Learning From Literature

Ultralearning by Scott Young

Cover of Ultralearning by Scott Young

Ultralearning: Master Hard Skills, Outsmart the Competition, and Accelerate Your Career by Scott Young is a productivity book published in 2019.

To prove his theory that the standard learning method is ineffective, Scott Young completed a four-year MIT computer science degree in only one year using free online courses; he didn’t even attend MIT! Next, Young became conversationally fluent in four languages in 12 months (spending three months on each language). Finally, he taught himself to draw portraits in just 30 days. Here is the before / after comparison:

Before and After Scott Young's Self-Portrait

Throughout these challenges and examining others who achieved equally impressive feats, Scott Young has perfected the most efficient learning system, what he calls “ultralearning.” The nine techniques Young gives the reader can be applied to anything you want to learn, no matter the task’s difficulty!

Purchase the book by clicking this link!

Enjoy!

Table of Contents

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3 Ways to Ultra-Learn
  • Part Time
    • A small amount of time each day or week
  • Learning Sabbatical
    • Take a certain amount of time off and direct it solely to learning
  • Reimagining Existing Learning Efforts
Overview of the 9 Principles of Ultralearning
  1. Metalearning: First Draw a Map
    1. Learn how to learn the subject / skill
    2. Discover how to do good research + how to draw on your past competencies to learn new skills easier
  2. Focus: Sharpen Your Knife
    1. Cultivate the ability to concentrate
    2. Carve out chunks of time when you can focus on learning + make it easy to just do it
  3. Directness: Go Straight Ahead
    1. Learn by doing the thing you want to become good at
    2. Don’t trade it off for other tasks just because those are more convenient or comfortable
  4. Drill: Attack Your Weakest Point
    1. Be ruthless in improving your weakest points
    2. Break down complex skills into small parts → Master those parts → Build them back together again
  5. Retrieval: Test to Learn
    1. Testing isn’t simply a way of assessing knowledge but a way of creating it
    2. Test yourself before you feel confident + push yourself to actively recall information rather than passively review it
  6. Feedback: Don’t Dodge the Punches
    1. Feedback is harsh and uncomfortable → Know how to use it without letting your ego get in the way
    2. Extract the signal from the noise so you know what to pay attention to and what to ignore
  7. Retention: Don’t Fill a Leaky Bucket
    1. Understand what you forget and why
    2. Learn to remember things forever
  8. Intuition: Dig Deep Before Building Up
    1. Develop your intuition through play and exploration of concepts and skills
    2. Understand how understanding works + don’t resort to cheap tricks of memorization to avoid deeply knowing things
  9. Experimentation: Explore Outside Your Comfort Zone
    1. All of these principles are only starting points
    2. True mastery comes not just from following the path trodden by others but from exploring possibilities they haven’t yet imagined
METALEARNING — First Draw A Map
  • Learning how to learn
    • How knowledge is structured and acquired within this subject
  • Metalearning forms the map, showing you how to get to your destination without getting lost
  • Find the common ways in which people learn the skill / subject
  • Answer three questions about learning your new skill:
    • Why?
      • If you know why you want to learn a skill / subject, you can save a lot of time by focusing your project on exactly what matters most
      • You’re learning French to go to Paris for two weeks → Focus on pronunciation rather than being able to spell correctly
    • What?
      • Knowledge and abilities you’ll need
      • Break them down into concepts, facts, and procedures
    • How?
      • Resources, environment, and methods you’ll use when learning 
  • Break down the knowledge required into three categories:
    • Concepts
      • What needs to be understood? 
      • Ideas that you need to understand in flexible ways, not just memorize
    • Facts
      • What needs to be memorized?
      • You don’t need to understand them too deeply so long as you can recall them in the right situations (vocabulary in language learning)
    • Procedures
      • What needs to be practiced? 
      • You might need an understanding of concepts before practicing
  • Design a default strategy as a starting point
  • How to customize / finalize your map:
    • Once you’ve finished your brainstorm → underline the concepts, facts, and procedures that are going to be most challenging
    • Understand the major bottle-necks so you can start searching for methods / resources to overcome those difficulties
FOCUS — Sharpen Your Knife
  • Focus is essential to learning deeply
  • 3 Struggles:
    • Starting
      • Procrastination = there’s a craving that drives you to do something else, an aversion to doing the task itself, or both
      • The first step is to consciously recognize when you procrastinate
    • Sustaining
      • Distraction sources = environment, your task, your mind
      • Make these as simple as possible
    • Optimizing the Quality
      • Interaction between arousal and task complexity
      • Complex tasks need quiet/simplicity to lower arousal but for mundane tasks, you might need to raise arousal like in a lively coffee shop
DIRECTNESS — Go Straight Ahead
  • Have learning be tied closely to the situation / context you want to use it in — Transferability from learning to real life is the ultimate goal
    • If you want to be good at one thing, spend a lot of time doing it
  • Formal education + Self-teaching is indirect — direct practice is often more intense and uncomfortable
  • Tactic 1 — Project-Based Learning (ex – computer program)
  • Tactic 2 — Immersive Learning (ex – language learning)
  • Tactic 3 — Artificial Environment (ex – flight simulator)
  • Tactic 4 — Overkill Approach
    • Throw yourself into high-demanding situations where you won’t miss any feedback
    • Aim for a challenge above your skill level
DRILL — Attack Your Weakest Point
  • Isolate the rate-determining step (bottleneck) and work on it independently (like vocab in languages, serve in tennis, etc.)
