Ultralearning

by Scott Young

  One such exercise he documents was taking a favorite magazine of his, The Spectator, and taking notes on articles that appeared there. He would then leave the notes for a few days and come back to them, trying to reconstruct the original argument from memory. After finishing, he “compared my Spectator with the original, discovered some of my faults, and corrected them.” Realizing that his vocabulary was limited, he developed another strategy. By turning the prose into verse, he could replace words with synonyms that matched in meter or rhyme. To improve his sense of the rhetorical flow of an essay, he tried his imitation approach again, but this time he jumbled up the hints so he would have to determine the correct order of the sequence of ideas as he wrote again.

  Once he had established some of the mechanics of writing, he moved on to the more difficult task of writing in a style that would persuade. When reading an English grammar book, he was exposed to the idea of the Socratic method, of challenging another’s ideas through probing questions rather than direct contradiction. He then went to work, carefully avoiding “abrupt contradiction and positive argumentation,” instead focusing on being the “humble inquirer and doubter.”

  Those early efforts produced results. At age sixteen, he wanted to try to get his work published. Fearing that his elder brother might reject it out of hand, however, he disguised his penmanship and submitted his essay under the pseudonym Silence Dogood, purporting to be a widowed woman living in the countryside. His brother, not knowing the true author, approved and published the essay, so Franklin returned and wrote more. Although initiated as a ruse to have his writing considered fairly, Franklin’s practice in adopting other characters would prove invaluable in his later career. Poor Richard’s Almanack, for example, was written from the perspective of a simple husband and wife, Richard and Bridget Saunders, and his political essays such as his “An Edict by the King of Prussia” similarly made use of his flexibility to adopt imagined perspectives.

  It’s difficult to imagine Franklin having become the household name he is today without his having first established a mastery of writing. Whether it was business, science, or statecraft, the unchanging core of what made him persuasive and great was his ability to write well. What distinguished Franklin wasn’t merely the amount he wrote or his raw talent but how he practiced. The way in which he decided to break apart the skill of writing and practice its elements in isolation enabled him to master writing at a young age and apply it to the other pursuits for which he would later become famous. Such careful analysis and deliberate practice forms the basis for the fourth ultralearning principle: drill.

  The Chemistry of Learning

  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.

  Consider learning mathematics. This is a complex skill that has many different parts: you need to be able to understand the fundamental concepts, you need to be able to remember the algorithm for solving a certain type of problem, and you need to know in what context it applies. Underlying this ability, however, is the ability to do arithmetic and algebra so as to be able to solve the problems in question. If your arithmetic is weak or your algebra sloppy, you’ll get the wrong answers even if you’ve mastered the other concepts.

  Another rate-determining step could be vocabulary when learning a foreign language. The number of sentences you can successfully utter depends on how many words you know. If you know too few, you won’t be able to talk about very much. If you were able to suddenly inject hundreds of new words into your mental database, you might drastically expand your fluency even if your pronunciation, grammar, or other linguistic knowledge remains unchanged.

  This is the strategy behind doing drills. By identifying a rate-determining step in your learning reaction, you can isolate it and work on it specifically. Since it governs the overall competence you have with that skill, by improving at it you will improve faster than if you try to practice every aspect of the skill at once. That was Franklin’s insight that allowed him to rapidly improve his writing: by identifying components of the overall skill of writing, figuring out which mattered in his situation, and then coming up with clever ways to emphasize them in his practice, he could get better more quickly than if he had just spent a lot of time writing.

  Drills and Cognitive Load

  Rate-determining steps in learning—where one component of a complex skill determines your overall level of performance—are a powerful reason to apply drills. However, they aren’t the only one. Even if there isn’t one isolatable aspect of the skill that is holding back your performance, it may still be a good idea to apply drills.

  The reason is that when you are practicing a complex skill, your cognitive resources (attention, memory, effort, etc.) must be spread over many different aspects of the task. When Franklin was writing, he had to consider not only the logical content of the argument he was making but word choice and rhetorical style. This can create a learning trap. In order to improve your performance in one aspect, you may need to devote so much attention to that one aspect that the other parts of your performance start to go down. If you can judge yourself only on how much you improve at the overall task, it can lead to a situation in which your improvement slows down because you will be getting worse at the overall task while becoming better at a specific component of it.

