by Scott Young
Although studying Latin has fallen out of favor, many educational pundits are reviving new incarnations of the formal discipline theory by suggesting that everyone learn programming or critical thinking in order to improve their general intelligence. Many popular “brain-training” games also subscribe to this view of the mind, assuming that deep training on one set of cognitive tasks will extend to everyday reasoning. It’s been more than one hundred years since the verdict came in, yet the allure of a general transfer procedure still has many searching for the Holy Grail.
Despite all this, the situation isn’t without hope. Although empirical work and educational institutions have often failed to demonstrate significant transfer, it is not the case that transfer doesn’t exist. Wilbert McKeachie, in reviewing the history of transfer, noted that “Transfer is paradoxical. When we want it, we do not get it. Yet it occurs all the time.”7 Whenever you use an analogy, saying something is like something else, you’re transferring knowledge. If you know how to ice skate and later learn to Rollerblade, you’re transferring skills. As Haskell pointed out, if transfer were really impossible, we would be unable to function.
So what explains the disconnect? Why have educational institutions struggled to demonstrate significant transfer, if transfer is something we all need to function in the world? 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: most formal learning is woefully indirect.
Overcoming the Problem of Transfer with Directness
Directness solves the problem of transfer in two ways. The first and most obvious is that if you learn with a direct connection to the area in which you eventually want to apply the skill, the need for far transfer is significantly reduced. Given a century of research showing the difficulties of transfer along with proposed solutions that have failed to provide lasting results, any student must take seriously the notion that transferring what has been learned between very different contexts and situations will be treacherous. If our learning is, as Haskell suggests, “welded to a place or subject matter,” it is a lot better that those situations be close to the ones we actually want to use.
Second, I believe that directness may help with transfer to new situations, beyond its more obvious role in preventing the need for far transfer. Many real-life situations share many subtle details with other real-life situations that they never share with the abstract environment of the classroom or textbook. Learning something new rarely depends just on the mass of easily articulated and codified knowledge present but on the myriad tiny details of how that knowledge interacts with reality. By learning in a real context, one also learns many of the hidden details and skills that are far more likely to transfer to a new real-life situation than from the artificial environment of a classroom. Using a personal example, one of the skills I found most important in the no-English project was being able to quickly use a dictionary or translation app on my phone, so I could fill gaps in my linguistic knowledge in midconversation. However, it’s exactly this kind of practical skill that is rarely covered in a language-learning curriculum. While this is a trivial example, real-life situations contain thousands of such pieces of skill and knowledge that are necessary if you’re going to apply academically learned subjects in the real world.
Ultimately, it will be for researchers to decide whether the Holy Grail of education will ever be found. In the meantime, as learners, we must accept that initial learning efforts often stick stubbornly to the situations we learn them in. The programmer who learns about an algorithm from a class may have trouble recognizing when to use it in her code. The leader who learns a new management philosophy from a business book may go back to working with the same approach she has always used with her employees. My favorite example, though, has to be when a group of friends invited me to join them at a casino. I asked them if their studies ever kept them from enjoying gambling, and they just looked at me blankly. I thought it was funny because the students were actuaries. Their years spent studying statistics in the classroom should have convinced them that you can’t expect to beat the house, yet that connection didn’t seem to dawn on them. When we learn new things, therefore, we should always strive to tie them directly to the contexts we want to use them in. Building knowledge outward from the kernel of a real situation is much better than the traditional strategy of learning something and hoping that we’ll be able to shift it into a real context at some undetermined future time.
How Ultralearners Avoid the Problem of Transfer and Learn Directly
Given the problem of transfer and the importance of learning directly, let’s look at some of the ways that this is managed in different ultralearning projects. 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 that the cognitive features of the skill you’re trying to master and the way you practice it be substantially similar. Consider again Craig’s simulation of Jeopardy! games by doing questions from old tests. The fact that he was using actual past questions is more important than whether his program matched the signature blue background color present on the show’s display. This is because the background color didn’t provide any information that would have changed his responses to the questions. The skill he was practicing wasn’t changed much by it. In contrast, if he had taken trivia questions from a different game (say the board game Trivial Pursuit) there might have been differences in how questions are typically asked, the topics they are drawn from, or the difficulty level. Worse, if he had spent all his time reading random Wikipedia articles to learn trivia, he wouldn’t have been practicing the fundamental skill of recalling answers based on cryptic Jeopardy!-style clues at all.
