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

by Scott H. Young

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?...