Ultralearning

by Scott Young

  There are two advantages to doing split tests. The first is that as in scientific experiments, you will get much better information about which method works best if you limit the variation to only the factor you want to test. The second is that by solving a problem multiple ways or applying multiple solution styles to it, you will increase your breadth of expertise. Forcing yourself to try different approaches encourages experimentation outside your comfort zone.

  Tactic 3: Introduce New Constraints

  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. A powerful technique for pushing out of those grooves of routine is by introducing new constraints that make the old methods impossible to use.

  It’s practically an axiom of design that the best innovations come from working within constraints. Give a designer unlimited freedom, and the solution is usually a mess. On the other hand, creating specific constraints in how you can proceed encourages you to explore options that are less familiar to you and sharpens your underlying skills. How can you add limitations to force yourself to develop new capacities?

  Tactic 4: Find Your Superpower in the Hybrid of Unrelated Skills

  The traditional path to mastery is to take a well-defined skill and practice it relentlessly until you have become insanely good at it. This is the path taken by many athletes, who train for decades to perfect their shot, jump, kick, or throw. However, for many areas of creative or professional skills, another, more accessible, path is to combine two skills that don’t necessarily overlap to bring about a distinct advantage that those who specialize in only one of those skills do not have. For instance, you might be an engineer who becomes really good at public speaking. You may not be the best possible engineer or the best possible presenter, but combining those two skills could make you the best person to present on engineering topics for your company at conferences, thus giving you access to new professional opportunities. Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, likened his own success to following this strategy by combining his background as an engineer with an MBA and a cartoonist.8

  This level of experimentation often plays out over multiple ultralearning projects. After I completed my MIT Challenge, I could apply the programming knowledge I had obtained to write scripts to automatically generate flash cards for learning Chinese. Such synergies become possible once you start exploring how one skill you’ve already acquired can impact another.

  Tactic 5: Explore the Extremes

  Van Gogh’s art pushed well outside normal conventions along many dimensions. His thick application of paint was far away from the thin layers of glazes used by Renaissance masters. His quick application was far more rapid than the careful brushstrokes of other painters. His colors were bold, often garish, instead of subtle. If you were to draw a chart that mapped out van Gogh’s style compared with those of other painters, you would probably see that he lay along the extreme in many dimensions.

  An interesting result from mathematics is that as you get to higher and higher dimensions, most of the volume of a higher-dimensional sphere lies near its surface. For instance, in two dimensions (a circle), just under 20 percent of its mass lies in the outer shell described by a tenth of the radius. In three dimensions (a sphere), that number rises to almost 30 percent. In ten dimensions, almost three-quarters of the mass is in that outermost layer. You can imagine learning a complex subject as akin to trying to find an optimal point in a region of higher-dimensional space—except that instead of length, width, and height, those dimensions might be the qualitative dimensions of work, such as van Gogh’s complementarity of colors, application of paint, or some other aspect of skill that can be applied in some varying degree of intensity. What this means is that the more complicated a domain of skill is (i.e., the more dimensions it contains), the more space will be taken up by applications of that skill that are extreme across at least one of those dimensions. This suggests that for many skills, the best option is going to be extreme in some way, since so many more of the possibilities are themselves extreme. Sticking to the middle and playing it safe isn’t the correct approach because that allows you to explore only a small subset of the total possibilities for your work.

  Pushing out to an extreme in some aspect of the skill you’re cultivating, even if you eventually decide to pull it back to something more moderate, is often a good exploration strategy. This allows you to search the space of possibilities more effectively, while also giving you a broader range of experience.

  Experimentation and Uncertainty

  Learning is a process of experimenting in two ways. First, the act of learning itself is a kind of trial and error. Practicing directly, getting feedback, and trying to summon up the right answers to problems are all ways of adjusting the knowledge and skills you have in your head to the real world. Second, the act of experimenting also lies in the process of trying out your learning methods. Try out different approaches, and use the ones that work best for you. The principles I’ve tried to articulate in this book should provide good starting points. But they are guidelines, not iron rules; starting points, not destinations. Only by experimenting will you be able to find the right trade-offs between different principles—for instance, when directness is more important and when you should focus on drills or whether retention or intuition is the main obstacle to learning. Experimenting will also help you decide among small differences in approach that no list of principles could possibly cover exhaustively.

