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

by Scott H. Young

Other researchers argue that the mechanism might be one of attention. By confronting a problem you don’t yet know how to answer, your mind automatically adjusts its attentional resources to spot information that looks like a solution when you learn it later.

One way to answer this question is simply to do direct practice. Directness sidesteps this question by forcing you to retrieve the things that come up often in the course of using the skill. If you’re learning a language and need to recall a word, you’ll practice it.

The problem with relying on direct practice exclusively is that knowledge that isn’t in your head can’t be used to help you solve problems. For instance, a programmer may realize a need to use a certain function to solve a problem but forgets how to write it out. Needing to look up the syntax might slow her down, but she will still be able to solve the problem. However, if you don’t have enough knowledge stored to recognize when you can use a function to solve your problem, no looking up can help you.

the thing separating mediocre programmers from great ones isn’t the range of problems they can solve but that the latter often know dozens of ways to solve problems and can select the best one for each situation. This kind of breadth requires a certain amount of passive exposure, which in turn benefits from retrieval practice.

Flash cards are an amazingly simple, yet effective, way to learn paired associations between questions and answers.

A simple tactic for applying retrieval is, after reading a section from a book or sitting through a lecture, to try to write down everything you can remember on a blank piece of paper. Free recall like this is often very difficult, and there will be many things missed, even if you just finished reading the text in question. However, this difficulty is also a good reason why this practice is helpful.

While doing research for this book, for instance, I would often print out journal articles and put them in a binder with a few blank sheets of paper after each of them. After I had finished reading, I’d do a quick free recall exercise to make sure I would retain the important details when it came time for writing.

Most students take notes by copying the main points as they encounter them. However, another strategy for taking notes is to rephrase what you’ve recorded as questions to be answered later.

with a reference to where to find the answer in case you forget. By taking notes as questions instead of answers, you generate the material to practice retrieval on later.

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.

if you’re trying to practice a skill, not merely remember information, they might not be enough. For a programmer, it’s not enough to know what an algorithm means, but be able to write it in code. In this case, as you go through your passive material, you can create challenges for yourself to solve later. You may encounter a new technique and then write a note to demonstrate that technique in an actual example. Creating a list of such challenges can serve as a prompt for mastering that information later in practice and can expand your library of tools that you are able to actually apply.

Any practice, whether direct or a drill, can be cut off from the ability to look things up. By preventing yourself from consulting the source, the information becomes knowledge stored inside your head instead of inside a reference manual.

in over 38 percent of cases, feedback actually had a negative impact. This leads to a confusing situation. On the one hand, feedback is essential for expert attainment, as demonstrated by the scientific studies of deliberate practice. Feedback also figures prominently in ultralearning projects, and it’s difficult to imagine their being successful if their sources of feedback had been turned off. At the same time, a review of the evidence doesn’t paint the picture of feedback being universally positive. What’s the explanation? Kluger and DeNisi argue that the discrepancy is in the type of feedback that is given. Feedback works well when it provides useful information that can guide future learning. If feedback tells you what you’re doing wrong or how to fix it, it can be a potent tool. But feedback often backfires when it is aimed at a person’s ego. Praise, a common type of feedback that teachers often use (and students enjoy), is usually harmful to further learning. When feedback steers into evaluations of you as an individual (e.g., “You’re so smart!” or “You’re lazy”), it usually has a negative impact on learning. Further, even feedback that includes useful information needs to be correctly processed as a motivator and tool for learning. Kluger and DeNisi noted that some of the studies that showed a negative impact of feedback occurred because the subjects themselves chose not to use the feedback constructively. They may have rejected the feedback, lowered the standards ...

when seeking feedback, the ultralearner needs to be on guard for two possibilities. The first is overreacting to feedback (both positive and negative) that doesn’t offer specific information that leads to improvement. Ultralearners need to be sensitive to what feedback is actually useful and tune out the rest. This is why, although all the ultralearners I met employed feedback, they didn’t act on every piece of possible feedback.

Second, when it is incorrectly applied, feedback can have a negative impact on motivation. Not only can overly negative feedback lower your motivation, but so can overly positive feedback.

Ultralearners must balance both concerns, pushing for the right level of feedback for their current stage of learning.