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

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

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.

The key to experimenting with different styles is to be aware of all the different styles that exist. Once again van Gogh provides a good model, as he spent an enormous amount of time studying and discussing the works of other artists. That gave him a large library of possible styles and ideas he could adapt to his own work. Similarly, you might wa

I find it useful to break down metalearning research that you do for a specific project into three questions: “Why?,” “What?,” and “How?”

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

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

A finding from the literature on memory, known as the levels-of-processing effect, suggests that it isn’t simply how much time you spend paying attention to information that determines what you retain but, crucially, how you think about that information while you pay attention to it.

The simplest way to be direct is to learn by doing. Whenever possible, if you can spend a good portion of your learning time just doing the thing you want to get better at, the problem of directness will likely go away. If this isn’t possible, you may need to create an artificial project or environment to test your skills. What matters most here is

What makes ultralearning interesting is also what makes it hard to boil down into step-by-step formulas. This is a difficult challenge, but I’m going to try to sidestep it by focusing on principles first. Principles allow you to solve problems, even those you may have never encountered before, in a way that a recipe or mechanical procedure cannot.