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

by Scott H. Young

One mistake I’ve made in applying this technique is to focus on the wrong kinds of things to ask questions about. I tried applying this method to a book on computational neuroscience, and I ended up asking myself all sorts of detailed questions such as what was the firing rate of certain neuronal circuits or who proposed a specific theory. That wasn’t intentional but rather a by-product of lazily restating the factual content in the book as questions. What’s harder and more useful is to restate the big idea of a chapter or section as a question. Since this is often implicit, it requires some deeper thinking and not just adding a question mark to some notes you copied verbatim. One rule I’ve found helpful for this is to restrict myself to one question per section of a text, thus forcing myself to acknowledge and rephrase the main point rather than zoom in on a detail that will be largely irrelevant later.