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

by Scott H. Young

SRS is an amazing tool, but it tends to have quite focused applications. Learning facts, trivia, vocabulary words, or definitions is ideally suited for flash card software, which presents knowledge in terms of a question with a single answer. It’s more difficult to apply to more complicated domains of knowledge, which rely on complex information associations that are built up only through real-world practice. Still, for some tasks, the bottleneck of memory is so tight that SRS is a powerful tool for widening it, even if there are some drawbacks. The authors of a popular study guide for medical students center their approach around SRS, because a medical student must remember so many things and the default strategy of forgetting and relearning is quite costly in terms of time.10