.

In general, if something needs to be understood, not just memorized, I put it into this column instead of the second column for facts.

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Facts In the second column, write down anything that needs to be memorized.

Mind Maps Graficos Nemonics Ver: videos de memorizacion,Jim Kuick y libro

You don’t need to understand them too deeply, so long as you can recall them in the right situations.

Procedures

needs to be practiced. Procedures are actions that need to be performed and may not involve much conscious thinking at all.

Learning new vocabulary in a language requires memorizing facts, but pronunciation requires practice and therefore belongs in this column.

Deep Practice check lists )ver libro The check list manofesto. Pomodoro Ver libroo Deep Work

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.

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concepts is going to be the tricky spot and consider spending time explaining those concepts to other people

Retrive method explain to a5 yesrs old

Knowing what the bottlenecks will be can help you start to think of ways of making your study time more efficient and effective,

You might look at some of the particular features of the concepts, facts, and procedures you’re trying to learn to find methods to master them more effectively.

Tecicas de memorizacion mind maps flash cards mnemonics memory palace graphic representstion

got the idea of doing lots and lots of sketches and comparing them by overlaying the reference photos.

Instant feedback

Answering “How?”

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

Benchmarking

The way to start any learning project is by finding the common ways in which people learn the skill or subject. This can help you design a default strategy as a starting point.

If I’m trying to learn something that is taught in school, say computer science, neurology, or history, one thing I’ll do is look at the curricul...

Good resources to consider for this approach are universities (MIT, Harvard, Yale, and Stanford are good examples but far from the only ones). Generally course lists and syllabi are available by looking on their websites aimed at existing students.

An hour spent searching online for almost any skill should turn up courses, articles, and recommendations for how to learn

Once you’ve found a default curriculum, you can consider making modifications to it.

The second part of the Emphasize/Exclude Method is to omit or delay elements of your benchmarked curriculum that don’t align with your goals.

There will always be some uncertainty in your approach, so it’s important to find the sweet spot between insufficient research and analysis paralysis. You know when you’re procrastinating, so just get started.

The goal here isn’t to exhaust every learning possibility but simply to make sure you haven’t latched onto the first possible resource or method

A good idea is to be aware of the common methods of learning, popular resources, and tools along with their strengths and weaknesses before starting.

However, the real benefits of metalearning aren’t short term but long term. They don’t reside in a particular project but influence your overall strengths as a learner.

the real benefit had been that they now understood the process of learning hard things.

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.

However, I learnt by habit to leave a subject and resume it again at once, like putting a mark into a book I might be reading.”

Therefore, a good first crutch is to convince yourself to get over just the few minutes of maximal unpleasantness before you take a break.

If this is the case and your problem has switched from being unable to get started to taking breaks too often, you can try something a little harder, say the Pomodoro Technique:

flash cards, for instance, I’d always feel an urge to give up whenever I couldn’t remember the answer to one of my cards. I knew this feeling was temporary, however, so I added a rule for myself: I can only quit when I’ve remembered the most recent card correctly.

Eventually, if working on your project is not troubled by extreme procrastination, you may want to switch to using a calendar on which you carve out specific hours of your day in advance to work on the project.