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

by Scott H. Young

Principle #1: Metalearning—I

Principle #2: Focus—I

Principle #3: Directness—I

Principle #4: Drill—I

Principle #6: Feedback—I

“Everybody that wants to succeed at a game is going to practice the game,” Craig contends. “You can practice haphazardly, or you can practice efficiently.”3

Completing the project was eye-opening for me. For years, I had thought the only way to learn things deeply was to push through school. Finishing this project taught me not only that this assumption was false but that this alternate path could be more fun and exciting.

In writing this book, I wanted to bring together the common principles I observed in their unique projects and in my own. I wanted to strip away all the superficial differences and strange idiosyncrasies and see what learning advice remains. I also wanted to generalize from their extreme examples something an ordinary student or professional can find useful.

Let’s spend a moment trying to see what exactly ultralearning is and how it differs from the most common approaches to learning and education. Then we can examine what the principles are that underlie all learning, to see how ultralearners exploit them to learn faster.

Here’s an imperfect definition: 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.

The trends toward skill polarization in the economy, skyrocketing tuition, and new technology are all global. But what does ultralearning actually look like for an individual? I believe there are three main cases in which this strategy for quickly acquiring hard skills can apply: accelerating the career you have, transitioning to a new career, and cultivating a hidden advantage in a competitive world.

Learning, at its core, is a broadening of horizons, of seeing things that were previously invisible and of recognizing capabilities within yourself that you didn’t know existed.

The core of the ultralearning strategy is intensity and a willingness to prioritize effectiveness.

But even the failure mode of ultralearning is usually that you will learn a skill fairly well.

Principles allow you to solve problems, even those you may have never encountered before, in a way that a recipe or mechanical procedure cannot.

The principles of ultralearning are going to be the focus of the second part of this book. In each chapter, I’ll introduce a new principle, plus some evidence to back it up both from ultralearning examples and from scientific research. Finally, I’ll share possible ways that the principle can manifest itself as specific tactics.

There are nine universal principles that underlie the ultralearning projects described so far.

Metalearning: First Draw a Map.

Focus: Sharpen Your Knife.

Directness: Go Straight Ahead.

Drill: Attack Your Weakest Point.

Retrieval: Test to Learn.

Feedback: Don’t Dodge the Punches.

Retention: Don’t Fill a Leaky Bucket.

Intuition: Dig Deep Before Building Up.

Experimentation: Explore Outside Your Comfort Zone. All

case metalearning means learning about learning.

Over the long term, the more ultralearning projects you do, the larger your set of general metalearning skills will be.

Ultralearning is a skill, just like riding a bicycle. The more practice you get with it, the more skills and knowledge you’ll pick up for how to do it well. This long-term advantage likely outweighs the short-term benefits and is what’s easiest to mistake for intelligence or talent when seen in others.

I find it useful to break down metalearning research that you do for a specific project into three questions: “Why?,” “What?,” and “How?”

The first question to try to answer is why are you learning and what that implies for how you should approach the project. Practically speaking, the projects you take on are going to have one of two broad motivations: instrumental and intrinsic.

Instrumental learning projects are those you’re learning with the purpose of achieving a different, nonlearning result.

Intrinsic projects are those that you’re pursuing for their own sake.

If you’re pursuing a project for mostly instrumental reasons, it’s often a good idea to do an additional step of research: determining whether learning the skill or topic in question will actually help you achieve your goal.

Tactic: The Expert Interview Method The main way you can do research of this kind is to talk to people who have already achieved what you want to achieve.

Though this method can be used for many parts of the research process, I’ve found it particularly valuable for vetting instrumental projects.

Once you’ve gotten a handle on why you’re learning, you can start looking at how the knowledge in your subject is structured. A good way to do this is to write down on a sheet of paper three columns with the headings “Concepts,” “Facts,” and “Procedures.”

In the first column, write down anything that needs to be understood.

In the second column, write down anything that needs to be memorized.

In the third column, write down anything that needs to be practiced.

I suggest following two methods to answer how you’ll learn something: Benchmarking and the Emphasize/Exclude Method.

The way to start any learning project is by finding the common ways in which people learn the skill or subject. This can help you design a default strategy as a starting point.

The Emphasize/Exclude Method involves first finding areas of study that align with the goals you identified in the first part of your research.

A good rule of thumb is that you should invest approximately 10 percent of your total expected learning time into research prior to starting.

Often obstacles and opportunities aren’t clear before you start, so reassessing is a necessary step of the learning process.

The struggles with focus that people have generally come in three broad varieties: starting, sustaining, and optimizing the quality of one’s focus.

The first problem that many people have is starting to focus. The most obvious way this manifests itself is when you procrastinate: instead of doing the thing you’re supposed to, you work on something else or slack off.

to the first step to overcoming procrastination: recognize when you are procrastinating.

The second problem people tend to encounter is an inability to sustain focus. This can happen when you’ve sat yourself down to study or practice something, but then your phone buzzes and you look away, a friend knocks on the door to say hello, or you spin off into a daydream only to realize you’ve been staring at the same paragraph for the last fifteen minutes. Like the challenge of initiating focus, sustaining focus is important if you want to make progress learning hard things. Before I talk about how to sustain focus, however, I’d like to raise a question about what kind of focus is the best to sustain.