  Drills resolve this problem by simplifying a skill enough that you can focus your cognitive resources on a single aspect. When Franklin focused on reconstructing the order of an essay he had read previously, he could devote all his attention to asking what sequence of ideas leads to a good essay rather than also needing to worry about word usage, grammar, and the content of the arguments.

  Astute readers will probably notice a tension between this principle and the last. If direct practice involves working on a whole skill nearest to the situation in which it will eventually be used, drills are a pull in the opposite direction. A drill takes the direct practice and cuts it apart, so that you are practicing only an isolated component. How can you resolve this contradiction?

  The Direct-Then-Drill Approach

  The tension between learning directly and doing drills can be resolved when we see them as being alternating stages in a larger cycle of learning. The mistake made in many academic strategies for learning is to ignore the direct context or abstract it away, in the hope that if enough component skills are developed, they will eventually transfer. Ultralearners, in contrast, frequently employ what I’ll call the Direct-Then-Drill Approach.

  The first step is to try to practice the skill directly. This means figuring out where and how the skill will be used and then trying to match that situation as close as is feasible when practicing. Practice a language by actually speaking it. Learn programming by writing software. Improve your writing skills by penning essays. This initial connection and subsequent feedback loop ensure that the transfer problem won’t occur.

  The next step is to analyze the direct skill and try to isolate components that are either rate-determining steps in your performance or subskills you find difficult to improve because there are too many other things going on for you to focus on them. From here you can develop drills and practice those components separately until you get better at them.

  The final step is to go back to direct practice and integrate what you’ve learned. This has two purposes. The first is that even in well-designed drills, there are going to be transfer hiccups owing to the fact that what was previously an isolated skill must be moved to a new and more complex context. Think of this as being like building the connectiv
e tissue to join the muscles you strengthened separately. The second function of this step is as a check on whether your drill was well designed and appropriate. Many attempts to isolate a drill may end in failure because the drill doesn’t really cut at the heart of what was difficult in real practice. That’s okay; this feedback is important to help you minimize wasting time learning things that don’t matter much to your end goals.

  The earlier you are in the learning process, the faster this cycle should be. Cycling between direct practice and drills, even within the same learning session, is a good idea when you’re just starting out. Later, as you get better at what you are trying to do and a lot more effort is required to noticeably improve your overall performance, it’s more acceptable to take longer detours into drills. As you approach mastery, your time may end up focused mostly on drills as your knowledge of how the complex skill breaks down into individual components becomes more refined and accurate and improving any individual component gets harder and harder.

  Tactics for Designing Drills

  There are three major problems when applying this principle. The first is figuring out when and what to drill. You should focus on what aspects of the skill might be the rate-determining steps in your performance. Which aspect of the skill, if you improved it, would cause the greatest improvement to your abilities overall for the least amount of effort? Your accounting skills might be limited by the fact that your Excel knowledge is superficial, which prevents you from applying all the things you know to practical situations. Your language abilities may be held back by having inaccurate pronunciation, even though you know the right words. Look as well to aspects of a skill that you need to juggle simultaneously. These may be harder to improve because you can’t devote enough cognitive resources to improving them. When writing a new article, you may have to juggle research, storytelling, vocabulary, and many other aspects simultaneously, making it hard to get a lot better at just one. Determining what to drill may seem tricky, but it doesn’t have to be. The key is to experiment. Make a hypothesis about what is holding you back, attack it with some drills, using the Direct-Then-Drill Approach, and you can quickly get feedback about whether you’re right.

  The second difficulty with this principle is designing the drill to produce improvement. This is often hard because even if you recognize an aspect of your performance you’re weak on, it may be tricky to design a drill that trains that component without artificially removing what makes it difficult in actual application. Franklin’s drills were uncommon, I believe, because most people, even recognizing specific deficits in their writing ability, would not have had the ingenuity to find ways to drill subskills such as ordering arguments persuasively and emulating a successful writing style.

  Finally, doing drills is hard and often uncomfortable. Teasing out the worst thing about your performance and practicing that in isolation takes guts. It’s much more pleasant to spend time focusing on things you’re already good at. Given this natural tendency, let’s look at some good ways to do drills so you can start applying them yourself.

