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

by Scott H. Young

Habits tend to work best when the act of learning is mostly a process of accumulation, adding new skills and knowledge.

Ultralearning also tends to be better for areas in which learning has greater frustration barriers and psychological obstacles that make any form of practice too great an effort to be an easily established habit.

However, in my own experience, I’ve noticed that enjoyment tends to come from being good at things.

Once you feel competent in a skill, it starts to get a lot more fun.

The message of this book isn’t that you should drop out of school to learn on your own but that you should take control over your own learning, wherever that may be.

It is to create new avenues for learning and to push yourself to pursue them aggressively rather than timidly waiting by the sidelines.

Polgár’s chess genius was no accident. Instead, it started with one man’s mission to raise genius children.

he was going to raise a genius.

“A genius is not born but educated and trained,”

They would start by introducing the girls to that subject slowly, in short bursts, and turn it into play so that they would actively want to practice rather than feel coerced

All the Polgárs knew they were part of something special, a unique mission that set them apart from other families.

Psychologists recognize a large difference between goals that people pursue intrinsically, based on their own interests, decisions, and targets, and goals that they pursue extrinsically, pushed by overbearing parents, punishing curricula, or demanding employers.

encouraged their unusual specialization through play and positive feedback, not authority and punishment.

László Polgár wrote a book entitled Raise a Genius!,

The second is that by specializing in one subject, the children could reach proficiency at a much younger age.

The third step was to make practice into play. Chess, being a game, is naturally suited to play.

Keeping the game fun and light, especially when the children were young, was a key stepping-stone to developing the drive and self-confidence that would support more serious efforts later.

Fourth, László was careful to create positive reinforcement to make chess a pleasant, rather than frustrating, experience.

“At the start it is most important to awake interest. . . . We should get the child to love what they do—to such a degree that they do it almost obsessively.”15

“One thing is certain: one can never achieve serious pedagogical results, especially at a high level, through coercion.”

László considered “the ability to handle monotony, the capability to sustain interest and persistent attention”

Training focus was a large part of László’s system for his daughters, as he encouraged them to focus their minds on the problem and not get distracted.

That allowed them to learn not only how to play the game well but also to deal with variables such as time pressure and the psychological insecurities

using chess timers even for casual games,

puzzles, hanging from the walls

Blitz and blindfolded games allowed the girls to get better at thinking more

“Socratic method” for chess, posing questions his girls must answer instead of telling them to remember a presolved solution, he was using the right method to encourage the expansion of their memory and understanding. Blindfolded games,

By practicing without looking at the board, it forced them to cultivate the ability to follow positions in their head,

László focused on having the girls recall chess patterns from memory and increased the speed of games to make elements of their play more automatic and less susceptible to forgetting.

encouraged his girls to write articles about chess, explaining, “If one writes an article, one considers a matter more deeply than without a goal, thinking alone or speaking with someone about

encouraged to come up with creative solutions to problems.

involves not merely a mastery of patterns but also choices about what skills and styles to cultivate within a vast range of possibilities.

aggressive, enthusiastic self-education following the key principles of learning.

Better yet, allow people to design their own learning goals that inspire them. Inspiration is an essential starting point in the process of ultralearning.

Coding boot camps, which have sprung up in the wake of high-paying programming jobs, push students through at a brutal pace, sometimes approaching eighty hours a week.

The goal, however, is compelling enough to justify this investment: complete a rigorous program over the course of a few weeks, and you can rise up the ladder of high-salaried tech jobs in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. The process is intense, but the motive is compelling.

Seeking out people’s natural interests for ultralearning means encouraging the sparks that already exist, rather than merely imposing on them the topics you feel would be most beneficial.

Once people see the structure of an ultralearning project, they can start thinking for themselves what would be most interesting, exciting, and useful for them to work on.

After all, becoming good at something is what learning is. However, you need to feel that you could be good at it.

Feel as though you’re lousy at doing something, and you’re robbed of the motivation to change.

When you have a natural talent and thus perform much better than the easily identifiable reference group, you’ll have more motivation to practice and learn with intensity.

For a person who either is of moderate ability or is behind other people, such as learning a skill in a domain in which he or she has no experience, or who is starting to learn a new skill later in life, you should make an effort to make the project unique.

This will encourage the person to frame his or her progress by comparing to his or her past self,

through passively before getting back to the real job at hand. Ultralearning, by encouraging direct, intensive practice, provides the opportunity for a kind of fusion project—one that accomplishes real objectives but is also designed to teach something new.

Although going between established levels of skill is important, it is when one learns to do something that nobody else can do that learning becomes truly valuable.

totaling one hundred hours of practice.