Ultralearning

by Scott Young

  In addition to these basic principles, László and Klára devoted themselves intensely to providing every opportunity for the advancement of their daughters, cultivating a database of more than two hundred thousand matches, buying every chess textbook they could find, and recruiting chess tutors for their daughters. The girls lacked no opportunity to study and improve at the game. The Polgár house, with diagrams of chess positions hanging on the walls, became a temple devoted to the practice of the ancient game. For László and Klára, raising their children was more than a full-time job as they fostered the girls’ talents by both assembling resources and schooling them at home.

  Ultralearning Principles in Action

  In addition to Polgár’s principles of raising genius children, I found it interesting that all of the principles of ultralearning I’ve discussed this far were present in their approach to learning.

  1. Metalearning

  Polgár devoted himself full-time to understanding how people learn chess and under what conditions his daughters would thrive. He created a huge library of chess positions, strategies, and lists of games, which, in the days before widespread internet, was no small feat. He also articulated a plan for coaching the girls in the game when they were still very young, starting by teaching them first to name the squares on the board and later to know how the pieces moved. That slow progression allowed the girls to pick up the game even before their other cognitive abilities had developed.

  2. Focus

  László considered “the ability to handle monotony, the capability to sustain interest and persistent attention” as key traits he aimed to instill in his daughters. The girls twice took part in twenty-four-hour chess marathons when they were fifteen, nine, and eight years old, respectively, needing to complete one hundred matches in the time period. Chess is a game not merely of flickers of brilliance but of endurance and stamina. Training focus was a large part of László’s system for his daughters, as he encouraged them to focus their minds on the problem and not get distracted.

  3. Directness

  László took his daughters to games with men when they were as young as four, showing them how the game was to be played against opponents who would really offer a challenge. The girls played many, many games of chess, which formed the backbone of their abilities. That allowed them to learn not only how to play the game well but also to deal with variables such as time pressure and the psychological insecurities of playing against older, more intimidating opponents. By using chess timers even for casual games, the girls practiced in an environment that more closely matched the one they would face in tournaments.

  4. Drill

  László varied the approaches to studying the game, starting his daughters off with memorizing first the names of the squares, then the movements of key pieces. Chess puzzles, hanging from the walls of the house, became the girls’ homework, as they had to solve the different tactical positions and come up with creative solutions. Blitz and blindfolded games allowed the girls to get better at thinking more quickly and mentally simulating the game.

  5. Retrieval

  For retrieval, László explained, “We should not tell them everything; we should try to get the child to say something!” Using what he described as the “Socratic method” for chess, posing questions his girls must answer instead of telling them to remember a presolved solution, he was using the right method to encourage the expansion of their memory and understanding. Blindfolded games, once again, formed a powerful component of the girls’ strategy. By practicing without looking at the board, it forced them to cultivate the ability to follow positions in their head, which was useful not only for retaining key chess patterns long term but also for honing the ability to simulate moves on the board that an opponent might play.

  6. Feedback

  László encouraged considerable play with real opponents but was careful to select “suitable partners, who have a generally similar playing ability.” Interestingly, the feedback here was carefully controlled, not only to provide the girls with enough challenge (the Polgárs’ insistence on playing in men’s tournaments in order to face such a challenge was an example of this) but also to avoid too great a challenge when their abilities were still nascent. Cultivating positive feedback was important early on, and László was ever ready to adjust the flow of the game to make sure it was at a level that would stimulate further play.

  7. Retention

  László focused on having the girls recall chess patterns from memory and increased the speed of games to make elements of their play more automatic and less susceptible to forgetting. Memorizing chess patterns is a large part of playing the game successfully, and this was aided both by spaced practice and through specialized drills such as blitz and blindfolded games.

  8. Intuition

  Mirroring the Feynman Technique, László encouraged his girls to write articles about chess, explaining, “If one writes an article, one considers a matter more deeply than without a goal, thinking alone or speaking with someone about it.” The girls were also encouraged to come up with creative solutions to problems. Play, not merely in the sense of chess being a game but also in the sense of an unconstructed, goalless activity, was part of the teaching strategy. Coming up with interesting solutions and challenging the girls to think of tricks and new insights allowed them to explore outside what could be offered by memorizing past results.

  9. Experimentation

  As the Polgár sisters eclipsed their father in chess ability, their impetus to continue mastering the game increasingly had to come from within themselves. Each of the girls had to cultivate her own unique style and approach. Judit chose to focus on tricks and tactics, writing that “opening preparation was not at all important at that time. This may be a reason why, even today, my strongest area remains the middlegame.”18 The girls’ varying choices show that chess, like any creative skill, involves not merely a mastery of patterns but also choices about what skills and styles to cultivate within a vast range of possibilities.

