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November 23, 2020 - January 17, 2021
Instead, it’s better to get in and take the punches early so that they don’t put you down for the count.
relearning is closer to repair work, while original learning is a completely new construction.
If you have ten hours to learn something, therefore, it makes more sense to spend ten days studying one hour each than to spend ten hours studying in one burst.
When it comes to retention, don’t let perfect become the enemy of good
moving up a level to a more advanced skill enabled the earlier skill to be overlearned, thus preventing some forgetting.
Thus mnemonics can act as a bridge for difficult-to-remember information, but it’s usually not the final step in creating memories that will endure forever.
To retain knowledge is ultimately to combat the inevitable human tendency to forget.
The secret was his impressive memory for certain arithmetic results and an intuition with numbers that enabled him to interpolate.
Instead of trying to follow an equation, he would try to imagine the situation it described.
Like chess grand masters, when given real physics problems he excelled because he had built a huge library of patterns from real experiences with physics.
his intuition, too, would fail him when the subject of his study wasn’t built on those assumptions.
When you feel like giving up and that you can’t possibly figure out the solution to a difficult problem, try setting a timer for another ten minutes to push yourself a bit further.
difficulty in retrieving the correct information—even when the difficulty is caused by the information not being there—can prime you to remember information better later.
Feynman didn’t master things by following along with other people’s results. Instead, it was by the process of mentally trying to re-create those results that he became so good at physics.
his drive to understand things by virtue of working through the results himself also assisted in building his capacity for deep intuition.
Asking whether you understand a concept is a lot harder because you may understand it a little, but not enough for the purposes at hand.
The illusion of understanding is very often the barrier to deeper knowledge, because unless that competency is actually tested, it’s easy to mislead yourself into thinking you understand more than you do.
when it’s not possible to imagine an appropriate example, that’s evidence that you don’t understand something well enough and would benefit from going back a few steps and learning the material better before continuing.
the fewer questions you ask, the more likely you are to know less about the subject.
How many of us lack the confidence to ask “dumb” questions? Feynman knew he was smart and had no problem asking them.
The irony is that by asking questions with seemingly obvious answers, he also noticed the not-so-obvious implications of the things he studied.
The opposite tendency, to avoid asking questions in the vain attempt to appear knowledgeab...
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Explaining things clearly and asking “dumb” questions can keep you from fooling yourself into thinking you know something you don’t.
with the book in hand and go back and forth between your explanation and the one in the book.
go through the problem step by step alongside the explanation you generate,
focus on generating illustrative examples, analogies, or visualizations that would make the idea comprehensible to someone who has learned far less than you have.
First, he would identify a learning resource, method, or style and pursue it with incredible vigor, creating dozens, if not hundreds, of works in that direction. After this burst of intensity, aware of his still-existing deficiencies, he would apply himself to a new resource, method, or style and start again.
Copying was another strategy van Gogh employed early on that he would continue late into his artistic career.
These two factors, variation and aggressive exploration, enabled him to push through his early obstacles and produce some of the most iconic and brilliant works ever painted.
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.
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.
many skills reward not only proficiency but originality.
As creativity becomes valuable, experimentation becomes essential.
Although van Gogh tried many different approaches when he first started teaching himself to draw and paint, he also produced an enormous quantity of work based on each of those methods.
so the question becomes not “How can I learn this?” but “What should I learn next?”
Once you master the basics, there is no longer one “right” way to do everything but many different possibilities, all of which have different strengths and weaknesses.
Similarly, you might want to identify masters in your own line of study and dissect what makes their styles successful to see what you can emulate or integrate into your own approach.
you will get much better information about which method works best if you limit the variation to only the factor you want to test.
Give a designer unlimited freedom, and the solution is usually a mess.
How can you add limitations to force yourself to develop new capacities?
For instance, you might be an engineer who becomes really good at public speaking. You may not be the best possible engineer or the best possible presenter, but combining those two skills could make you the best person to present on engineering topics for your company at conferences, thus giving you access to new professional opportunities.
Pushing out to an extreme in some aspect of the skill you’re cultivating, even if you eventually decide to pull it back to something more moderate, is often a good exploration strategy.
test your schedule for one week before you commit to it. This will give you firsthand knowledge of how difficult it will be and prevents overconfidence.
With ultralearning, as with all self-education, the goal isn’t merely to learn one skill or subject but to hone and enhance your overall learning process. Each successful project can be refined and improved for the next one.
enjoyment tends to come from being good at things. Once you feel competent in a skill, it starts to get a lot more fun.
Being self-directed is about who is making decisions, not about whether other people are involved.
Otodidak
László and Klára had found a loophole in the normal expectation that pushing others to study intensely necessarily leads to misery.
Keeping the game fun and light, especially when the children were young, was a key stepping-stone to developing the drive and self-confidence that would support more serious efforts later.
“one of the most important educational tasks is to teach self-education.”
Seeking out people’s natural interests for ultralearning means encouraging the sparks that already exist, rather than merely imposing on them the topics you feel would be most beneficial.
