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.

Principle #1: Metalearning—I

Principle #2: Focus—I

Principle #3: Directness—I

Principle #4: Drill—I

Principle #6: Feedback—I

As we continued to walk, now on the grounds in front of the Eiffel Tower, Lewis explained his approach: Start speaking the very first day. Don’t be afraid to talk to strangers. Use a phrasebook to get started; save formal study for later. Use visual mnemonics to memorize vocabulary. What struck me were not the methods but the boldness with which he applied them.

“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 To amass the wide-ranging trivia needed to break records, he decided to be ruthlessly analytical about how he acquired knowledge.

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

Given this difficulty, I think it’s important to articulate clearly why ultralearning is something you should seriously consider. The first reason is for your work.

The second reason is for your personal life.

In the words of the economist Tyler Cowen, “Average is over.”1 In his book of the same title, Cowen argues that because of increased computerization, automation, outsourcing, and regionalization, we are increasingly living in a world in which the top performers do a lot better than the rest. Driving this effect is what is known as “skill polarization.” It’s well known that income inequality has been increasing in the United States over the last several decades. However, this description ignores a more subtle picture. The MIT economist David Autor has shown that instead of inequality rising across the board, there are actually two different effects: inequality rising at the top and lowering at the bottom.2 This matches Cowen’s thesis of average being over, with the middle part of the income spectrum being compressed into the bottom and stretched out at the top.

Exacerbating the trends caused by computers and robots are globalization and regionalization. As medium-skilled technical work is outsourced to workers in developing nations, many of those jobs are disappearing at home. Lower-skilled jobs, which often require face-to-face contact or social knowledge in the form of cultural or language abilities, are likely to remain. Higher-skilled work is also more resistant to shipping overseas because of the benefits of coordination with management and the market.

By choosing a valuable skill and focusing on quickly developing proficiency, you can accelerate your normal career progression.

The best ultralearners are those who blend the practical reasons for learning a skill with an inspiration that comes from something that excites them. There’s an added benefit to ultralearning that transcends even the skills one learns with it. Doing hard things, particularly things that involve learning something new, stretches your self-conception. It gives you confidence that you might be able to do things that you couldn’t do before.

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. Whether this happens on a full-time schedule or just a couple hours per week is completely up to you.

“Make me care,” Gendler told him after listening to one of de Montebello’s speeches. “I understand why this is important to you, but the audience doesn’t care about you. You have to make me care.”

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

There are nine universal principles that underlie the ultralearning projects described so far. Each embodies a particular aspect of successful learning, and I describe how ultralearners maximize the effectiveness of the principle through the choices they make in their projects.

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

Beyond principles and tactics is a broader ultralearning ethos. It’s one of taking responsibility for your own learning: deciding what you want to learn, how you want to learn it, and crafting your own plan to learn what you need to. You’re the one in charge, and you’re the one who’s ultimately responsible for the results you generate.

I find it useful to break down metalearning research that you do for a specific project into three questions: “Why?,” “What?,” and “How?” “Why?” refers to understanding your motivation to learn. If you know exactly why you want to learn a skill or subject, you can save a lot of time by focusing your project on exactly what matters most to you. “What?” refers to the knowledge and abilities you’ll need to acquire in order to be successful. Breaking things down into concepts, facts, and procedures can enable you to map out what obstacles you’ll face and how best to overcome them. “How?” refers to the resources, environment, and methods you’ll use when learning. Making careful choices here can make a big difference in your overall effectiveness.

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.

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.” Then brainstorm all the things you’ll need to learn.

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

Once you’ve found a default curriculum, you can consider making modifications to it. I find this easier to do with skills that have obvious success criteria (say drawing, languages, or music) and for which you can generally make a guess at the relative importance to the subject topics prior to studying them. For conceptual subjects or topics where you may not even understand the meaning of the terms in the syllabus, it’s probably better to stick closer to your benchmark until you learn a bit more. 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.

This type of analysis depends on something known as the Law of Diminishing Returns. This states that the more time you invest in an activity (such as more research), the weaker and weaker the benefits will be as you get closer and closer to the ideal approach. If you keep doing research, eventually it will be less valuable than simply doing more learning, so at that point you can safely focus on learning.

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.

The second problem people tend to encounter is an inability to sustain focus.

A third, problem, subtler than the other two, has to do with the quality and direction of your attention.

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, say working at a coffee shop.

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

Transfer has been called the “Holy Grail of education.” It happens when you learn something in one context, say in a classroom, and are able to use it in another context, say in real life. Although this may sound technical, transfer really embodies something we expect of almost all learning efforts—that we’ll be able to use something we study in one situation and apply it to a new situation. Anything less than this is hard to describe as learning at all. 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 simplest way to be direct is to learn by doing. 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. If this isn’t possible, you may need to create an artificial project or environment to test your skills.

Tactic 1: Project-Based Learning

Tactic 2: Immersive Learning

Tactic 3: The Flight Simulator Method

Tactic 4: The Overkill Approach