  Finally, the Polgárs embodied the idea of ultralearning at its broadest, with László arguing, “In my opinion, we should disseminate the idea of intensive learning in every field.” The success of the Polgárs follows the same pattern as that of most of the ultralearners I have met: aggressive, enthusiastic self-education following the key principles of learning.

  Fostering Ultralearning in the Home, School, and Workplace

  How can you foster ultralearning as a parent or educator or in an organization? Is it possible to help others self-confidently tackle difficult learning projects of their own design? Can you teach students not just the material they need to study but how to learn on their own, so they will be self-sufficient outside the classroom? Can you lead the individuals in your organization to learn more aggressively, filling gaps in their competency and achieving their full potential? These are all intriguing questions to which we don’t yet have definitive answers.

  In reading the scientific literature on learning and following up with the ultralearners’ stories, I was struck not only by how much is known about learning already but by how many open questions exist for which researchers and autodidacts are still hazarding hypotheses. The complications expand exponentially once you introduce the social environment as well. Now it’s no longer a question simply of individual cognition but of the emotions, culture, and relationships that start to influence learning in complex and unexpected ways. From this perspective, therefore, I’d like to cautiously suggest some starting points for fostering an environment that will support ultralearning, at home, in the school, or in the workplace. These suggestions aren’t rules, but they can be seen as starting points for enabling others to capture the ultralearning spirit.

  Suggestion 1: Create an Inspiring Goal

  Better yet, allow people to design their own learning goals that inspire them. Inspiration is an essential starting point in the process of ultralearning. There must be something very compelling for a person to summon u
p the energy and self-discipline needed to learn. Sometimes that is the promise of a new skill bringing career opportunities. Coding boot camps, which have sprung up in the wake of high-paying programming jobs, push students through at a brutal pace, sometimes approaching eighty hours a week. The goal, however, is compelling enough to justify this investment: complete a rigorous program over the course of a few weeks, and you can rise up the ladder of high-salaried tech jobs in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. The process is intense, but the motive is compelling.

  In other cases, the motivation for ultralearning comes from an intrinsic interest that becomes amplified. My own MIT Challenge started with feeling I had missed out by not studying computer science in school. Normally, that wouldn’t have led to any large, structured effort to learn a lot of computer science. It was only when the idea of doing an entire degree in a shortened period of time, along with the research that made me think it might be possible, that my initial interest become a passionate commitment. Roger Craig, with his Jeopardy! exploits, was always interested in trivia competitions. It was only when he recognized that there might be a chance to appear on the famous television show that his interest became an obsession. Eric Barone took his love of a childhood video game and expanded it into an effort to create a better version. Seeking out people’s natural interests for ultralearning means encouraging the sparks that already exist, rather than merely imposing on them the topics you feel would be most beneficial. Once people see the structure of an ultralearning project, they can start thinking for themselves what would be most interesting, exciting, and useful for them to work on. Tristan de Montebello started with the idea of ultralearning and only later chose to craft a public speaking project around it.

  Suggestion 2: Be Careful with Competition

  The Polgárs’ example clearly indicates that early self-confidence can create an enthusiasm that leads to continued investment. You don’t need to feel as though you’re good at something to invest energy into learning. After all, becoming good at something is what learning is. However, you need to feel that you could be good at it. People tend to make their perceptions of inadequacy into immutable destinies: “I’m no good at math,” “I can’t draw anything but stick figures,” “I don’t have the language gene.” Although there likely do exist real differences in innate ability, so that these pronouncements aren’t completely false, they tend to ignore an important factor: motivation. When you see yourself as lacking the potential to be good at something or believe that you’ll always be behind everyone else no matter how hard you work, it robs you of the motivation to work hard. Thus, although there are differences in ability among all of us, they can often be exacerbated by the affective dimension they create in how we feel about learning. Feel as though you’re lousy at doing something, and you’re robbed of the motivation to change.

  The reference group you compare yourself to can have a powerful influence. I find it interesting that many, but not all, ultralearners aimed at projects that were so unusual that they made it hard to compare them to a normal reference group. De Montebello’s public speaking competition certainly pitted himself against excellent public speakers. That might have created a feeling of inferiority, except that de Montebello could always explain to himself any perceived deficits as coming from trying such an ambitious project with so little prior experience. Had it been the case that instead of an individual ultralearning project, he had been pitted against a dozen other competitors with exactly the same prior experience, he might instead have rationalized any perceived inadequacy as his simply not being good enough. This suggests that the competitiveness of the project cuts both ways: When you have a natural talent and thus perform much better than the easily identifiable reference group, you’ll have more motivation to practice and learn with intensity. However, if you come up short, it may rob you of the motivation to practice. The Polgárs used competition to their advantage. Because the girls’ training started unusually young, they were always seen as precocious and the competitive environment enhanced their motivation. Had they started late or been put into a school where they weren’t guaranteed to be star performers, their motivation might have been sapped.

