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

One such exercise he documents was taking a favorite magazine of his, The Spectator, and taking notes on articles that appeared there. He would then leave the notes for a few days and come back to them, trying to reconstruct the original argument from memory. After finishing, he “compared my Spectator with the original, discovered some of my faults

The first question to try to answer is why are you learning and what that implies for how you should approach the project. Practically speaking, the projects you take on are going to have one of two broad motivations: instrumental and intrinsic.

When starting to learn a new skill, often it’s sufficient simply to follow the example of someone who is further along than you. In discussing the principles of ultralearning, metalearning comes first. Understanding how a subject breaks down into different elements and seeing how others have learned it previously, thus providing an advantageous sta

The educators Maria Araceli Ruiz-Primo and Susan M. Brookhart argue, “The best feedback is informative and usable by the student(s) who receive it. Optimal feedback indicates the difference between the current state and the desired learning state AND helps students to take a step to improve their learning.”5

Because this project was my own vision and design, it rarely felt painful, even if it was often challenging. The subjects felt alive and exciting, rather than stale chores to be completed. For the first time ever, I felt I could learn anything I wanted to with the right plan and effort. The possibilities were endless, and my mind was already turnin

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.

to avoid this problem of fooling yourself is simply to ask lots of questions. Feynman took this approach himself: “Some people think in the beginning that I’m kind of slow and I don’t understand the problem, because I ask a lot of these ‘dumb’ questions: ‘Is a cathode plus or minus? Is an an-ion this way, or that way?’”*16 How many of us lack the c

I see the experimental mindset as an extension of the growth mindset: whereas the growth mindset encourages you to see opportunities and potential for improvement, experimentation enacts a plan to reach those improvements. The experimental mindset doesn’t just assume that growth is possible but creates an active strategy for exploring all the possi

Tactic 1: Copy, Then Create