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November 23, 2020 - January 17, 2021
Even if you can go straight into learning by doing, this approach is often more intense and uncomfortable than passively watching lecture videos or playing around with a fun app.
If you don’t pay attention to directness, therefore, it’s very easy to slip into lousy learning strategies.
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.”
As we develop more knowledge and skill in an area, they become more flexible and easier to apply outside the narrow contexts in which they were learned.
any student must take seriously the notion that transferring what has been learned between very different contexts and situations will be treacherous.
initial learning efforts often stick stubbornly to the situations we learn them in.
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.
learning directly is hard. It is often more frustrating, challenging, and intense than reading a book or sitting through a lecture. But this very difficulty creates a potent source of competitive advantage for any would-be ultralearner. If you’re willing to apply tactics that exploit directness despite these difficulties, you will end up learning much more effectively.
By immersing yourself in an environment where a language is spoken, not only do you guarantee that you’ll end up practicing the language a lot more than you would otherwise (since you have no choice), but you also face a broader diversity of situations that require learning new words and phrases.
It’s important to note that what matters for transfer is not every possible feature of the learning environment, such as what room you’re in or what clothes you’re wearing while you learn. Rather, it’s the cognitive features—situations where you need to make decisions about what to do and cue knowledge you’ve stored in your head.
The overkill approach is to put yourself into an environment where the demands are going to be extremely high, so you’re unlikely to miss any important lessons or feedback.
By identifying a rate-determining step in your learning reaction, you can isolate it and work on it specifically.
In order to improve your performance in one aspect, you may need to devote so much attention to that one aspect that the other parts of your performance start to go down.
this feedback is important to help you minimize wasting time learning things that don’t matter much to your end goals.
Cycling between direct practice and drills, even within the same learning session, is a good idea when you’re just starting out.
Later, as you get better at what you are trying to do and a lot more effort is required to noticeably improve your overall performance, it’s more acceptable to take longer detours into drills.
Make a hypothesis about what is holding you back, attack it with some drills, using the Direct-Then-Drill Approach, and you can quickly get feedback about whether you’re right.
Teasing out the worst thing about your performance and practicing that in isolation takes guts. It’s much more pleasant to spend time focusing on things you’re already good at.
something mentally strenuous provides a greater benefit to learning than something easy.
Testing yourself—trying to retrieve information without looking at the text—clearly outperformed all other conditions.
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.
Human beings don’t have the ability to know with certainty how well they’ve learned something.
Whether you are ready or not, retrieval practice works better.
Difficulty, far from being an obstacle to making retrieval work, may be part of the reason it does so.
Delaying the first test of a newly learned fact has some benefits over testing immediately.
The research is clear: if you need to recall something later, you’re best off practicing retrieving it.
There will always be some things you choose to master and others you satisfy yourself with knowing you can look up if you need to.
Being able to look things up is certainly an advantage, but without a certain amount of knowledge inside your head, it doesn’t help you solve hard problems.
What’s harder and more useful is to restate the big idea of a chapter or section as a question.
One rule I’ve found helpful for this is to restrict myself to one question per section of a text,
When everything you do is funny, how do you know what really makes a joke good?
Praise, a common type of feedback that teachers often use (and students enjoy), is usually harmful to further learning.
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.
although informative feedback is beneficial, it can backfire if it is processed inappropriately or if it fails to provide useful information.
although all the ultralearners I met employed feedback, they didn’t act on every piece of possible feedback.
In many cases he ignored them, when the feedback conflicted with his vision.
Not only can overly negative feedback lower your motivation, but so can overly positive feedback.
Fear of feedback often feels more uncomfortable than experiencing the feedback itself.
Ultralearners acquire skills quickly because they seek aggressive feedback when others opt for practice that includes weaker forms of feedback or no feedback at all.
outcome feedback, informational feedback, and corrective feedback.
Although outcome feedback isn’t complete, it is often the only kind available and can still have a potent impact on your learning rate.
sometimes the added edge of having corrective over merely informational feedback can be worth the effort needed to find such people.
The self-directed nature of ultralearning shouldn’t convince you that learning is best done as an entirely solitary pursuit.
This illustrates that ultralearning isn’t simply about maximizing feedback but also knowing when to selectively ignore elements of it to extract the useful information.
In general, research has pointed to immediate feedback being superior in settings outside of the laboratory.
Feedback too soon may turn your retrieval practice effectively into passive review, which we already know is less effective for learning.
Good feedback does the opposite. It is very hard to predict and thus gives more information each time you receive it.
Ultralearners carefully adjust their environment so that they’re not able to predict whether they’ll succeed or fail.
Basically, you should try to avoid situations that always make you feel good (or bad) about your performance.
By throwing yourself into a high-intensity, rapid feedback situation, you may initially feel uncomfortable, but you’ll get over that initial aversion much faster than if you wait months or years before getting feedback.
