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

by Scott H. Young

You don’t need to feel as though you’re good at something to invest energy into learning. After all, becoming good at something is what learning is. However, you need to feel that you could be good at it.

When you see yourself as lacking the potential to be good at something or believe that you’ll always be behind everyone else no matter how hard you work, it robs you of the motivation to work hard.

If a person in whom you want to encourage an ultralearning spirit has a natural aptitude, competition is probably good.

Although going between established levels of skill is important, it is when one learns to do something that nobody else can do that learning becomes truly valuable.

Without the belief that progress in one’s own knowledge and skill is possible, one cannot undertake the project required to generate it.

Finishing a project, therefore, isn’t usually accompanied by a sense of finishing learning but by the creation of a feeling of possibility as one’s eyes are opened to all the things left to learn.

Curiosity doesn’t work this way. The more one learns, the greater the craving to learn more. The better one gets, the more one recognizes how much better one could become.