  Having a mindset of experimentation will also encourage you to explore beyond what you feel most comfortable doing. Many people stick to the same routines, the same narrow set of methods, they apply to learning everything. As a result, there are a lot of things they struggle to learn because they don’t know the best way to do so. Copying exemplars, running tests, and pushing to extremes are all ways to push outside your ingrained habits and try out something different. That process will teach you not just abstract learning principles but concrete tactics that will accommodate your personality, interests, strengths, and weaknesses. Are you better off learning a language through practicing speaking or engaging in lots of input through movies and books? Are you better off learning programming by building your own game or working on open-source projects? These questions don’t have a single correct answer, and people have achieved success using a wide variety of different methods.

  My own experience with learning has been one of constant experimentation. In university, I focused a lot on making associations and connections. During the MIT Challenge, I switched to making practice the foundation. In my first experience learning a language, I was sloppy, speaking English most of the time. In the second round, I experimented with going to another extreme, to see if I could avoid that sticking point. While doing projects, I’ve had to adjust my methods frequently. Even though it was only thirty days long, my portrait-drawing challenge involved a lot of trial and error from starting by doing sketches and, when my progress using that approach slowed, trying to do sketches even faster to get more feedback. When that, too, had reached its limits, I spent some time learning a different technique altogether to achieve greater accuracy.

  Embedded in my successes are many failures—times where I thought I could get something to work and it ended up failing miserably. Early on in learning Chinese, I thought I could use some kind of mnemonic system to remember the words, with colors for tones and memorized symbols for the syllables. That was because my normal sounds-like method for visual mnemonics wasn’t working with the words, which all sounded so different from English. The result was a total failure, and it didn’t work at all! Other times, my experiments with new methods worked out great. Most of the techniques I’ve shared in this book thus far started as ideas I wasn’t sure would pan out.

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nbsp; Experimentation is the principle that ties all the others together. Not only does it make you try new things and think hard about how to solve specific learning challenges, it also encourages you to be ruthless in discarding methods that don’t work. Careful experimentation not only brings out your best potential, it also eliminates bad habits and superstitions by putting them to the test of real-world results.

  Chapter XIII

  Your First Ultralearning Project

  The beginning is always today.

  —Mary Shelley

  By now you’re probably eager to start your own ultralearning project. What things could you learn that you have put off due to fears of inadequacy, frustration, or lack of time? What old skills could you take to new heights? The biggest obstacle to ultralearning is simply that most people don’t care enough about their own self-education to get started. As you’ve read this far, I doubt that is true of you. Learning, in whatever forms it takes, is something that’s important to you. The question is whether that spark of interest will ignite into a flame or be smothered prematurely.

  Ultralearning projects aren’t easy. They require planning, time, and effort. Yet the rewards are worth the effort. Being able to learn hard things quickly and effectively is a powerful skill. One successful project tends to lead to others. It’s usually the first project that requires the most thought and care. A solid, well-researched, well-executed plan can give you the confidence to face harder challenges in the future. A bungled attempt is not a disaster, but it may make you reluctant to pursue future projects of a similar nature. In this chapter, I’d like to tell you everything I’ve learned about how to get it right.

  Step 1: Do Your Research

  The first step in any project is to do the metalearning research required to give you a good starting point. Planning ahead will avoid a lot of problems and prevent you from having to make drastic changes to your learning plan before you’ve even started making progress. 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. Your ultralearning “packing” checklist should include, at a minimum:

  What topic you’re going to learn and its approximate scope. Obviously, no learning project can begin unless you figure out what you want to learn. In some cases, this is obvious. In others, you may need to do further research to identify which skill or knowledge would be most valuable. If your goal is to learn something instrumentally (to start a business, get a promotion, do research for an article), learning what you need to learn is important and will suggest how wide and deep you need to go. I suggest starting with rather a narrow scope, which can expand as you proceed. “Learning enough Mandarin Chinese to hold a fifteen-minute conversation on simple topics” is a lot more constrained than “Learn Chinese,” which may include reading, writing, studying history, and more.

  The primary resources you’re going to use. This includes books, videos, classes, tutorials, guides, and even people who will serve as mentors, coaches, and peers. This is where you decide what your starting point will be. Examples: “I’m going to read and complete the exercises in a book on Python programming for beginners” or “I’m going to learn Spanish through online tutoring via italki.com” or “I’m going to practice drawing by making sketches.” In some subjects, static materials will determine how you proceed. In others, they will be supports to back up your practice. In any case, they should be identified, purchased, borrowed, or enrolled in before you begin.

  A benchmark for how others have successfully learned this skill or subject. Almost any popular skill has online forums where those who have learned the skill previously can share their approaches. You should identify the things other people who have learned the skill have done to learn it. This doesn’t mean you need to follow exactly in their footsteps, but it will prevent you from completely missing something important. The Expert Interview Method in chapter 4 provides a good method for following up on this.

