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

by Scott H. Young

you might want to identify masters in your own line of study and dissect what makes their styles successful to see what you can emulate or integrate into your own approach.

In a growth mindset, in contrast, learners see their own capacity for learning as something that can be actively improved.

Those who think they can improve and grow, do; those who think they are fixed and immutable remain stuck.

I see the experimental mindset as an extension of the growth mindset: whereas the growth mindset encourages you to see opportunities and potential for improvement, experimentation enacts a plan to reach those improvements.

Exploration, not dogmatism, is the key to realizing that potential.

However, if you start by emulating another artist, you can use that foothold to venture further in your own creative directions.

you must deconstruct it to understand why it works.

That showed that even if creating the mnemonics took a bit more time, they were worth it.

Give a designer unlimited freedom, and the solution is usually a mess. On the other hand, creating specific constraints in how you can proceed encourages you to explore options that are less familiar to you and sharpens your underlying skills. How can you add limitations to force yourself to develop new capacities?

Técnica de Decisive . What if i cannot do this...

For instance, you might be an engineer who becomes really good at public speaking. You may not be the best possible engineer or the best possible presenter, but combining those two skills could make you the best person to present on engineering topics for your company at conferences, thus giving you access to new professional opportunities. Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, likened his own success to following this strategy by combining his background as an engineer with an MBA and a cartoonist.

Many people stick to the same routines, the same narrow set of methods, they apply to learning everything. As a result, there are a lot of things they struggle to learn because they don’t know the best way to do

What topic you’re going to learn and its approximate scope.

The primary resources you’re going to use. This includes books, videos, classes, tutorials, guides, and even people who will serve as mentors, coaches, and peers.

You should identify the things other people who have learned the skill have done to learn it.

Direct practice activities. Every skill and subject you’re learning will be used somewhere eventually, even if it’s as simple as using it to learn something else.

If direct practice is impossible, you should nonetheless identify opportunities for practice that mimic the mental requirements of using the skill.

it’s better to decide on how much time you are willing to devote to learning in advance

The first decision you should make is how much time you’re going to commit.

Whatever time you can commit, decide on it in advance.

The second decision you need to make is when you are going to learn.

recommend setting a consistent schedule that is the same every week, rather than trying to fit in learning when you can.

Shorter, spaced time chunks are better for memory than crammed chunks are.

The third decision you need to make is the length of time for your project. I generally prefer shorter commitments

If you have a big goal you want to accomplish that can’t be done in a short time frame, I suggest breaking it up into multiple smaller ones of a few months each.

Finally, take all this information and put it into your calendar.

What’s more, the act of scheduling demonstrates your seriousness about doing the project.

the mere act of writing down the schedule helped prepare me psychologically for the project ahead.

As a bonus step, for those who are embarking on longer projects of six months or more, I strongly recommend doing a pilot week of your schedule.

How can I practice transferring the knowledge I learn from my book/class/video to real life?

am I solving problems and recalling things from memory without looking at my notes?

testing

Can I successfully explain what I learned yesterday, last week, a year ago? ...

plan in place to remember what I’m learning long term?

Am I turning factual knowledge into procedures that I’ll retain? Am I overlearning the most critical aspects of the skill?

deeply und...

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In each case, look at how you’re currently progressing through your materials,

Although the tendency is to blame willpower and motivation, very often the problems with projects can be traced back to their conception. I

This struggle illustrates that mastering the principles is a lifelong process.

successful project succeeded are the very elements you want to retain and replicate for the future.

However, all knowledge decays without any form of intervention,

This can often be accomplished by setting up a habit of regular practice, even if it is a minimal one.

Another option is to try to integrate the skill into your life.

but it ensures that I will keep it up enough to make it usable.

This means that doing a refresher course or practice series can be enough to reactivate most of it in a fraction of the time it took to learn it initially.

dive deeper into the skill you have learned.

This can be done through continued practice at a lighter pace or by following up with another ultralearning project.

Mastery is a long road that extends far beyond a single project.

If you’ve mastered the basics of a subject so that you can read denser books about it, reading books on the topic is mostly a matter of putting in time, not developing ingenious learning strategies.

The decision of whether the right step forward is to set up long-term habits or to create a concentrated ultralearning project