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

by Scott H. Young

Second, they usually involve translating abstract or arbitrary information into vivid pictures or spatial maps.

However, certain strategies—spacing, proceduralization, overlearning, and mnemonics—can

who have dominated memory-intensive subjects: active recall, spaced rehearsal, and an obsessive commitment to intense practice.

The surface features of a problem don’t always relate to the correct procedure needed to solve it. The students needed much more trial and error to home in on the correct method, whereas the experts could immediately start with the right approach.

Intuition sounds magical, but the reality may be more banal—the product of a large volume of organized experience dealing with the problem.

Without the library of memorized patterns at their disposal, they have to resort to the beginner’s method of remembering the board piece by piece.

He, too, focused on principles first, building off examples that cut straight to the heart of what the problem represented

One way you can introduce this into your own efforts is to give yourself a “struggle timer” as you work on problems. When you feel like giving up and that you can’t possibly figure out the solution to a difficult problem, try setting a timer for another ten minutes to push yourself a bit further.

difficulty in retrieving the correct information—even when the difficulty is caused by the information not being there—can prime you to remember information better later.

by the process of mentally trying to re-create those results that he became so good at physics.

Como lo han hecho

The illusion of understanding is very often the barrier to deeper knowledge,

Human beings don’t learn things very well in the abstract.

after being exposed to many concrete examples.

Feynman himself would supply concrete examples even when they were not given.

Working through an explicit example in his mind’s eye, he could follow along and see what the math was trying to demonstrate.

This process of following along with one’s own example forces a deeper level of processing the mater...

However, the orienting technique did make a large difference. Those who processed the words deeply remembered almost twice as much as those who simply scanned their spelling.

This technique also enables some feedback, because when it’s not possible to imagine an appropriate example, that’s evidence that you don’t understand something well enough and would benefit from going back a few steps and learning the material better before continuing.

“Don’t fool yourself”

you’re the easiest person to fool.”

had cultivated such rigorous standards for what he counted as knowing.

One way to avoid this problem of fooling yourself is simply to ask lots of questions.

Explaining things clearly and asking “dumb” questions can keep you from fooling yourself into thinking you know something you don’t.

It can be used when you don’t understand an idea at all or simply when you understand something a little but really want to turn it into a deep intuition.

Write down

explain

fails to provide a clear answer, go back to your book,

bypasses this problem by forcing you to articulate the idea you want to understand in detail.

Now any gaps in your understanding will become obvious as you struggle to explain key parts of the idea.

in hand and go back and forth between your explanation and the one in the book.

“I’m going to stop, and read one sentence slowly, so I can figure out what the hell it means.”

second way to apply this is for solving a difficult problem or mastering a technique.

In this instance, it’s very important to go through the problem step by step alongside the explanation you generate, rather than simply summarizing it.

instead of focusing on explaining every detail or going along with the source material, you should try to focus on generating illustrative examples, analogies, or visualizations that would make the idea comprehensible to someone who has learned far less than you have.

Imagine that instead of trying to teach the idea, you are being paid to write a magazine article explaining the idea.

What visual intuitions would you use to pin down the abstractions? Which examples would fle...

He worked hard on understanding things, and he put incredible amounts of his spare time into mastering the methods that made his intuition work.

First, he would identify a learning resource, method, or style and pursue it with incredible vigor, creating dozens, if not hundreds, of works in that direction.

successful scientists: hypothesis, experiment, results, repeat.

These two factors, variation and aggressive exploration,

Learning in the early phases of a skill is an act of accumulation.

Successful business leaders are those who can spot opportunities others cannot, not merely those who can copy the style and strategy of those before them.

This kind of experimentation is useful in helping you discover the guides and resources that work best for you.

A good strategy to take is to pick a resource (maybe a book, class, or method of learning) and apply it rigorously for a predetermined period of time. Once you apply yourself aggressively to that new method, you can step back and evaluate how well it is working and whether you feel it makes sense to continue with that approach or try another.

the options for what to learn next expand faster and faster,

becomes not “How can I learn this?” but “What should I learn next?”

spend some time learning it aggressively, and then evaluate your progress.

Should you continue in that direction or pick another? There’s no “right” answer here, but there are answers that will be more useful to the specific skill you’re trying to master.

Once you master the basics, there is no longer one “right” way to do everything but many different possibilities, all of which have different strengths and weaknesses.

The key to experimenting with different styles is to be aware of all the different styles that exist.