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

by Scott H. Young

Joining communities of people who are actively engaged in learning can have a similar impact, since it encourages constant exposure to new ideas and challenges.

it’s the cognitive features—situations where you need to make decisions about what to do and cue knowledge you’ve stored in your head.

a simulation of the environment will work to the degree to which it remains faithful to the cognitive elements of the task in question.

When evaluating different methods for learning, those that significantly simulate the direct approach will transfer a lot better.

The last method I’ve found for enhancing directness is to increase the challenge, so that the skill level required is wholly contained within the goal that is set.

The overkill approach is to put yourself into an environment where the demands are going to be extremely high, so you’re unlikely to miss any important lessons or feedback.

you can get enough motivation to start this method, it’s often a lot easier to continue it long term.

One way you can overkill a project is to aim for a particular test, performance, or challenge that will be above the skill level you strictly require.

Benny Lewis likes to attempt language exams, because they provide a concrete challenge.

Deciding in advance that your work will be viewable publicly alters your approach to learning and will gear you toward performance in the desired

Whenever you learn anything new, it’s a good habit to ask yourself where and how the knowledge will manifest itself.

If you can answer that, you can then ask whether you’re doing anything to tie what you’re learning to that context.

Doing a lot of direct practice in the environment where you want to eventually use your skills is an important start.

Franklin thus “determined to endeavor at improvement” and went about a series of exercises to practice his writing skill.

One such exercise he documents was taking a favorite magazine of his, The Spectator, and taking notes on articles that appeared there.

He would then leave the notes for a few days and come back to them, trying to reconstruct the or...

he was exposed to the idea of the Socratic method, of challenging another’s ideas through probing questions rather than direct contradiction. He then went to work, carefully avoiding “abrupt contradiction and positive argumentation,” instead focusing on being the “humble inquirer and doubter.”

Franklin’s practice in adopting other characters would prove invaluable in his later career.

flexibility to adopt imagined perspectives.

What distinguished Franklin wasn’t merely the amount he wrote or his raw talent but how he practiced.

he decided to break apart the skill of writing and practice its elements in isolation

This is the strategy behind doing drills. By identifying a rate-determining step in your learning reaction, you can isolate it and work on it specifically.

Since it governs the overall competence you have with that skill, by improving at it you will improve faster than if you try to practice every aspect of the skill at once.

by identifying components of the ove...

The reason is that when you are practicing a complex skill, your cognitive resources (attention, memory, effort, etc.) must be spread over many different aspects of the task.

improve your performance in one aspect, you may need to devote so much attention to that one aspect that the other parts of your performance start to go down.

Drills resolve this problem by simplifying a skill enough that you can focus your cognitive resources on a single aspect.

A drill takes the direct practice and cuts it apart, so that you are practicing only an isolated component.

The first step is to try to practice the skill directly.

Memo palabra en día a día contexto

This means figuring out where and how the skill will be used and then trying to match that situation as close as is feasible when practicing.

The next step is to analyze the direct skill and try to isolate components that are either rate-determining steps in your performance or subskills you find difficult

The final step is to go back to direct practice and integrate what you’ve learned.

Think of this as being like building the connective tissue to join the muscles you strengthened separately.

The key is to experiment. Make a hypothesis about what is holding you back, attack it with some drills, using the Direct-Then-Drill Approach, and you can quickly get feedback about whether you’re right.

The second difficulty with this principle is designing the drill to produce improvement.

have had the ingenuity to find ways to drill subskills such as ordering arguments persuasively and

Teasing out the worst thing about your performance and practicing that in isolation takes guts. It’s much more pleasant to spend time focusing on things you’re already good at.

The easiest way to create a drill is to isolate a slice in time of a longer sequence of actions.

Musicians often do this

In the early phase of learning a new language, I often obsessively repeat a few key phrases, so they quickly get embedded into my long-term memory.

but a particular cognitive component.

When speaking a language, grammar, pronunciation, and vocabulary occur at all moments, but they form different cognitive aspects that must be managed simultaneously.

The tactic here is to find a way to drill only one component...

by copying the parts of the skill you don’t want to drill (either from someone else or your past work), you can focus exclusively on the component you want to practice.

The Magnifying Glass Method is to spend more time on one component of the skill than you would otherwise.

applied this method when trying to improve my ability to do research when writing articles, by spending about ten times as long on research as I had previously.

they go back a step, learn one of the foundational topics, and repeat the exercise.

When he struggled with certain aspects, such as colors, he went back, learned color theory, and repeated his work.

However, once you’ve identified that it’s the bottleneck preventing you from going further, they become instilled with new purpose. In ultralearning,

Instead of being forced to do them for unknown purposes, it is now up to you to find a way to enhance the learning process by accelerating learning on the specific things that you find most difficult. In this sense, drills take