In other cases, what you’re trying to achieve may not be a practical skill. Many of the ultralearners I encountered wanted, as their end goal, to understand a subject particularly well, such as Vishal Maini with machine learning and artificial intelligence. Even my own MIT Challenge was based around gaining a deep understanding of computer science, as opposed to a more practical goal of building an app or video game. Though this may seem like a case where directness no longer matters, that really isn’t true. It’s simply that the place you want to apply these ideas is less obvious and concrete. In Maini’s case, he wanted to be able to think and talk intelligently about machine learning, enough to be able to land a nontechnical role in a company that utilized those methods. That meant that being able to communicate his ideas articulately, understanding the concepts clearly, and being able to discuss them with both knowledgeable practitioners and laypeople was important. That’s why his goal to make a minicourse explaining the basics of machine learning fit so well. His learning was directly connected with where he wanted to apply the skill: communicating it to others.
Although the findings of the research on transfer are fairly bleak, there is a glimmer of hope, which is that gaining a deeper knowledge of a subject will make it more flexible for future transfer. Whereas the structures of our knowledge start out brittle, welded to the environments and contexts we learn them in, with more work and time they can become flexible and can be applied more broadly. This is the conclusion of Robert Haskell, and although it does not provide a short-term solution to the problem for new learners, it does suggest a path out for those who want to continue working on a subject until they master it. Many ultralearners who have specialized in a smaller subset of fields are masters at transfer; no doubt this is largely due to their depth of knowledge, which makes transfer easier to accomplish. Dan Everett, who was featured in the opening of the chap
ter on the first principle, metalearning, is a prime example of this. His linguistic depth allows him to learn new languages relatively easily, compared to someone who has learned only a second language or has learned only languages academically.
How to Learn Directly
Given the well-documented difficulty with indirect forms of learning, why are they still the default both in schools and in many failed attempts at self-education? The answer is that learning directly is hard. It is often more frustrating, challenging, and intense than reading a book or sitting through a lecture. But this very difficulty creates a potent source of competitive advantage for any would-be ultralearner. If you’re willing to apply tactics that exploit directness despite these difficulties, you will end up learning much more effectively.
Let’s examine some of the tactics ultralearners use to maximize this principle and take advantage of the inadequacies of more typical schooling.
Tactic 1: Project-Based Learning
Many ultralearners opt for projects rather than classes to learn the skills they need. The rationale is simple: if you organize your learning around producing something, you’re guaranteed to at least learn how to produce that thing. If you take classes, you may spend a lot of time taking notes and reading but not achieve your goal.
Learning to program by creating your own computer game is a perfect example of project-based learning. Engineering, design, art, musical composition, carpentry, writing, and many other skills naturally lend themselves to projects that produce something at the end. However, an intellectual topic can also be the basis of a project. One ultralearner I interviewed, whose project is still ongoing, wanted to learn military history. His project, in this case, was to work toward producing a thesis paper. Since his end goal was to be able to converse knowledgeably about the subject, a project to produce an original paper applied learning more directly than simply trying to read a lot of books without creating anything.
Tactic 2: Immersive Learning
Immersion is the process of surrounding yourself with the target environment in which the skill is practiced. This has the advantage of requiring much larger amounts of practice than would be typical, as well as exposing you to a fuller range of situations in which the skill applies.
Learning a language is the canonical example of where immersion works. By immersing yourself in an environment where a language is spoken, not only do you guarantee that you’ll end up practicing the language a lot more than you would otherwise (since you have no choice), but you also face a broader diversity of situations that require learning new words and phrases. However, language learning is not the only place where you can apply immersion to learn more. Joining communities of people who are actively engaged in learning can have a similar impact, since it encourages constant exposure to new ideas and challenges. For example, novice programmers might join open-source projects to expose themselves to new coding challenges.
Tactic 3: The Flight Simulator Method
Immersion and projects are great, but for many skills there’s no way to actually practice the skill directly. For skills such as piloting a plane or performing surgery, it’s not even legal to practice them in a real situation until you’ve already invested considerable time into training. How can you overcome this?
It’s important to note that what matters for transfer is not every possible feature of the learning environment, such as what room you’re in or what clothes you’re wearing while you learn. Rather, it’s the cognitive features—situations where you need to make decisions about what to do and cue knowledge you’ve stored in your head. This suggests that when direct practice is impossible, a simulation of the environment will work to the degree to which it remains faithful to the cognitive elements of the task in question. For flying a plane, this means that practicing on a flight simulator may be as good for learning as flying an actual plane if it sufficiently calls on the discriminations and decisions a pilot needs to make. Better graphics and sounds aren’t important, unless they change the nature of the decisions being made or the cues pilots receive for when to use certain skills or knowledge.8
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.
