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

by Scott H. Young

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.

If retrieval practice—trying to recall facts and concepts from memory—is so much better for learning, why don’t students realize it? Why do many prefer to stick to concept mapping or the even less effective passive review, when simply closing the book and trying to recall as much as possible would help them so much more? Karpicke’s research points to a possible explanation: Human beings don’t have the ability to know with certainty how well they’ve learned something. Instead, we need to rely on clues from our experience of studying to give us a feeling about how well we’re doing.

Feedback is one of the most consistent aspects of the strategy ultralearners use.

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.

Outcome Feedback: Are You Doing It Wrong?

Informational Feedback: What Are You Doing Wrong?

Corrective Feedback: How Can You Fix What You’re Doing Wrong?

Losing access to previously learned knowledge has been a perennial problem for educators, students, and psychologists. Fading knowledge impacts the work you do as well.

Our minds are a leaky bucket; however, most of the holes are near the top, so the water that remains at the bottom leaks out more slowly.

Decay: Forgetting with Time

Interference: Overwriting Old Memories with New Ones

Forgotten Cues: A Locked Box with No Key

Memory Mechanism 1—Spacing: Repeat to Remember

Memory Mechanism 2—Proceduralization: Automatic Will Endure

Memory Mechanism 3—Overlearning: Practice Beyond Perfect

Memory Mechanism 4—Mnemonics: A Picture Retains a Thousand Words

This process sounds needlessly complicated and elaborate at first, but it benefits from converting a difficult association (between arbitrary sounds and a new meaning) into a few links that are much easier to associate and remember. With practice, each conversion of this type may take only fifteen to twenty seconds, and it really does help with remembering foreign-language words. This particular kind of mnemonic works for this purpose, but there are others that work for remembering lists, numbers, maps, or sequences of steps in a procedure. For a good introduction to this topic, I highly recommend Joshua Foer’s book Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything.

In a famous study, advanced PhDs and undergraduate physics students were given sets of physics problems and asked to sort them into categories.5 Immediately, a stark difference became apparent. Whereas beginners tended to look at superficial features of the problem—such as whether the problem was about pulleys or inclined planes—experts focused on the deeper principles at work. “Ah, so it’s a conservation of energy problem,” you can almost hear them saying as they categorized the problem by what principles of physics they represented. This approach is more successful in solving problems because it gets to the core of how the problems work. The surface features of a problem don’t always relate to the correct procedure needed to solve it. The students needed much more trial and error to home in on the correct method, whereas the experts could immediately start with the right approach.

Only by developing enough experience with problem solving can you build up a deep mental model of how other problems work.

Rule 1: Don’t Give Up on Hard Problems Easily

Rule 2: Prove Things to Understand Them

Rule 3: Always Start with a Concrete Example

Rule 4: Don’t Fool Yourself

The Feynman Technique

The method is quite simple: Write down the concept or problem you want to understand at the top of a piece of paper. In the space below, explain the idea as if you had to teach it to someone else. If it’s a concept, ask yourself how you would convey the idea to someone who has never heard of it before. If it’s a problem, explain how to solve it and—crucially—why that solution procedure makes sense to you. When you get stuck, meaning your understanding fails to provide a clear answer, go back to your book, notes, teacher, or reference material to find the answer.

When starting to learn a new skill, often it’s sufficient simply to follow the example of someone who is further along than you. In discussing the principles of ultralearning, metalearning comes first. Understanding how a subject breaks down into different elements and seeing how others have learned it previously, thus providing an advantageous starting point. However, as your skill develops, it’s often no longer enough to simply follow the examples of others; you need to experiment and find your own path. Part of the reason for this is that the early part of learning a skill tends to be the best trodden and supported, as everyone begins at the same place. As your skills develop, however, not only are there fewer people who can teach you and fewer students you could have as peers (thus lowering the total market for books, classes, and instructors), but you also start to diverge from those you’re learning from. Whereas two complete novices have quite similar knowledge and skills, two experts might have quite different sets of skills that they’ve already acquired, thus making improving those skills an increasingly personalized and idiosyncratic adventure. A second reason for the value of experimentation as you approach mastery is that abilities are more likely to stagnate after you’ve mastered the basics.

The difference between a novice programmer and a master isn’t usually that the novice cannot solve certain problems. Rather, it’s that the master knows the best way to solve a problem, which will be the most efficient and clean and cause the fewest headaches later on. As mastery becomes a process of unlearning over accumulation, experimentation becomes synonymous with learning as you force yourself to go outside your comfort zone and try new things.