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

by Scott H. Young

Directness is the practice of learning by directly doing the thing you want to learn. Basically, it’s improvement through active practice rather than through passive learning. The phrases learning something new and practicing something new may seem similar, but these two methods can produce profoundly different results. Passive learning creates knowledge. Active practice creates skill.

“Always have a challenge,”

Ultralearning: A strategy for acquiring skills and knowledge that is both self-directed and intense.

Your deepest moments of happiness don’t come from doing easy things; they come from realizing your potential and overcoming your own limiting beliefs about yourself. Ultralearning offers a path to master those things that will bring you deep satisfaction and self-confidence. Although the motivation behind ultralearning is timeless,

Metalearning: First Draw a Map. Start by learning how to learn the subject or skill you want to tackle. Discover how to do good research and how to draw on your past competencies to learn new skills more easily.

Focus: Sharpen Your Knife. Cultivate the ability to concentrate. Carve out chunks of time when you can focus on learning, and make it easy to just do it.

Directness: Go Straight Ahead. Learn by doing the thing you want to become good at. Don’t trade it off for other tasks, just because tho...

Drill: Attack Your Weakest Point. Be ruthless in improving your weakest points. Break down complex skills into small parts; then master those p...

Retrieval: Test to Learn. Testing isn’t simply a way of assessing knowledge but a way of creating it. Test yourself before you feel confident, and push yourself to actively rec...

Feedback: Don’t Dodge the Punches. Feedback is harsh and uncomfortable. Know how to use it without letting your ego get in the way. Extract the signal from the noise, so you k...

Retention: Don’t Fill a Leaky Bucket. Understand what you forget and why. Learn to remember things ...

Intuition: Dig Deep Before Building Up. Develop your intuition through play and exploration of concepts and skills. Understand how understanding works, and don’t recourse to cheap tric...

Experimentation: Explore Outside Your Comfort Zone. All of these principles are only starting points. True mastery comes not just from following the path trodden by others but from ...

Directness is the idea of learning being tied closely to the situation or context you want to use it in.

In his book The Unschooled Mind: How Children Think and How Schools Should Teach,

The old way of creating paper flash cards to drill yourself is powerful, but it has largely been superseded by spaced-repetition systems, as I’ll discuss in Principle 7.

The best kind of feedback to get is corrective feedback. This is the feedback that shows you not only what you’re doing wrong but how to fix it. This

Joshua Foer’s book Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything.

The method is quite simple: Write down the concept or problem you want to understand at the top of a piece of paper. In the space below, explain the idea as if you had to teach it to someone else. If it’s a concept, ask yourself how you would convey the idea to someone who has never heard of it before. If it’s a problem, explain how to solve it and—crucially—why that solution procedure makes sense to you. When you get stuck, meaning your understanding fails to provide a clear answer, go back to your book, notes, teacher, or reference material to find the answer.

Here are some questions to ask yourself to determine whether you’re slipping from the ideal: Metalearning. Have I done research into what are the typical ways of learning this subject or skill? Have I interviewed successful learners to see what resources and advice they can recommend? Have I spent about 10 percent of the total time on preparing my project? Focus. Am I focused when I spend time learning, or am I multitasking and distracted? Am I skipping learning sessions or procrastinating? When I start a session, how long does it take before I’m in a good flow? How long can I sustain that focus before my mind starts to wander? How sharp is my attention? Should it be more concentrated for intensity or more diffuse for creativity? Directness. Am I learning the skill in the way I’ll eventually be using it? If not, what mental processes are missing from my practice that exist in the real environment? How can I practice transferring the knowledge I learn from my book/class/video to real life? Drill. Am I spending time focusing on the weakest points of my performance? What is the rate-limiting step that is holding me back? Does it feel as though my learning is slowing down and that there’s too many components of the skill to master? If so, how can I split apart a complex skill to work on smaller, more manageable components of it? Retrieval. Am I spending most of my time reading and reviewing, or am I solving problems and recalling things from memory without looking at my notes?...

ultralearning is a strategy.

that ultralearning is self-directed, although not necessarily solitary.