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

by Scott H. Young

Researchers generally find that people retain more of what they learn when practice is broken into different studying periods than when it is crammed together. Similarly, the phenomenon of interleaving suggests that even within a solid block of focus, it can make sense to alternate between different aspects of the skill or knowledge to be remembered.

If you’re struggling to concentrate, look at each of these three in turn.

The first source of distraction is your environment.

A third, problem, subtler than the other two, has to do with the quality and direction of your attention. Supposing you’ve managed to wrangle the problems of procrastination and distraction down long enough to focus on your task, how should you do

This implies that you may want to consider optimizing your arousal levels to sustain the ideal level of focus. Complex tasks may benefit from lower arousal, so working in a quiet room at home might be the right idea for math problems. Simpler tasks might benefit from a noisier environment,

In all these cases the problem is the same: directly learning the thing we want feels too uncomfortable, boring, or frustrating, so we settle for some book, lecture, or app, hoping it will eventually make us better at the real thing.

Indirect approaches to learning, however, aren’t limited to traditional education. Many self-directed learners fall into the trap of indirect learning.

This makes me think that most students view sitting and listening to a lecture as the main way that they learn the material, with doing problems that look substantially similar to those on the final exam as being a superficial check on their knowledge.

Unfortunately, transfer is also something that, despite more than a century of intense work and research, has largely failed to occur in formal education. The psychologist Robert Haskell has said in his excellent coverage of the vast literature on transfer in learning, “Despite the importance of transfer of learning, research findings over the past nine decades clearly show that as individuals, and as educational institutions, we have failed to achieve transfer of learning on any significant level.” He later added, “Without exaggeration, it’s an education scandal.”

In his book The Unschooled Mind: How Children Think and How Schools Should Teach, the developmental psychologist Howard Gardner pointed to the body of evidence showing that even “students who receive honors grades in college-level physics courses are frequently unable to solve basic problems and questions encountered in a form slightly different from that on which they have been formally instructed and tested.”

When we learn new things, therefore, we should always strive to tie them directly to the contexts we want to use them in.

Whenever possible, if you can spend a good portion of your learning time just doing the thing you want to get better at, the problem of directness will likely go away.

Whereas the structures of our knowledge start out brittle, welded to the environments and contexts we learn them in, with more work and time they can become flexible and can be applied more broadly. This

Many ultralearners opt for projects rather than classes to learn the skills they need. The rationale is simple: if you organize your learning around producing something, you’re guaranteed to at least learn how to produce that thing. If you take classes, you may spend a lot of time taking notes and reading but not achieve your goal.

Immersion is the process of surrounding yourself with the target environment in which the skill is practiced. This has the advantage of requiring much larger amounts of practice than would be typical, as well as exposing you to a fuller range of situations in which the skill applies.

when direct practice is impossible, a simulation of the environment will work to the degree to which it remains faithful to the cognitive elements of the task in question.

The last method I’ve found for enhancing directness is to increase the challenge, so that the skill level required is wholly contained within the goal that is set.

In chemistry, there’s a useful concept known as the rate-determining step. This occurs when a reaction takes place over multiple steps, with the products of one reaction becoming the reagents for another. The rate-determining step is the slowest part of this chain of reactions, forming a bottleneck that ultimately defines the amount of time needed for the entire reaction to occur. Learning, I’d like to argue, often works similarly, with certain aspects of the learning problem forming a bottleneck that controls the speed at which you can become more proficient overall.

This is the strategy behind doing drills. By identifying a rate-determining step in your learning reaction, you can isolate it and work on it specifically. Since it governs the overall competence you have with that skill, by improving at it you will improve faster than if you try to practice every aspect of the skill at once.

The mistake made in many academic strategies for learning is to ignore the direct context or abstract it away, in the hope that if enough component skills are developed, they will eventually transfer. Ultralearners, in contrast, frequently employ what I’ll call the Direct-Then-Drill Approach.

There are three major problems when applying this principle. The first is figuring out when and what to drill.

The second difficulty with this principle is designing the drill to produce improvement. This

Finally, doing drills is hard and often uncomfortable.

The easiest way to create a drill is to isolate a slice in time of a longer sequence of actions.

Sometimes what you’ll want to practice isn’t a slice in time of a larger skill but a particular cognitive component.

A difficulty with drills in many creative skills is that it is often impossible to practice one aspect without also doing the work of the others.

The Magnifying Glass Method is to spend more time on one component of the skill than you would otherwise.

One strategy I’ve seen repeatedly from ultralearners is to start with a skill that they don’t have all the prerequisites for. Then, when they inevitably do poorly, they go back a step, learn one of the foundational topics, and repeat the exercise.