    • Isolate elements of the activity and work on important ones
  • Then, return to direct practicing and see if drilling improved that area
  • 3 Problems:
    • When + What To Drill
      • Which aspect would cause the greatest improvement in your abilities for the least amount of effort?
    • Designing The Drill
    • Doing The Drill
  • Drill 1 — Time Slicing
    • engage in skills you only use fractions of full time like layup lines
  • Drill 2 — Cognitive Components
    • sometime slices aren’t time but components like grammar
  • Drill 3 — The Copycat
    • use other’s work so you don’t go through the whole skill to work on one part
  • Drill 4 — Magnifying Glass Method
    • if you can’t slice time but have to go through whole skill, spend a lot of time on the sub-skill you need most
    • when serving in tennis, you have to play out the whole point but deeply focus on the serve, make that your main focus
  • Drill 5 — Prerequisite Chaining
    • only review what you mess up
    • it saves time by not learning stuff you don’t need
RETRIEVAL — Test to Learn
  • Strained recall is the number one way to learn
    • Immediately start, don’t wait till you completely learn
  • Increasing difficulty helps you retain better (less clues, etc.)
  • Forward testing also helps (testing before you learn)
  • How do you know what all to retrieve?
    • Direct practice shows you what your skill requires
    • You can look at the goal to see if what you’re testing applies
  • Tactic 1 — Flashcards
    • only works for facts, not concepts
  • Tactic 2 —Free Recall
  • Tactic 3 — Question-Book Method
    • take notes as questions to be answered later
  • Tactic 4 — Self-Generated Challenges
    • generate challenges for procedural skills like coding
  • Tactic 5 — Closed-Book Learning
    • don’t look up the answer until you done recalling
FEEDBACK — Don’t Dodge the Punches
  • Feedback is only helpful when the advice is useful to further future learning
  • Use useful feedback and tune out the rest
  • Feedback is a huge competitive advantage
  • Immediate feedback is more effective than delayed
  • Outcome Feedback
    • How well you did overall but not any ideas on how to improve
    • Use as a motivational benchmark and to see what your best learning method is
  • Informational Feedback
    • Tells what you were doing wrong but not how to fix it
  • Corrective Feedback
    • Often only available through a mentor / coach
    • Only problem is that it can be hard to find such people
    • Worth the effort – you might not notice the weaknesses a professional can see
  • Tactic 1 — Noise Cancellation
    • ignore useless data
  • Tactic 2 — Hitting The Difficulty Sweet Spot
    • avoid situations that always make you feel always good or always bad
  • Tactics 3 — Meta-Feedback
    • watch your own learning rate
  • Tactic 4 — High-Intensity Rapid Feedback
    • harsh feedback right away helps you learn faster
    • immersed in a language
RETENTION — Don’t Fill a Leaky Bucket
  • 3 Reasons We Forget
    • Decay
      • Forgetting with time
    • Interference
      • Overwriting old memories with new ones
    • Forgotten Cues
      • A locked box with no key 
  • Memory Mechanism 1 — Spacing
    • don’t wait too long
    • if you can’t space out learning, cut out time to relearn. It’s better than nothing
  • Memory Mechanism 2 — Proceduralization
    • procedural skills are less likely to be forgotten than knowledge
    • frequently emphasize / use the core set of information to get it procedural
  • Memory Mechanism 3 — Overlearning
    • overpracticing core abilities makes them hard to forget
    • go above the required skill set so the required abilities are learned on the way
  • Memory Mechanism 4 — Mnemonics 
INTUITION — Dig Deep Before Building Up
  • Get to the core of how problems work
  • Only by developing enough experience with a subject can you be able to develop a mental model in similar problems
  • Chess
    • Grandmasters remember the board in chunks with key patterns
    • Beginners look at pieces as individual units
  • Rule 1 — Don’t give up on hard problems easily
  • Rule 2 — Prove problems to understand them better
  • Rule 3 — Always start with a concrete example
    • you don’t remember as well learning abstract principle, it is better to use examples
  • Rule 4 — Don’t fool yourself
    • Dunning-Kruger Effect – the less you know about a subject, the more you think you know
    • teach it to someone, gaps in your knowledge will become obvious
EXPERIMENTATION — Explore Outside Your Comfort Zone
  • A variety of methods, ideas, and resources let you see what is the best way for you 
  • When starting, it’s good to use formal teaching but as your skill progresses, you need your own touches (like a tennis serve)
  • 3 Types of Experimentation:
    • Experimentation With Learning Resources — how to learn
    • Experimentation With Technique — what to learn
    • Experimenting With Style — there are many different correct possibilities but what is the right way for you personally
  • Tactic 1 — Copy Then Create
  • Tactic 2 — Compare Methods Side-To-Side
    • do same thing while changing only one variable and see what you like best
  • Tactic 3 — Introduce New Constraints
    • make yourself explore things you aren’t used to
  • Tactic 4 — Find Your Superpower In The Hybrid Of Unrelated Skills 
  • Tactic 5 — Explore The Extremes
    • normally in one subset of an ability — reign it in and understand it
FOR YOUR PROJECT
  • Need motivation
    • Intrinsic goals are empowering / fun while extrinsic motivations are cause for anxiety / pressure
    • Without the belief that growth is possible, you won’t be motivated
  • Time depends on your situation
    • If you can focus within few minutes of starting → use short chunks of time whenever you have them
    • If you need long periods of time to focus → wait for when you have time
  • Review your process after → see what went wrong / could’ve been better → see what would be good for a future project
  • Keep up with your skill
    • Maintenance
    • Relearn
    • Mastery
  • Other strategies:
    • Low Intensity Habits
      • Learn a language through living in a country
    • Formal Education

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