Book Summary: Ultralearning

What does it take to master skills incredibly quickly? How could you use these skills to further both your personal and professional life? Scott Young’s Ultralearning takes a look at how some of the worlds best learners have done it.

Book Summary Notes: Ultralearning

Ultralearning is an aggressive, self driven approach to learning.

Upskill Your Life

What skills have you always wanted to learn but never ‘had the time’
Today’s professional landscape is heavily dominated by people with multiple skillsets.
This was further made possible by advances in both tech and with the huge amount of both online self directed learning and the ability to use those same platforms to build a business.
As jobs become threatened by automation it becomes more and more important to bring another skill set to the table.

Metalearning

Metalearning: learning how to learn.
How is the information in your chosen area structured?
A good place to begin is breaking down your chosen skill into three areas.
Concepts to understand, facts to memorise and procedures (what you need to do).
Not all skills require all 3 so evaluate what you need and change the theory to suit.
Once you know what area your skill requires you can begin to implement a plan to speed up the process. Do you need to remember lots of facts? Spaced repetition and flash cards can help.
By breaking down the skill you wish to acquire you can build a roadmap to help you speed up the process.

Mental Strategy

Life is full of distractions
Often the hardest part is simply getting going. It can seem very overwhelming at first so choose an easy task to begin or consider just putting in some work on the project for 3 minutes. A small enough amount of time but chances are you’ll keep going once you have some inertia.
Pomodoro timers are great for this as well.
Try as much as possible to limit distractions and create a positive learning environment. Turn off or put on flight mode your phone. Shut down your emails. Whatever you need to do.

Practice, Practice, Practice

Begin to move from theory to practice as soon as possible.
Practice will help your brain to move the information from one context to another. It will also speed up your learning curve by giving more frequent feedback, allowing you to essentially make mistakes faster.
Learn by doing is extremely powerful for people looking to learn something quickly.

Practice Drills

Use short drills to maintain your technique.
Use direct practice first and then drill what you have learned.
Do you need to drill a process? Try breaking it into sections and drilling each individually.
Drilling is particularly effective with information or skills needed to advance your chosen field. For example if you needed to know 100 French words, drilling would assist in getting to that bench mark.
You can also drill different aspects of a skill. With language for example you could drill vocabulary, pronunciation or spelling.

Recall Strategies

Strengthen your ability to remember by using various recall strategies.
Two main ways to improve your ability to recall, the first is review. By reviewing materials you can keep it fresh in your mind. The second is recall, using your memory to try and recall the facts that you have been studying.
Of the two options, recall is far more powerful. Yet most people use review instead.
By struggling to remember something in the short term, we strengthen our ability to recall it long term.
A powerful method of testing recall is by sitting down and writing out everything you remember about a topic after you’ve finished learning a section of content.
Instead of detailed notes you can try leaving yourself questions in their place. Instead of listing facts and figures, ask yourself a question instead. This will force you to remember the answer each time you review the content instead of being able to just simply skim over the notes.

Get Feedback

Feedback is one of the most important ways of improving and learning a skill.
Feedback can have many different levels.
Outcome feedback is the first, usually revolving around whether or not you’ve reached a desired outcome.
Informational Feedback, for example during a talk if people were to start getting up and leaving, this is a kind of feedback. It can alert you to the fact that you are doing something wrong.
Corrective feedback, this can involve letting you know what you are doing wrong and also how you can fix the issue. This is the most valuable form of feedback.
When looking at feedback it is helpful to take notice of corrective feedback first, informational feedback second and outcome feedback last. Pay attention to them in the order that they are the most valuable.
To make the most of feedback remember to let mistakes happen. You can’t receive feedback if there is nothing to critique.
You could even for example get feedback about your learning methods to make sure that what you are spending your time on is valuable.

Memorise Strategically

Chances are good that eventually your project will require you to memorise some facts or figures.
The best way to begin is to plan a strategy for memorising these things and begin right away.
The strategy needs to involve a spaced repetition style of practice so as to be most effectively remembered.
Flashcards are commonly combined with spaced repetition systems for a good reason, they work!
Studies have also shown that by using the basics we are trying to remember in harder and more difficult problems/scenarios can actually help us to retain the lower level information better. For example if your trying to remember a math formula, solving problems that also require the use of harder equations or formulas will help to fortify your memory of the easier one.

Experiment

Through out your learning journey don’t be afraid to experiment.
An easy way to begin can be mimicking someone else’s work.
For learning something like painting you could follow a Youtube tutorial on how to paint a particular scene, learning about the brush strokes and the way the colours and elements of the painting come together. You can then apply the exact same process to something unique of your own.
Imposing false constraints can also be a great way to experiment. Following the above example, how would your painting have to change if you only had a certain brush to use, or limited yourself to a certain range of colours?

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