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

Retroactive interference is the opposite—where learning something new “erases” or suppresses an old memory.

I want to consider three types of feedback: outcome feedback, informational feedback, and corrective feedback. Outcome feedback is the most common and in many situations the only type of feedback available. Informational feedback is also fairly common, and it’s important to recognize when you can split apart outcomes to get feedback on parts of wha

What this means is that the more complicated a domain of skill is (i.e., the more dimensions it contains), the more space will be taken up by applications of that skill that are extreme across at least one of those dimensions. This suggests that for many skills, the best option is going to be extreme in some way, since so many more of the possibili

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 challenge of thinking you understand something you don’t is unfortunately a common one. Researcher Rebecca Lawson calls this the “illusion of explanatory depth.”11 At issue here is the notion that we judge our own learning competency, not directly but through various signals. Assessing whether or not we know a factual matter, such as what is th

Some researchers argue that it may be that trying to find knowledge that hasn’t been learned yet—say, by trying to solve a problem you haven’t learned the answer to yet—nonetheless helps reinforce search strategies that are put to use once the knowledge is encountered later. An analogy here is that trying to retrieve an answer that doesn’t yet exis

Tactic 3: The Question-Book Method 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. Instead of writing that the Magna Carta was signed in 1215, you could instead write the question “When was the Magna Carta si

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

The struggles with focus that people have generally come in three broad varieties: starting, sustaining, and optimizing the quality of one’s focus. Ultralearners are relentless in coming up with solutions to handle these three problems, which form the basis of an ability to focus well and learn deeply.

Haskell suggests that a major reason is that transfer tends to be harder when our knowledge is more limited. As we develop more knowledge and skill in an area, they become more flexible and easier to apply outside the narrow contexts in which they were learned. However, I’d like to add my own hypothesis as an explanation for the transfer problem: m