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

by Scott H. Young

Instead of going to the source, taking feedback directly, and using that information to learn quickly,

Ultralearners acquire skills quickly because they seek aggressive feedback

three types of feedback: outcome feedback, informational feedback, and corrective feedback.

Corrective feedback is the toughest to find but when employed well can accelerate learning

informational feedback. This feedback tells you what you’re doing wrong, but it doesn’t necessarily tell you how to fix it.

Self-provided feedback is also ubiquitous, and in some pursuits it can be almost as good as feedback from others.

This is the feedback that shows you not only what you’re doing wrong but how to fix it. This kind of feedback is often available only through a coach, mentor, or teacher.

The self-directed nature of ultralearning shouldn’t convince you that learning is best done as an entirely solitary pursuit.

I generally recommend faster feedback. This enables a quicker recognition of mistakes. However, there’s a possible risk that this recommendation

Feedback too soon may turn your retrieval practice effectively into passive review, which we already know is less effective for learning.

For hard problems, I suggest setting yourself a timer to encourage you to think hard on difficult problems before giving up to look at the correct answer.

By modifying and selecting the streams of feedback you pay attention to, you can reduce the noise and get more of the signal.

Feedback is information. More information equals more opportunities to learn.

Good feedback does the opposite. It is very hard to predict and thus gives more information each time you receive it.

If they fail too often, they simplify the problem so they can start noticing when they’re doing things right. If they fail too little, they’ll make the task harder or their standards stricter so that they can distinguish the success of different approaches. Basically, you should try to avoid situations that always make you feel good (or bad) about your performance.

One important type of metafeedback is your learning rate. This gives you information about how fast you’re learning, or at least how fast you’re improving in one aspect of your skill.

LSAT studiers might track their improvements on mock exams. Language learners might track vocabulary learned or errors made when writing or speaking.

A second way you can apply metafeedback is by comparing two different study methods to see which works better.

Knowing that your work will be evaluated is an incredible motivator to do your best.

Instead, it’s better to get in and take the punches early so that they don’t put you down for the count.

Though short-term feedback can be stressful, once you get into the habit of receiving it, it becomes easier to process without overreacting emotionally.

an obsessive intensity that exceeds what is considered a normal investment of effort.

active recall and rehearsal. By retrieving words, Richards likely takes his already impressive memory and makes it unassailable through active practice.

How many times does he have to read the words from his list before he can rehearse it mentally?

“It’s hard work, you have to have dedication to learn,”

“I’m not sure there is a secret, it’s just a matter of learning the words.”

memory is essential to learning things well.

is essential, even when it is wrapped up in bigger ideas such as understanding, intuition, or practical skill. Being able to understand how something works or how to perform a particular technique is useless if you cannot recall it. Retention depends on employing strategies so the things you learn don’t leak out of your mind.

forget much of what we initially learn: decay, interference, and forgotten

It might also suggest that relearning things is much faster than learning them initially, because relearning is closer to repair work, while original learning is a completely new construction.

Many memory researchers now believe that the act of remembering is not a passive process. In recalling facts, events, or knowledge, we’re engaging in a creative process of reconstruction.

The memories themselves are often modified, enhanced, or manipulated in the process of remembering. It may be, then, that “lost” memories that are retrieved through new cues are actually fabrications.

This seems especially likely in the case of “recovered” witness testimony from traumatic events, as experiments have shown that even highly vivid memories that feel comp...

You need to pick a mnemonic system, which will both accomplish your goals and be simple enough to stick to.

Regardless of the exact system used, however, all systems seemed to work according to one of four mechanisms: spacing, proceduralization, overlearning, or mnemonics.

it tends to have quite focused applications. Learning facts, trivia, vocabulary words, or definitions is ideally suited for flash card software,

relearning is quite costly in terms of time.10 Spacing does not require complex software, however. As Richards’s story clearly demonstrates, simply printing lists of words, reading them over, and then rehearsing them mentally without having them in front of you is an incredibly powerful technique.

than doing nothing and letting the skills atrophy. When it comes to retention, don’t let perfect become the enemy of good enough.

are harder to integrate into your daily habits, is to semiregularly do refresher projects.

will remind you that learning isn’t something done once and then ignored but a process that continues for your entire life.

There’s evidence that procedural skills, such as riding a bicycle, are stored in a different way from declarative knowledge, such as knowing the Pythagorean Theorem or the Sine Rule for triangles.

This difference between knowing how and knowing that may also have different implications for long-term memory.

One dominant theory of learning suggests that most skills proceed through stages—starting declarative but ending up procedural as you practice more.

Since subjects are already doing the skill correctly, performance doesn’t improve past this point. However, the overlearning can extend the durability of the skill.

suspect, however, that overlearning might have longer-term implications if it is

combined with spacing and proceduralization over much longer projects.

rather than overlearning the smaller subset of very common patterns.

for applying overlearning. The first is core practice, continually practicing and refining the core elements of a skill.

The second strategy is advanced practice, going one level above a certain set of skills so that core parts of the lower-level skills are overlearned as one applies them in a more difficult domain.

This suggests that moving up a level to a more advanced skill enabled the earlier skill to be overlearned, thus preventing some forgetting.