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

Instrumental learning projects are those you’re learning with the purpose of achieving a different, nonlearning result.

Benchmarking and the Emphasize/Exclude Method.

Tactic 2: Free Recall A simple tactic for applying retrieval is, after reading a section from a book or sitting through a lecture, to try to write down everything you can remember on a blank piece of paper. Free recall like this is often very difficult, and there will be many things missed, even if you just finished reading the text in question. Ho

Ultralearning, in my view, works best when you see it through a simple set of principles, rather than trying to copy and paste exact steps or protocols.

Transfer has been called the “Holy Grail of education.” It happens when you learn something in one context, say in a classroom, and are able to use it in another context, say in real life.

Transfer has been called the “Holy Grail of education.” It happens when you learn something in one context, say in a classroom, and are able to use it in another context, say in real life. Although this may sound technical, transfer really embodies something we expect of almost all learning efforts—that we’ll be able to use something we study in on

First, deep learning provides a sense of purpose in life. Developing skills is meaningful. It feels good to get good at something. Ultralearning is a path to prove to yourself that you have the ability to improve and to make the most of your life. It gives you the confidence that you can accomplish ambitious things.

Memory Mechanism 3—Overlearning: Practice Beyond Perfect Overlearning is a well-studied psychological phenomenon that’s fairly easy to understand: additional practice, beyond what is required to perform adequately, can increase the length of time that memories are stored.

It pays better to wait and recollect by an effort from within, than to look at the book again. —William James, psychologist