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

by Scott H. Young

deep learning provides a sense of purpose in life. Developing skills is meaningful. It feels good to get good at something.

deep learning is how you get outsized returns. 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.

most people would be surprised by what they could accomplish with a year (or a few months) of focused learning. The process of intense self-directed learning can fashion skills you never thought you could develop.

I stumbled across a class taught at MIT and posted online. It had fully recorded lectures, assignments, and quizzes; even the actual exams used in the real class with the solution keys were provided. I decided to try taking the class. To my surprise, I found that the class was much better than most of the classes I had paid thousands of dollars to attend in university. The lectures were polished, the professor was engaging, and the material was fascinating. Digging further, I could see that this wasn’t the only class MIT offered for free. MIT had uploaded the materials from hundreds of different classes. I wondered if this could be the solution to my problem. If anyone could learn the content of an MIT class for free, would it be possible to learn the content of an entire degree?

Instead of showing up to prescheduled lectures, I watched downloaded videos for the class at twice the normal speed. Instead of meticulously doing each assignment and waiting weeks to learn my results, I could test myself on the material one question at a time, quickly learning from my mistakes. Using these and other methods, I found I could scrape through a class in as little as a week’s time. Doing some quick calculations and adding some room for error, I decided it might be possible to tackle the remaining thirty-two classes in under a year.

Let’s spend a moment trying to see what exactly ultralearning is and how it differs from the most common approaches to learning and education. Then we can examine what the principles are that underlie all learning, to see how ultralearners exploit them to learn faster.

First, ultralearning is a strategy. A strategy is not the only solution to a given problem, but it may be a good one. Strategies also tend to be well suited for certain situations and not others, so using them is a choice, not a commandment.

Second, ultralearning is self-directed. It’s about how you make decisions about what to learn and why. It’s possible to be a completely self-directed learner and still decide that attending a particular school is the best way to learn something. Similarly, you could “teach yourself” something on your own by mindlessly following the steps outlined in a textbook. Self-direction is about who is in the driver’s seat for the project, not about where it takes place.

Finally, ultralearning is intense. All of the ultralearners I met took unusual steps to maximize the...

with ultralearning, deeply and effectively learning things is always the main priority.

ultralearning isn’t easy. You’ll have to set aside time from your busy schedule in order to pursue something that will strain you mentally, emotionally, and possibly even physically.

rapidly learning hard skills can have a greater impact than years of mediocre striving on the job. Whether you want to change careers, take on new challenges, or accelerate your progress, ultralearning is a powerful tool.

In the words of the economist Tyler Cowen, “Average is over.” In his book of the same title, Cowen argues that because of increased computerization, automation, outsourcing, and regionalization, we are increasingly living in a world in which the top performers do a lot better than the rest.

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.

Tuition has increased far faster than the rate of inflation, which means that unless you are well poised to translate that education into a major salary increase, it may not be worth the expense.

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter if ultralearning is a suitable replacement for higher education. In many professions, having a degree isn’t just nice, it’s legally required. Doctors, lawyers, and engineers all require formal credentials to even start doing the job. However, those same professionals don’t stop learning when they leave school, and so the ability to teach oneself new subjects and skills remains essential.

To see how ultralearning can accelerate the career you already have, consider Colby Durant. After graduating from college, she started work at a web development firm but wanted to make faster progress. She took on an ultralearning project to learn copywriting. After taking the initiative and showing her boss what she could do, she was able to get a promotion. By choosing a valuable skill and focusing on quickly developing proficiency, you can accelerate your normal career progression.

an ultralearning project can augment the other skills and assets you’ve cultivated in your work.

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

What could you learn if you took the right approach to make it successful? Who could you become?

The first way is by pursuing ultralearning part-time. The most dramatic examples of learning success tend to be those where the ultralearner put impressive amounts of time into the project. Spending fifty hours a week on a project will accomplish more than spending five hours a week on it, even if the efficiency is the same, and thus the most captivating stories usually involve heroic schedules. Though this makes for good storytelling, it’s actually unnecessary when it comes to pursuing your own ultralearning projects. The core of the ultralearning strategy is intensity and a willingness to prioritize effectiveness.

The second way is by pursuing ultralearning during gaps in work and school. Many of the people I interviewed did their projects during temporary unemployment, career transitions, semesters off, or sabbaticals.

The third way is to integrate ultralearning principles into the time and energy you already devote to learning. Think about the last business book you read or the time you tried to pick up Spanish, pottery, or programming. What about that new software you needed to learn for work? Those professional development hours you need to log to maintain your certification? Ultralearning doesn’t have to be an additional activity; it can inform the time you already spend learning. How can you align the learning and studies you already need to do with the principles for maximizing effectiveness?

De Montebello practiced obsessively, sometimes speaking twice in one day. He recorded a video of every speech and analyzed it obsessively for flaws. He asked for feedback every time he gave a speech, and he got plenty of it. His coach, Gendler, pushed him far outside of his comfort zone. Once, when faced with the choice between polishing an existing speech and creating a brand-new one from scratch, de Montebello asked what he should do. Gendler’s response was to do whichever was scariest for him. His relentless drive pushed de Montebello into unusual places. He took improv classes to work on his spontaneous delivery. There he learned to trust whatever was in his head and deliver it without hesitation. That kept him from stammering over his words or fearing freezing up onstage. He talked to a friend who works as a Hollywood director to give feedback on his delivery. The director taught de Montebello to give his speech dozens of times in different styles—angry, monotone, screaming, even as a rap—then go back and see what was different from his normal voice. According to de Montebello, that helped break him of the “uncanny valley” that happened when his normal speaking delivery felt slightly unnatural.

