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

by Scott H. Young

Somerville would deliberately block out time for the study of particular subjects.

Flow is the enjoyable state that slides right between boredom and frustration, when a task is neither too hard nor too easy.

Ultralearning, with its similar focus on performance-driven learning, would also appear to be unsuitable for flow, in the same way that Ericsson originally argued for deliberate practice.

Your goal is to enhance your learning, and this often involves pushing through some sessions that are more frustrating than what could be considered ideal for flow. Remember, even if your learning is intense, your use of the skill later on will not

it can make sense to alternate between different aspects of the skill or knowledge to be remembered.

Therefore, if you have several hours to study, you’re possibly better off covering a few topics rather than focusing exclusively on one.

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.

If your schedule permits only more concentrated chunks of time, say once per week for several hours, you may want to take several minutes as a break at the end of each hour and split your time over different aspects of the subject you want to learn.

I’ve found that there are three different sources that cause focus to break down and distraction to occur. If you’re

Distraction Source 1: Your Environment

Multitasking may feel like fun, but it’s unsuitable for ultralearning, which requires concentrating your full mind on the task at hand.

Sometimes you can subtly modify what you’re doing to enable greater focus.

If I have difficult reading to do, I will often make an effort to jot down notes that reexplain hard concepts for me. I do this mostly because, while I’m writing, I’m less likely to enter into the state of reading hypnosis where I’m pantomiming the act of reading while my mind is actually elsewhere.

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Negative emotions, restlessness, and daydreaming can be some of the biggest obstacles to focus.

that a clear, calm mind is best for focusing on almost all learning problems. A mind filled with angers, anxieties, frustrations, or sadness will be harder to study with.

Here the solution is to acknowledge the feeling, be aware of it, and gently adjust your focus back to your task and allow the feeling to pass.

See let go let in medot

remember that the long-term strengthening of your ability to persist on this task will be useful, so the time is not wasted even if you don’t accomplish much in this particular learning session.

Too much arousal, however, and focus starts to suffer.6 It becomes very easy to be distracted, and you may have a hard time holding focus at any particular spot.

Taking a break from the problem can widen the space of focus enough that possibilities that were not in your consciousness earlier can conjoin and you can make new discoveries.

This implies that you may want to consider optimizing your arousal levels to sustain the ideal level of focus.

Complex tasks may benefit from lower arousal, so working in a quiet room at home might be the right idea for math problems. Simpler tasks might benefit from a noisier environment, say working at a coffee shop.

My advice is this: recognize where you are, and start small. If you’re the kind of person who can’t sit still for a minute, try sitting still for half a minute. Half a minute soon becomes one minute, then two. Over time, the frustrations you feel learning a particular subject may become transmuted into genuine interest.

By seeing how architecture was actually being done and learning a set of skills that was closely related to the job position he wanted to perform,

many of us are building the wrong portfolio of skills for the kinds of career and personal achievements we want to create.

We want to become great speakers, so we buy a book on communication, rather than practice presenting.

the learning activities are always done with a connection to the context in which the skills learned will eventually be used.

memorizing the vocabulary of a language because it’s written on a list, not because you want to use it;

During the MIT Challenge, I recognized that the most important resource for being able to eventually pass the classes wasn’t having access to recorded lectures, it was having access to problem sets.

Si quieres pasar un Exámenes .tienes qie practica exámenes

The easiest way to learn directly is to simply spend a lot of time doing the thing you want to become good at.

If you want to pass a test, practice solving the kinds of problems that are likely to appear on it,

we’ll be able to use something we study in one situation and apply it to a new situation.

the brain was analogous to a muscle, containing fairly general capacities of memory, attention, and reasoning, and that training those muscles, irrespective of the content, could result in general improvement.

Haskell suggests that a major reason is that transfer tends to be harder when our knowledge is more limited.

As we develop more knowledge and skill in an area, they become more flexible and easier to apply outside the narrow contexts in which they were learned.

any student must take seriously the notion that transferring what has been learned between very different contexts and situations will be treacherous.

is a lot better that those situations be close to the ones we actually want to use.

Learning something new rarely depends just on the mass of easily articulated and codified knowledge present but on the myriad tiny details of how that knowledge interacts with reality.

project was being able to quickly use a dictionary or translation app on my phone, so I could fill gaps in my linguistic knowledge in midconversation.

When we learn new things, therefore, we should always strive to tie them directly to the contexts we want to use them in.

The simplest way to be direct is to learn by doing.

If this isn’t possible, you may need to create an artificial project or environment to test your skills.

In other cases, what you’re trying to achieve may not be a practical skill.

His learning was directly connected with where he wanted to apply the skill: communicating it to others.

gaining a deeper knowledge of a subject will make it more flexible for future transfer.

and intense than reading a book or sitting through a lecture. But this very difficulty creates a potent source of competitive advantage for any would-be ultralearner.

if you organize your learning around producing something, you’re guaranteed to at least learn how to produce that thing.

Engineering, design, art, musical composition, carpentry, writing, and many other skills naturally lend themselves to projects that produce something at the end.

Since his end goal was to be able to converse knowledgeably about the subject, a project to produce an original paper applied learning more directly than simply trying to read a lot of books

Immersion is the process of surrounding yourself with the target environment in which the skill is practiced.