Tactic 4: The Overkill Approach
The last method I’ve found for enhancing directness is to increase the challenge, so that the skill level required is wholly contained within the goal that is set. Tristan de Montebello, when preparing to compete in the World Championship of Public Speaking, pushed to speak at middle schools, giving early versions of his talk. His feeling was that the feedback he received at Toastmasters clubs might be too soft or congratulatory to cut deep at what worked and didn’t work in his speech. Middle school students, in contrast, would be merciless. If a joke he said wasn’t funny or his delivery was boring or cheesy, he would be able to tell immediately from their faces what needed to be reworked. The overkill approach is to put yourself into an environment where the demands are going to be extremely high, so you’re unlikely to miss any important lessons or feedback.
Going into this environment can feel intense. You may feel as though you’re “not ready” to start speaking a language you’ve barely learned. You may be afraid to stand onstage and deliver a speech you haven’t memorized perfectly. You might not want to dive right into programming your own application and prefer to stick to watching videos where someone else does the coding. But these fears are often only temporary. If you can get enough motivation to start this method, it’s often a lot easier to continue it long term. The first week in each new country in my language learning project was always a shock, but soon it became completely normal to live entirely within the new language.
One way you can overkill a project is to aim for a particular test, performance, or challenge that will be above the skill level you strictly require. Benny Lewis likes to attempt language exams, because they provide a concrete challenge. In his German project, he wanted to attempt the highest-level exam, because his awareness of that goal would push him to study more than he might if he were satisfied with comfortable conversations alone. Another friend of mine decided to exhibit her photography as a means of pushing her skills and talent. Deciding in advance that your work will be viewable publicly alters your approach to learning and will gear you toward performance in the desired domain, rather than just checking off boxes of facts learned.
Learn Straight from the Source
Learning directly is one of the hallmarks of many of the successful ultralearning projects I’ve encountered, particularly because of how different it can be from the style of education most of us are used to. Whenever you learn anything new, it’s a good habit to ask yourself where and how the knowledge will manifest itself. If you can answer that, you can then ask whether you’re doing anything to tie what you’re learning to that context. If you’re not, you need to tread carefully, as the problem of transfer may rear its ugly head.
The act of learning directly, however, is only half of the answer to the question of what you should do to learn well. Doing a lot of direct practice in the environment where you want to eventually use your skills is an important start. However, in order to master skills quickly, bulk practice isn’t enough. This brings us to our next principle of ultralearning: drill.
Chapter VII
Principle 4
Drill
Attack Your Weakest Point
Take care of the bars and the piece will take care of itself.
—Philip Johnston, composer
Of all the roles Benjamin Franklin played throughout his life—entrepreneur, inventor, scientist, diplomat, and founding father of the United States—he was first and foremost a writer. It was in writing that he first found success. After fleeing Boston to escape
the final years of his indentured labor as an apprentice to his brother’s printing company, he went to Philadelphia. There, penniless and unknown, he first worked for another printing company before establishing himself as a competitor. His Poor Richard’s Almanack became an international bestseller and allowed him to retire at forty-two. However, it was in the latter half1 of his life that his writing would have world-changing consequences.2
As a scientist, Franklin was bad at math and more interested in practical consequences than in grand theories of the universe. However, his prose was “written equally well for the uninitiated as well as the philosopher,” noted the English chemist Sir Humphrey Davy, adding “he has rendered his details as amusing as well as perspicuous.”3 The strength of his writing and its practical consequences made him an international sensation.
In politics, it was again Franklin’s writing talent that helped him win allies and persuade potential antagonists. Prior to the American Revolution, he penned an essay, supposedly written by King Frederick II of Prussia, entitled “An Edict by the King of Prussia.” In it he satirized British-American relations by proposing that, due to early settlers of the British Isles being of German origin, “revenue [should] be raised from said colonies in Britain” by the Prussian king.
Later, his skill with a pen would make his writing into the Declaration of Independence, where he edited Thomas Jefferson’s words to become the now famous “We hold these truths to be self-evident.”
With such an amazing skill for writing and persuasion, it’s worth asking how Franklin acquired it. Fortunately, unlike so many other great writers, whose efforts at honing their skills remain mysterious, we have Franklin’s own words for how he did it. In his Autobiography, he details his sophisticated efforts to slice apart sections of his writing skill for practice as a young boy. Beginning with a childhood debate against a friend about the merits of educating women (Franklin was for, his friend against), his father noticed that aspects of his writing lacked persuasive ability. Franklin thus “determined to endeavor at improvement” and went about a series of exercises to practice his writing skill.
