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

by Scott H. Young

I just committed to relentless experimentation.

Passive learning creates knowledge. Active practice creates skill.

You can research the best instructions on the bench press technique, but the only way to build strength is to practice lifting weights.

You can read all of the bestselling sales books, but the only way to actually get customers is to practice making sales calls.

Learning can be very useful, of course, but the danger is that the act of soaking up new facts can be disconnected from t...

“In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But in practice, there is.”*

examining other popular bloggers and authors.

Lihat YouTuber2 yang sukses akademiknya

Focus—I went full-time as a writer nearly from the start.

Dedikasikan lebih babyak waktu untuk latihan

Directness—I learned writing by writing.

Learn Math, Physics, and Chemistry by doing the problems.

testing and refining my ability to perform each small aspect of the larger task.

Break down material into smaller chunks and tackle them one by one.

Feedback—I personally emailed nearly all of my first ten thousand subscribers to say hello and to ask for feedback on my writing. It didn’t scale, but it taught me a lot in the beginning.

Tanya ke temen yang jago Fis, Mat, Kim dan cari tau apakah jawaban yang kita buat benar/ada cara yang lebih singkat apa ngga.

Learning something valuable and doing it fast doesn’t have to be confined to some narrow set of geniuses. It’s a process anyone can embrace. It’s just that most people never do it because they never had a playbook to show them how.

The simple truth is most people will never intensely study your area of interest. Doing so—even if it’s just for a few months—will help you stand out.

With the stories and strategies Scott shares in this book, you will have the knowledge. All that is left is to take action.

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.

With the disappearance of medium-skilled jobs, it’s not enough to get a basic education and work hard every day in order to succeed. Instead, you need to move into the higher-skilled category, where learning is constant, or you’ll be pushed into the lower-skilled category at the bottom.

The best ultralearners are those who blend the practical reasons for learning a skill with an inspiration that comes from something that excites them.

Learn by doing the thing you want to become good at. Don’t trade it off for other tasks, just because those are more convenient or comfortable.

learning about how knowledge is structured and acquired within this subject; in other words, learning how to learn it.

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.

If someone who has already accomplished the goal you want to achieve doesn’t think your learning project will help reach it or thinks it’s less important than mastering some other skill, that’s a good sign that your motivation and the project are misaligned.

The key is to write a simple, to-the-point email, explaining why you’re reaching out to them and asking if they could spare fifteen minutes to answer some simple questions. Make the email concise and nonthreatening. Don’t ask for more than fifteen minutes or for ongoing mentorship. Though some experts will be happy to help you in those ways, it’s not good form to ask for too much in the first email.

The way to start any learning project is by finding the common ways in which people learn the skill or subject.

the quality of the materials you use can create orders-of-magnitude differences in your effectiveness.

Use external resources for learning weekly classes tingz

There will always be some uncertainty in your approach, so it’s important to find the sweet spot between insufficient research and analysis paralysis. You know when you’re procrastinating, so just get started.

The benefits of ultralearning aren’t always apparent from the first project because that first project occurs when you’re at your lowest level of metalearning ability.

Recognizing that you’re procrastinating is the first step to avoiding it.

If you actually start working or ignore a potent distractor, it usually only takes a couple minutes until the worry starts to dissolve, even for fairly unpleasant tasks.

If you find yourself setting a daily schedule with chunked hours and then frequently ignore it to do something else, go back to the start and try building back up again with the five-minute rule and then the Pomodoro Technique.

Don’t ever feel bad if you have to back up a stage, either; you cannot control your aversions or tendency to distraction, but with practice you can lessen their impact.

don’t feel guilty if flow doesn’t come automatically. Your goal is to enhance your learning, and this often involves pushing through some sessions that are more frustrating than what could be considered ideal for flow.

Investments made in pushing through learning now will make skillful practice a much more enjoyable activity down the road.

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 have several hours to study, you’re possibly better off covering a few topics rather than focusing exclusively on one.

Many people tell themselves that they focus better while listening to music, let’s say, but the reality might be that they don’t want to work on a given task, so music provides a low-level, amusing distraction.

Multitasking may feel like fun, but it’s unsuitable for ultralearning, which requires concentrating your full mind on the task at hand.

you’re struggling with problems in your life, you’ll have a harder time learning well, and you may want to look at dealing with those first.

If instead you “learn to let it arise, note it, and release it or let it go,” this can diminish the behavior you’re trying to avoid.

If it ever feels as though continuing working is pointless because you’re so distracted by a negative emotion that you can’t possibly work, remember that the long-term strengthening of your ability to persist on this task will be useful, so the time is not wasted even if you don’t accomplish much in this particular learning session.

Taking a break from the problem can widen the space of focus enough that possibilities that were not in your consciousness earlier can conjoin and you can make new discoveries.

such an approach often only works when one has been focusing on a problem for long enough that the residue of ideas remains in one’s mind.

Not working at all is unlikely to lead to creative genius, but taking a break may help breathe fresh perspective into a hard problem.

you may want to consider optimizing your arousal levels to sustain the ideal level of focus.

recognize where you are, and start small. If you’re the kind of person who can’t sit still for a minute, try sitting still for half a minute. Half a minute soon becomes one minute, then two.

The impulse to engage in distractions will weaken each time you resist it.

With patience and persistence, your few minutes may become large enough to accomplish great things, just as Somerville did almost two hundred years ago.

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.

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.

Though first covering the material is often essential to begin doing practice, the principle of directness asserts that it’s actually while doing the thing you want to get good at when much of learning takes place.

directness isn’t an all-or-nothing feature but something you can gradually increase to improve your performance.