  Direct practice activities. Every skill and subject you’re learning will be used somewhere eventually, even if it’s as simple as using it to learn something else. Thinking about how you might use the skill can enable you to start finding opportunities to practice it as early as possible. If direct practice is impossible, you should nonetheless identify opportunities for practice that mimic the mental requirements of using the skill.

  Backup materials and drills. In addition to the principal materials and methods you’ll be using, it’s a good idea to look at possible drills and backup materials you may want to use. Backup materials are often good if you recognize that a certain tool or set of materials might be useful but you don’t want to be overwhelmed in the beginning.

  Step 2: Schedule Your Time

  Your ultralearning project doesn’t need to be an intensive, full-time endeavor to succeed. However, it will require some time investment, and it’s better to decide on how much time you are willing to devote to learning in advance than simply hope that you’ll find the time later. There are two good reasons for planning your schedule ahead of time. The first is that this way you subconsciously prioritize your project by setting it down on your calendar ahead of other things. The second is that learning is often frustrating and it is almost always easier to click over to Facebook, Twitter, or Netflix. If you don’t set aside time to learn, it will be a lot harder to summon up the motivation to do so.

  The first decision you should make is how much time you’re going to commit. This is often dictated by your schedule. You may have a gap in employment that allows intensive learning, but only for a month. Alternatively, you may have a full schedule that permits you to devote only a few hours per week to learning something new. Whatever time you can commit, decide on it in advance.

  The second decision you need to make is when you are going to learn. During a few hours on Sunday? By waking up an hour earlier and putting in the time before work? In the evening? During lunch breaks? Once again, the best thing is to do whatever makes it easiest based on your schedule. I recommend setting a consistent schedule that is the same every week, rather than trying to fit in learning when you can. Consistency breeds good habits, reducing the effort required to study. If you have absolutely no choice, an ad hoc schedule is better than none, but it will require more discipline to sustain.

  If you do have some flexibility in your schedule, you may want to optimize it. Shorter, spaced time chunks are better for memory than crammed chunks are. However, some types of tasks, such as writing and programming, have a long warm-up time that may benefit from longer uninterrupted time chunks. The best way to find out what is best for you is to practice; if you find it takes a long time to warm up, opt for longer spaces in your schedule. If you find you can get to work within a few minutes of starting, shorter chunks of time spread out will be helpful for long-term retention.

  The third decision you need to make is the length of time for your project. I generally prefer shorter commitments to longer ones because they are easier to stick with. An intensive project that lasts a month has fewer potential interruptions from life or from your motivation changing and waning. If you have a big goal you want to accomplish that can’t be done in a short time frame, I suggest breaking it up into multiple smaller ones of a few months each.

  Finally, take all this information and put it into your calendar. Scheduling all the hours of work on the project in advance has important logistical and psychological benefits. Logistically, this will help you spot potential conflicts in your schedule due to vacations, work, or family events. Psychologically, it will help you remember and act on your initial plan better than if it were written on a piece of paper tucked into a desk drawer. What’s more, the act of scheduling demonstrates your seriousness about doing the project.

  I can clearly remember writing down my hypothetical studying schedule before starting the MIT Challenge. It had me up and studyi
ng by 7 a.m. and working until 6 p.m., with only a short break for lunch. Although my actual schedule, in practice, rarely reached that ideal (even in my most intensive early days, I almost never got in eleven hours straight), the mere act of writing down the schedule helped prepare me psychologically for the project ahead. If you’re unwilling to put time into your calendar, you’re almost certainly unwilling to put in time to study. If you’re waffling at this stage, that’s a good sign your heart isn’t really in the right place to get started.

  As a bonus step, for those who are embarking on longer projects of six months or more, I strongly recommend doing a pilot week of your schedule. This is simple: test your schedule for one week before you commit to it. This will give you firsthand knowledge of how difficult it will be and prevents overconfidence. If you already feel burned out after the first week, you may need to make adjustments. There’s no shame in going back and retooling your plan to make it fit your life better. Making this kind of adjustment is a lot better than giving up midway because your plan was doomed from the start.

  Step 3: Execute Your Plan

  Whatever plan you started with, now is the time to do it. No plan is perfect, and you may realize that what you’re doing for learning departs from the ideal, as established by the ultralearning principles. You may notice that your plan relies too much on passive reading rather than retrieval practice. You may see that the way you’re practicing is a winding detour away from where you will actually want to use it. You may feel as though you’re forgetting things or memorizing them without really understanding them. That’s okay. In some cases, you won’t be able to have the perfect learning approach because the resources to do so don’t exist. However, becoming sensitive to how the way you’re learning isn’t aligned with the principles is a good way to feel out changes you can make to improve it.