Ultralearning by Scott Young

The Book in Two Sentences

The capacity to quickly and independently learn new things has become immensely important, but few students know where to begin. Successful ultralearners insist on 9 principles for acquiring new skills fast.

Ultralearning Summary

Disclaimer: these are my notes from Ultralearning by Scott H. Young. This summary may contain my own ideas, references to other resources, as well as passages from the book.
Definition: ULTRALEARNING is a strategy for learning new things fast.
Principles of Ultralearning:
The 9 principles of ultralearning are (i) metalearning (ii) focus (iii) directness (iv) drill (v) retrieval (vi) feedback (vii) retention (viii) intuition (ix) experimentation.
(i) Metalearning: Make a plan first. Invest 10% of your total expected time into learning how it is that you want to acquire this skill. Conduct research and draw on previous knowledge for quickly picking up new competencies.
(ii) Focus: Cultivate your ability to concentrate through environment design. Make it obvious, make it attractive, make it easy, make it satisfying.
(iii) Directness: The context in which you practice should closely resemble the environment that the new skill will be used.
(iv) Drill: Be relentless in your efforts to improve your weak spots. Decompose skills into manageable chunks, then master those chunks before assembling the whole.
(v) Retrieval: Instead of passive review, use active recall. Test early, frequently, and before you feel confident.
(vi) Feedback: Seek immediate feedback and learn from those mistakes. You can use mistakes as fuel for the next iteration.
(vii) Retention: Stop forgetting stuff. Internalize facts and concepts using spaced repetition principles.
(viii) Intuition: Combine top-down and bottom-up strategies. Develop theories and models that will help you gain insight into your subject. Then, seek out applications and counter-examples to enrich your understanding.
(ix) Experimentation: Remain in the zone of proximal development. Keep exploring. Continue to expand your horizons by seeking out and combining skills just outside your reach.
More Quotes
The ability to learn skills fast and independently is increasingly valuable: "The best careers demand sophisticated skills that you’re unlikely to stumble upon by chance. Not just programmers but managers, entrepreneurs, designers, doctors, and nearly every other profession is rapidly accelerating the knowledge and skills required, and many are struggling to keep up..."
"In university, I had often felt stifled, trying to stay awake during boring lectures, grinding through busywork assignments, forcing myself to learn things I had no interest in just to get the grade. Because this project was my own vision and design, it rarely felt painful, even if it was often challenging."
"Research is a bit like packing a suitcase for a long voyage. You may not bring the right items, or you may forget something and need to buy it on the road. However, thinking ahead and packing your bags correctly will prevent a lot of fumbling later."
"Albert Einstein focused so intensely during his formulation of the general theory of relativity that he developed stomach problems. The mathematician Paul Erdős was a heavy user of amphetamines to increase his capacity for focus. When a friend bet him that he could not give them up, even for a short time, he did manage to do so. Later, however, he complained that the only result had been that mathematics as a whole was set back a month in his unfocused absence..."
"The easiest way to learn directly is to simply spend a lot of time doing the thing you want to become good at. If you want to learn a language, speak it, as Benny Lewis does. If you want to master making video games, then make them, as Eric Barone does. If you want to pass a test, practice solving the kinds of problems that are likely to appear on it, as I did in my own MIT Challenge."
"When evaluating different methods for learning, those that significantly simulate the direct approach will transfer a lot better. Therefore, if you’re trying to evaluate what’s the best way to learn French before your trip to France, you’ll get more (although not perfect) transfer from doing Skype tutoring than you will from flipping through flash cards..."
"In chemistry, there’s a useful concept known as the rate-determining step. This occurs when a reaction takes place over multiple steps, with the products of one reaction becoming the reagents for another. The rate-determining step is the slowest part of this chain of reactions, forming a bottleneck that ultimately defines the amount of time needed for the entire reaction to occur. Learning, I’d like to argue, often works similarly, with certain aspects of the learning problem forming a bottleneck that controls the speed at which you can become more proficient overall."
"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. This practice of starting too hard and learning prerequisites as they are needed can be frustrating, but it saves a lot of time learning subskills that don’t actually drive performance much. Eric Barone, for instance, started his pixel art experiments simply by making them. When he struggled with certain aspects, such as colors, he went back, learned color theory, and repeated his work..."
"When Ramanujan dealt only with Carr’s extensive list of theorems using his own quirky obsession with mathematical formulas, he was unwittingly practicing one of the most powerful methods known to build a deep understanding... Carr’s book, with its lists of proofs without solutions, could have become, in the hands of someone sufficiently motivated to master them, an incredible tool for becoming brilliant at math. Without the answers at hand, Ramanujan was forced to invent his own solutions to the problems, retrieving information from his mind rather than reviewing it in a book."
"Consider that over the last twenty years, the amount of knowledge easily accessible from a quick online search has exploded. Nearly any fact or concept is now available on demand to anyone with a smartphone. Yet despite this incredible advance, it is not as if the average person is thousands as times as smart as people were was a generation ago. Being able to look things up is certainly an advantage, but without a certain amount of knowledge inside your head, it doesn’t help you solve hard problems..."
"In nearly every biography of great geniuses and contemporary ultralearners I have encountered, some form of retrieval practice is mentioned. Benjamin Franklin practiced his writing by reconstructing essays from memory. Mary Somerville worked through problems mentally when no candle was available for night reading. Roger Craig practiced trivia questions without looking at the answers. Retrieval is not a sufficient tool to create genius, but it may be a necessary one."
"The ultralearner needs to be on guard for two possibilities [when seeking feedback]. The first is overreacting to feedback (both positive and negative) that doesn’t offer specific information that leads to improvement. Ultralearners need to be sensitive to what feedback is actually useful and tune out the rest."
"One of the pieces of studying advice that is best supported by research is that if you care about long-term retention, don’t cram. Spreading learning sessions over more intervals over longer periods of time tends to cause somewhat lower performance in the short run (because there is a chance for forgetting between intervals) but much better performance in the long run..."
"The challenge of learning in the beginning is that you don’t know what to do. The challenge of learning in the end is that you think you already know what to do. It’s this latter difficulty that causes us to rerun old routines and old ways of solving problems that are encouraged through habit, not always because the old way is actually best."
"[Another reason for] the increasing importance of experimentation as you approach mastery is that many skills reward not only proficiency but originality. A great mathematician is one who can solve problems others cannot, not merely a person who can solve previously solved problems easily."

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