> Combining stories of dramatic ultralearning feats with the detailed science on how to learn anything effectively, ULTRALEARNING will transform how you work, live and learn.
It made me realise that for most of my life, the things I was doing to try and learn new skills, techniques or technologies was actually more akin to entertainment than actually learning the thing.
It also helped me understand why I have been able to learn really specific things really effectively, and use those patterns to intentionally learn other things that I'd usually find really hard to crack.
Excerpt from the book that summarizes itself pretty well:
"There are nine universal principles that underlie the ultralearning projects described so far. Each embodies a particular aspect of successful learning, and I describe how ultralearners maximize the effectiveness of the principle through the choices they make in their projects. They are:
Metalearning: First Draw a Map. Start by learning how to learn the subject or skill you want to tackle. Discover how to do good research and how to draw on your past competencies to learn new skills more easily.
Focus: Sharpen Your Knife. Cultivate the ability to concentrate. Carve out chunks of time when you can focus on learning, and make it easy to just do it.
Directness: Go Straight Ahead. Learn by doing the thing you want to become good at. Don’t trade it off for other tasks, just because those are more convenient or comfortable.
Drill: Attack Your Weakest Point. Be ruthless in improving your weakest points. Break down complex skills into small parts; then master those parts and build them back together again.
Retrieval: Test to Learn. Testing isn’t simply a way of assessing knowledge but a way of creating it. Test yourself before you feel confident, and push yourself to actively recall information rather than passively review it.
Feedback: Don’t Dodge the Punches. Feedback is harsh and uncomfortable. Know how to use it without letting your ego get in the way. Extract the signal from the noise, so you know what to pay attention to and what to ignore.
Retention: Don’t Fill a Leaky Bucket. Understand what you forget and why. Learn to remember things not just for now but forever.
Intuition: Dig Deep Before Building Up. Develop your intuition through play and exploration of concepts and skills. Understand how understanding works, and don’t recourse to cheap tricks of memorization to avoid deeply knowing things.
Experimentation: Explore Outside Your Comfort Zone. All of these principles are only starting points. True mastery comes not just from following the path trodden by others but from exploring possibilities they haven’t yet imagined.”
YMMV, but I did not find the book to be super insightful or particularly helpful for how my brain works.
It spells out a framework that (roughly) boils down to:
0) Pick one topic at a time
1) Learning by doing
2) The doing has to be exercises of deliberate practice that push you
3) Create some type of deadline or pressure to make sure you actually stick to the task.
My experience with being self-taught is that I tend to just bounce around arbitrarily to different subjects or interests and drop them when I get bored and then all that knowledge bouncing around eventually becomes cohesive once I repeat that cycle enough times. So the concepts of picking a single topic, creating a strategy for only focusing on that topic, and then executing were difficult to apply.
I think one advantage to bouncing around/being self taught (as I have most typically been too) is it lets you draw connections between seemingly unconnected things!
I think this is something lost in the act of being too focussed on learning one thing at a time!
As someone who has ADHD/Autism and identifies as neurodivergent, I found it specifically helped me unpick some ways that the way my brain works has created bad habits.
Note: I listened to the audiobook! The anecdotes about incredible learners (such as various language experts, the stardew valley dev as well as various other skills) was also really interesting.
I found that they were a lot of subjects I’d learned a lot about without directly engaging in the thing itself.
Learning about a programming language, vs actually building stuff in it. Learning the grammatical patterns of a language without speaking it etc.
There’s lots of videos, books and apps which first and foremost want you to be engaged moreso than actually teach you how to do the thing. This sort of context can be really useful, but ultimately one claim the book makes is that the best way to learn is to get as close to doing the thing you want to learn how to do as possible.
https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/ultralearning/
> Combining stories of dramatic ultralearning feats with the detailed science on how to learn anything effectively, ULTRALEARNING will transform how you work, live and learn.
It made me realise that for most of my life, the things I was doing to try and learn new skills, techniques or technologies was actually more akin to entertainment than actually learning the thing.
It also helped me understand why I have been able to learn really specific things really effectively, and use those patterns to intentionally learn other things that I'd usually find really hard to crack.