After bombing terribly outside the comfort of Toastmasters, he learned to talk to his audience before going onstage: learn their language and emotions and connect with them. That way, applying all he had learned so far, he could change his speech on the fly, so it would be sure to connect with a new audience. Above all, Gendler pushed him relentlessly. “Make me care,” Gendler told him after listening to one of de Montebello’s speeches. “I understand why this is important to you, but the audience doesn’t care about you. You have to make me care.”

What differentiated de Montebello wasn’t that he thought he could go from near-zero experience to the finalist for the World Championship in six months. Rather, it was his obsessive work ethic. His goal wasn’t to reach some predetermined extreme but to see how far he could go.

What makes ultralearning interesting is also what makes it hard to boil down into step-by-step formulas.

Ultralearning, in my view, works best when you see it through a simple set of principles, rather than trying to copy and paste exact steps or protocols.

Metalearning: First Draw a Map. Start by learning how to learn the subject or skill you want to tackle. Discover how to do good research and how to draw on your past competencies to learn new skills more easily.

Focus: Sharpen Your Knife. Cultivate the ability to concentrate. Carve out chunks of time when you can focus on learning, and make it easy to just do it.

Directness: Go Straight Ahead. Learn by doing the thing you want to become good at. Don’t trade it off for other tasks, just because tho...

Drill: Attack Your Weakest Point. Be ruthless in improving your weakest points. Break down complex skills into small parts; then master those p...

Retrieval: Test to Learn. Testing isn’t simply a way of assessing knowledge but a way of creating it. Test yourself before you feel confident, and push yourself to actively rec...

Feedback: Don’t Dodge the Punches. Feedback is harsh and uncomfortable. Know how to use it without letting your ego get in the way. Extract the signal from the noise, so you k...

Retention: Don’t Fill a Leaky Bucket. Understand what you forget and why. Learn to remember things ...

Intuition: Dig Deep Before Building Up. Develop your intuition through play and exploration of concepts and skills. Understand how understanding works, and don’t recourse to cheap tric...

Experimentation: Explore Outside Your Comfort Zone. All of these principles are only starting points. True mastery comes not just from following the path trodden by others but from ...

If several people or, better yet, every ultralearner I encountered, did a certain thing in a certain way, it was much stronger evidence that I had stumbled upon a general principle. I then checked those principles against the scientific literature. Are there mechanisms and findings from cognitive science to support the tactics I saw? Better yet, have there been controlled experiments comparing one approach to learning with another? The scientific research supports many of the learning strategies employed by the ultralearners I witnessed. This suggests that ultralearners, with their ruthless focus on efficiency and effectiveness, may have landed on some universal principles in the art of learning.

It’s one of taking responsibility for your own learning: deciding what you want to learn, how you want to learn it, and crafting your own plan to learn what you need to. You’re the one in charge, and you’re the one who’s ultimately responsible for the results you generate.

The prefix meta comes from the Greek term μετά, meaning “beyond.” It typically signifies when something is “about” itself or deals with a higher layer of abstraction. In this case metalearning means learning about learning.

Here’s an example: If you’re learning Chinese characters, you will learn that 火 means “fire.” That’s regular learning. You may also learn that Chinese characters are often organized by something called radicals, which indicate what kind of thing the character describes. The character 灶, for example which means “stove,” has a 火 on the left-hand side to indicate that it has some relationship to fire. Learning this property of Chinese characters is metalearning—not learning about the object of your inquiry itself, in this case words and phrases, but learning about how knowledge is structured and acquired within this subject; in other words, learning how to learn it.

The demonstration he has presented is not his own invention. Called a “monolingual fieldwork” demonstration, this method was first developed by Everett’s teacher Kenneth Pike as a means of learning indigenous languages. The method lays out a sequence of objects and actions that the practitioner can use to start piecing together the language.

Metalearning thus forms the map, showing you how to get to your destination without getting lost.

you can do research to focus on improving your metalearning before and during a learning project. Ultralearning, owing to its intensity and self-directed nature, has the opportunity for a lot higher variance than normal schooling efforts do. A good ultralearning project, with excellent materials and an awareness of what needs to be learned, has the potential to be completed faster than formal schooling. Language learning through intensive immersion can beat lengthy classes. Aggressively paced coding bootcamps can get participants up to a level where they can compete for jobs much faster than those with a normal undergraduate degree. This is because you can tailor your project to your exact needs and abilities, avoiding the one-size-fits-all approach taken in school. However, there’s also a danger of choosing unwisely and ending up much worse off. Metalearning research avoids this problem and helps you seek out points where you might even be able to get a significant advantage over the status quo.

Over the long term, the more ultralearning projects you do, the larger your set of general metalearning skills will be. You’ll know what your capacity is for learning, how you can best schedule your time and manage your motivation, and you’ll have well-tested strategies for dealing with common problems. As you learn more things, you’ll acquire more and more confidence, which will allow you to enjoy the process of learning more with less frustration.

I find it useful to break down metalearning research that you do for a specific project into three questions: “Why?,” “What?,” and “How?” “Why?” refers to understanding your motivation to learn. If you know exactly why you want to learn a skill or subject, you can save a lot of time by focusing your project on exactly what matters most to you. “What?” refers to the knowledge and abilities you’ll need to acquire in order to be successful. Breaking things down into concepts, facts, and procedures can enable you to map out what obstacles you’ll face and how best to overcome them. “How?” refers to the resources, environment, and methods you’ll use when learning. Making careful choices here can make a big difference in your overall effectiveness.

Instrumental learning projects are those you’re learning with the purpose of achieving a different, nonlearning result.

Intrinsic projects are those that you’re pursuing for their own sake.

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.

The fix here is to do your research first. Determine if learning a topic is likely to have the effect you want it to before you get started.