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

Intuition. Do I deeply understand the things I’m learning, or am I just memorizing? Could I teach the ideas and procedures I’m studying to someone else? Is it clear to me why what I’m learning is true, or does it all seem arbitrary and unrelated?

What’s harder and more useful is to restate the big idea of a chapter or section as a question. Since this is often implicit, it requires some deeper thinking and not just adding a question mark to some notes you copied verbatim. One rule I’ve found helpful for this is to restrict myself to one question per section of a text, thus forcing myself to

One strategy I’ve seen repeatedly from ultralearners is to start with a skill that they don’t have all the prerequisites for. Then, when they inevitably do poorly, they go back a step, learn one of the foundational topics, and repeat the exercise.

Researchers generally find that people retain more of what they learn when practice is broken into different studying periods than when it is crammed together.

As the saying goes, “In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But in practice, there is.”*

If you’re pursuing a project for mostly instrumental reasons, it’s often a good idea to do an

Intrinsic projects are those that you’re pursuing for their own sake.

I think there are lots of potential ways the declarative-to-procedural transition of knowledge might be applied by clever ultralearners in the future.

starting, sustaining, and optimizing the quality of one’s focus.