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

why you’re learning and what you’re learning—it’s time to answer the final question: How are you going to learn it? I suggest following two methods to answer how you’ll learn something: Benchmarking and the Emphasize/Exclude Method.

Procedures In the third column, write down anything that needs to be practiced. Procedures are actions that need to be performed and may not involve much conscious thinking at all.

Metalearning research isn’t a onetime activity you do only before starting your project. You should continue to do research as you learn more. Often obstacles and opportunities aren’t clear before you start, so reassessing is a necessary step of the learning process.

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

Tactic 1: Flash Cards Flash cards are an amazingly simple, yet effective, way to learn paired associations between questions and answers. The old way of creating paper flash cards to drill yourself is powerful, but it has largely been superseded by spaced-repetition systems, as

The 10 Percent Rule A good rule of thumb is that you should invest approximately 10 percent of your total expected learning time into research prior to starting.

A good strategy to take is to pick a resource (maybe a book, class, or method of learning) and apply it rigorously for a predetermined period of time. Once you apply yourself aggressively to that new method, you can step back and evaluate how well it is working and whether you feel it makes sense to continue with that approach or try another.

There are parallels between the mindset required to experiment and what the Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck refers to as growth mindset.6 In her research, she distinguishes between two different ways of looking at one’s own learning and potential.

For every ultralearning story I encountered, there were likely dozens more my searches didn’t reveal. It is a profound error to claim that learning is about replacing ignorance with understanding. Knowledge expands, but so does ignorance, as with a greater understanding of a subject also comes a greater appreciation for all the questions that remai

To retain knowledge is ultimately to combat the inevitable human tendency to forget. This process occurs in all of us, and there’s no way to avoid it completely. However, certain strategies—spacing, proceduralization, overlearning, and mnemonics—can counteract your short- and long-term rates of forgetting and end up making a huge difference in your