  To me, such motivational effects, coming from implicit comparison to a reference group, suggest adopting a twofold approach. If a person in whom you want to encourage an ultralearning spirit has a natural aptitude, competition is probably good. Seeing him- or herself do well in direct comparison with others may encourage a commitment to further improvement. For a person who either is of moderate ability or is behind other people, such as learning a skill in a domain in which he or she has no experience, or who is starting to learn a new skill later in life, you should make an effort to make the project unique. This will encourage the person to frame his or her progress by comparing to his or her past self, not due to competition with others. Sometimes a project can start out being unique, thus sheltered from the harsh light of unfavorable comparison, and move to a more competitive environment once confidence has been established. For example, you might start learning programming by creating a game that is hard to compare to others but enter coding competitions as you begin to feel more competent.

  Suggestion 3: Make Learning a Priority

  Outside school, learning is usually seen as a by-product of doing a job, not the core goal. Though organizations often give lip service to ongoing training and education, it’s usually in the form of workshops or seminars that one sits through passively before getting back to the real job at hand. Ultralearning, by encouraging direct, intensive practice, provides the opportunity for a kind of fusion project—one that accomplishes real objectives but is also designed to teach something new.

  The normal protocol for assigning a project is to find the best person for the job and give them the task. A learning-driven approach would suggest instead that people who are not yet capable of doing the task might be assigned to the project. An ultralearning-driven work environment might consist of employees’ spending a majority of their time on projects that are within or near their competency levels but devoting a specific fraction of their time to working on projects that are a leap above their current abilities. Although this is purely hypothetical, I imagine two benefits of this approach. First, it will create a culture of learning within an organization where people are always willing to try to solve problems they don’t yet know how to solve, instead of expecting someone else to know the answer already. Second, it will help reveal talent by giving people challenges they can rise to. If mentorship opportunities and difficult projects are assigned only on a whim by managers, they will likely miss a lot of people who may have the ability to succeed in difficult positions but are never given the opportunity to do so.

  At the highest levels, an ultralearning-driven culture also allows learning to go into areas where perhaps nobody else has a particular skill. Although going between established levels of skill is important, it is when one learns to do something that nobody else can do that learning becomes truly valuable.

  Conclusion

  In many ways, writing this book has been an ultralearning project. Although a writer researching for a book is hardly unique, not all ultralearning projects need to be one of a kind to matter to the person doing them. Sitting in my den at home are stacks of binders filled with thousands of pages of printed journal articles. My bookshelf now has dozens of obscure, out-of-print monographs on thin slices of the question of how people learn. Recordings of calls with various researchers helped me realize how much nuance there is to even simple questions such as “Is feedback helpful?” and “Why do people forget?” I’ve poured over numerous biographies of famous intellectuals, entrepreneurs, and scientists to try to arrive at an understanding of how they approached learning. In many ways, the process of writing this book was a reflection of its subject—an ultralearning project to write a book about ultralearning. Although I had a strong interest in the subject of learning and had browsed textbooks, articles, and biographies before I began res
earch into this book, it was only after I started this structured project that I really began to dig deep.

  Beyond research, this book was a challenge for me as a writer. My writing experience comes from blogging, not authoring books. Striking the right tone in a book is hard, and it’s quite different from the casual daily missives in a blog. I knew from the start that I wanted to share the stories of others and their exploits, not just recount my own experiences. That was initially quite challenging. Most biographies and published stories don’t focus on learning methods. Even when learning is the central theme of the story, most biographers are satisfied to be in awe of talent, rather than dig into the specific details of how a person did a particular thing. My research efforts frequently involved scouring a five-hundred-page biography for the several paragraphs in which concrete details about learning methods were mentioned in passing. Although this created challenges, it also forced me to develop new skills as a writer. I had to improve my research and writing skills in ways that more than a decade of penning blog articles never had. Even the style of the book created a skill-challenging project for myself. I’ll leave it to you, the reader, to judge whether I was successful.

  The metaproject of ultralearning to write a book about ultralearning also illustrates some important ideas. For one, although I’ve made enormous improvements in my writing ability and knowledge of cognitive science and stories of famous learning exploits, there is still far more to learn. Digging into the science, for instance, one can quickly develop a sense of vertigo standing atop the mountain of papers, theories, ideas, and experiments, all loosely connected to the topic of learning. Similarly, for every biography I read, there were hundreds I could not. For every ultralearning story I encountered, there were likely dozens more my searches didn’t reveal. It is a profound error to claim that learning is about replacing ignorance with understanding. Knowledge expands, but so does ignorance, as with a greater understanding of a subject also comes a greater appreciation for all the questions that remain unanswered.