The difficulty and usefulness of drills repeat a pattern that will recur throughout the ultralearning principles: that something mentally strenuous provides a greater benefit to learning than something easy.

The act of trying to summon up knowledge from memory is a powerful learning tool on its own, beyond its connection to direct practice or feedback.

Especially if you combine retrieval with the ability to look up the answers, retrieval practice is a much better form of studying than the ones most students apply.

What makes practicing retrieval so much better than review? One answer comes from the psychologist R. A. Bjork’s concept of desirable difficulty.5 More difficult retrieval leads to better learning, provided the act of retrieval is itself successful.

Pushing difficulty higher and opting for testing oneself well before you are “ready” is more efficient.

Difficulty can become undesirable if it gets so hard that retrieval becomes impossible.

Flash cards are an amazingly simple, yet effective, way to learn paired associations between questions and answers.

The old way of creating paper flash cards to drill yourself is powerful, but it has largely been superseded by spaced-repetition systems,

A simple tactic for applying retrieval is, after reading a section from a book or sitting through a lecture, to try to write down everything you can remember on a blank piece of paper.

Most students take notes by copying the main points as they encounter them. However, another strategy for taking notes is to rephrase what you’ve recorded as questions to be answered later. Instead of writing that the Magna Carta was signed in 1215, you could instead write the question “When was the Magna Carta signed?” with a reference to where to find the answer in case you forget. By taking notes as questions instead of answers, you generate the material to practice retrieval on later.

Trying to produce the answer rather than merely reviewing it is only half of a bigger cycle, however. To make retrieval really effective, it helps to know whether the answer you dredged up from your mind was correct. Just as we often avoid testing ourselves until we’re ready because struggling with a test is uncomfortable, we often avoid seeking information about our skill level until we think it will be favorable. Being able to process that information effectively, hearing the message it contains loud and clear, isn’t always easy. Yet this is also why it is so important.

Feedback features prominently in the research on deliberate practice, a scientific theory of the acquisition of expertise initiated by K. Anders Ericsson and other psychologists. In his studies, Ericsson has found that the ability to gain immediate feedback on one’s performance is an essential ingredient in reaching expert levels of performance. No feedback, and the result is often stagnation—long periods of time when you continue to use a skill but don’t get any better at it. Sometimes the lack of feedback can even result in declining abilities. Many medical practitioners get worse with more experience as their accumulated knowledge from medical school begins to fade and the accuracy of their diagnoses is not given the rapid feedback that would normally promote further learning.2

In a large meta-analysis, Avraham Kluger and Angelo DeNisi looked at hundreds of studies on the impact of providing feedback for learning.3 Though the overall effect of feedback was positive, it’s important to note that in over 38 percent of cases, feedback actually had a negative impact. This leads to a confusing situation. On the one hand, feedback is essential for expert attainment, as demonstrated by the scientific studies of deliberate practice. Feedback also figures prominently in ultralearning projects, and it’s difficult to imagine their being successful if their sources of feedback had been turned off. At the same time, a review of the evidence doesn’t paint the picture of feedback being universally positive. What’s

feedback often backfires when it is aimed at a person’s ego.

When feedback steers into evaluations of you as an individual (e.g., “You’re so smart!” or “You’re lazy”), it usually has a negative impact on learning.

The first type of feedback, and the least granular, is outcome feedback. This tells you something about how well you’re doing overall but offers no ideas as to what you’re doing better or worse.

The next type of feedback is informational feedback. This feedback tells you what you’re doing wrong, but it doesn’t necessarily tell you how to fix it.

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 kind of feedback is often available only through a coach, mentor, or teacher. However, sometimes it can be provided automatically if you are using the right study materials.

The self-directed nature of ultralearning shouldn’t convince you that learning is best done as an entirely solitary pursuit.

Tactic 1: Noise Cancellation Anytime you receive feedback, there are going to be both a signal—the useful information you want to process—and noise. Noise is caused by random factors, which you shouldn’t overreact to when trying to improve. Say

Tactic 2: Hitting the Difficulty Sweet Spot Feedback is information. More information equals more opportunities to learn. A scientific measure of information is based on how easily you can predict what message it will contain. If you know that success is guaranteed, the feedback itself provides no information; you knew it would go well all along. Good feedback does the opposite. It is very hard to predict and thus gives more information each time you receive it.

Tactic 3: Metafeedback Typical feedback is performance assessment: your grade on a quiz tells you something about how well you know the material. However, there’s another type of feedback that’s perhaps even more useful: metafeedback. This kind of feedback isn’t about your performance but about evaluating