As creativity becomes valuable, experimentation becomes essential.

Though first covering the material is often essential to begin doing practice, the principle of directness asserts that it’s actually while doing the thing you want to get good at when much of learning takes place.

The director taught de Montebello to give his speech dozens of times in different styles—angry, monotone, screaming, even as a rap—then

Many self-directed learners fall into the trap of indirect learning.

But perhaps his greatest one was his ability to merge tenacious practice and play. He approached picking locks with the same enthusiasm for solving puzzles that he did for unraveling the secrets of quantum electrodynamics. It’s this spirit of playful exploration that I want to turn to in the final principle of ultralearning: experimentation.

Directness is the practice of learning by directly doing the thing you want to learn. Basically, it’s improvement through active practice rather than through passive learning. The phrases learning something new and practicing something new may seem similar, but these two methods can produce profoundly different results. Passive learning creates

Thorndike was able to refute this idea by showing that the ability to transfer was much narrower than most people had assumed.

If you’re learning mathematics, you might recognize that deep understanding of certain concepts is going to be the tricky spot and consider spending time explaining those concepts to other people so you really understand them yourself. Knowing what the bottlenecks will be can help you start to think of ways of making your study time more efficient

you’re learning French with the idea of going to Paris for two weeks and speaking in shops and restaurants, I would focus a lot more on pronunciation than being able to spell correctly. If you’re learning programming solely to make your own app, I’d focus on the inner workings of app development more than theories of computation.