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

In the experiments mentioned, students were asked to do free recall but weren’t provided any feedback about items they missed or got wrong. The act of trying to summon up knowledge from memory is a powerful learning tool on its own, beyond its connection to direct practice or feedback.

The typical experimental setup is to give subjects a task, such as assembling a rifle or going through an emergency checklist, allowing them enough time to practice that they can do it correctly once. The time from zero to this point is considered the “learning” phase. Next, allow the subjects different amounts of “overlearning,” or practice that c

Many of the ultralearners I interviewed for this book told me a similar story: that they were proud of their accomplishments in individual projects but that the real benefit had been that they now understood the process of learning hard things.

Once you’ve gotten a handle on why you’re learning, you can start looking at how the knowledge in your subject is structured. A good way to do this is to write down on a sheet of paper three columns with the headings “Concepts,” “Facts,” and “Procedures.” Then brainstorm all the things you’ll need to learn. It doesn’t matter if the list is perfectl

The final step is to go back to direct practice and integrate what you’ve learned.

Complex tasks may benefit from lower arousal, so working in a quiet room at home might be the right idea for math problems. Simpler tasks might benefit from a noisier environment, say working at a coffee shop.

If the principles-first way of thinking of problems is so much more effective, why don’t students start there instead of attending to superficial characteristics? The simple answer may be that they can’t. Only by developing enough experience with problem solving can you build up a deep mental model of how other problems work. Intuition sounds magic

Over the long term, the more ultralearning projects you do, the larger your set of general metalearning skills will be. You’ll know what your capacity is for learning, how you can best schedule your time and manage your motivation, and you’ll have well-tested strategies for dealing with common problems. As you learn more things, you’ll acquire more

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

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. Similarly, the phenomenon of interleaving suggests that even within a solid block of focus, it can make sense to alternate between different aspects of the skill or knowledge to be remembere