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

by Scott H. Young

The first step is to try to practice the skill directly. This means figuring out where and how the skill will be used and then trying to match that situation as close as is feasible when practicing. Practice a language by actually speaking it. Learn programming by writing software. Improve your writing skills by penning essays. This initial connection and subsequent feedback loop ensure that the transfer problem won’t occur. The next step is to analyze the direct skill and try to isolate components that are either rate-determining steps in your performance or subskills you find difficult to improve because there are too many other things going on for you to focus on them. From here you can develop drills and practice those components separately until you get better at them. The final step is to go back to direct practice and integrate what you’ve learned. This has two purposes. The first is that even in well-designed drills, there are going to be transfer hiccups owing to the fact that what was previously an isolated skill must be moved to a new and more complex context. Think of this as being like building the connective tissue to join the muscles you strengthened separately. The second function of this step is as a check on whether your drill was well designed and appropriate. Many attempts to isolate a drill may end in failure because the drill doesn’t really cut at the heart of what was difficult in real practice. That’s okay; this feedback is important to help you min...