  Drill 1: Time Slicing

  The easiest way to create a drill is to isolate a slice in time of a longer sequence of actions. Musicians often do this kind of training when they identify the hardest parts of a piece of music and practice each one until it’s perfect before integrating it back into the context of the entire song or symphony. Athletes similarly engage in this process when they drill skills that are normally a fraction of total playing time, such as layups or penalty shots. In the early phase of learning a new language, I often obsessively repeat a few key phrases, so they quickly get embedded into my long-term memory. Look for parts of the skill you’re learning that can be decomposed into specific moments of time that have heightened difficulty or importance.

  Drill 2: Cognitive Components

  Sometimes what you’ll want to practice isn’t a slice in time of a larger skill but a particular cognitive component. When speaking a language, grammar, pronunciation, and vocabulary occur at all moments, but they form different cognitive aspects that must be managed simultaneously. The tactic here is to find a way to drill only one component when, in practice, others would be applied at the same time. When learning Mandarin Chinese, I would do tone drills that involved pronouncing pairs of words with different tones and recording myself speaking. That allowed me to practice producing different tones quickly, without the distraction of needing to remember what the words meant or how to form grammatically correct sentences.

  Drill 3: The Copycat

  A difficulty with drills in many creative skills is that it is often impossible to practice one aspect without also doing the work of the others. When Franklin was trying to improve his ability to order arguments logically, for instance, it wasn’t possible to do so without writing an entire essay. To solve this problem in your own learning, you can take a page from Franklin: by copying the parts of the skill you don’t want to drill (either from someone else or your past work), you can focus exclusively on the component you want to practice. Not only does this save a lot of time, because you need to repeat only the part you’re drilling, it also reduces your cognitive burden, meaning you can apply more focus to getting better at that one aspect. When practicing drawing, I started by drawing not just from photos but from drawings other people had done. That helped me focus on the skill of accurately rendering the picture, simplifying the decision about how to frame the scene and which details to include. For flexible creative works, editing works you’ve created in the past may have the same effect, allowing you to selectively improve an aspect of your work without having to consider the other demands of an original composition.

  Drill 4: The Magnifying Glass Method

  Suppose you need to create something new and can’t edit or separate out the part you want to practice. How can you create a drill? The Magnifying Glass Method is to spend more time on one component of the skill than you would otherwise. This may reduce your overall performance or increase your input time, but it will allow you to spend a much higher proportion of your time and cognitive resources on the subskill you want to master. I applied this method when trying to improve my ability to do research when writing articles, by spending about ten times as long on research as I had previously. Although I still had to do all the other parts of writing the article, by spending much longer on research than I would normally, I could develop new habits and skills for doing so.

  Drill 5: Prerequisite Chaining

  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. Benny Lewis has a similar habit of starting with speaking from a phrase book and only later learning the grammar that explains how the phrases function.

  Mindful Drilling

  To many, the idea of drilling may seem to be a push in the wrong direction. We’ve all spent time doing homework designed to drill into us facts and procedures that turned out to be a total waste of time. That was often because we didn’t know the reasons behind what we were practicing or how it fit into a broader context. Drilling problems without context is mind-numbing. However, once you’ve identified that it’s the bottleneck preventing you from going further, they become instilled with new purpose. In ultralearning, which is directed by the student, not an external source, drills take on a new light. Instead of being forced to do them for unknown purposes, it is now up to you to find a way to enhance the learning process by accelerating learning on the specific things that you find most difficult. In this sense, drills
take on a very different flavor in ultralearning as opposed to traditional learning. Far from being meaningless drudgery, carefully designed drills elicit creativity and imagination as you strive to solve a more complex learning challenge by breaking it into specific parts.

  Drills are hard to do, which is why many of us would rather avoid them. When we do engage in drills, it’s often in subjects where we feel competent and comfortable. Drills require the learner not only to think deeply about what is being learned but also figure out what is most difficult and attack that weakness directly rather than focus on what is the most fun or what has already been mastered. This requires strong motivation and a comfort with learning aggressively. Franklin, in his Autobiography, remarked about the lengths he went to so he could dedicate himself to his writing drills: “My time for these exercises and for reading was at night, after work or before it began in the morning.” Despite the prominence writing would play in his life, Franklin still had to work long hours under his taskmaster brother in the print shop, diligently improving his craft in what little leisure time he had. Eric Barone similarly repeated his pixel art dozens of times, going back to master prerequisite concepts and theory until he got it perfect.