Ultralearning Paperback – August 15, 2019

The book Ultralearning teaches the reader how to learn better and get better results from what they are trying to learn. "Ultralearning is a strategy for acquiring skills and knowledge that is both self-directed and intense."I read this book more from the perspective of a teacher rather than a learner. I may use the concepts at some point to do my own ultralearning projects, but since I am creating content to teach people new skills, I'm looking for ways to make my content more engaging. I want to know the best ways to teach people and help them learn what I'm teaching.One of the things I really liked about this book was that the author provided practical information about ultralearning. He didn't just present a bunch of concepts; he gave strategies and tactics for getting results.The Nine Principles of UltralearningHere are the nine principles of ultralearning, along with some things I've learned about each principle:1. Metaleaning: First Draw a MapLearn how to learn a topic. Find out how others who successfully learned the topic learned it. Don't just try the first tactic you discover because other tactics may help you learn more effectively.2. Focus: Sharpen Your KnifeFocus on starting your project. Focus on sustaining progress on your project. Focus on ensuring that your learning is directed at what you need to learn to increase knowledge, not just make yourself feel good by focusing on the basics.3. Directness: Go Straight AheadLearn by using the new skill you're trying to acquire in a situation similar to or exactly like the situation you would actually use the skill. For example, learning a new language is more direct when you try to use the language in conversation with someone rather than just listening to lessons or using fun apps.4. Drill: Attach Your Weakest PointKnowing what you really need to learn and deliberately practicing. Focus more on the areas that you are deficient in to improve your weakest skills. Practice an isolated component.5. Retrieval: Test to LearnLearning something doesn't do you any good if you can't remember it when you need it. Testing yourself on what you've learned is best done by doing retrieval exercises or tests rather than referring to books or content about the subject. Do your best to extract the information you are learning from your memory to help form long-term memories of the content.6. Feedback: Don't Dodge the PunchesFind ways to get honest feedback from your learning initiatives through tests. It's easy to get feedback that stokes your ego, but this feedback does not help you grow and learn. Some feedback is noise and is not helpful. Other feedback is a signal and can help you build up the skill you're trying to learn by letting you know about things you need to improve upon.7. Retention: Don't Fill a Leaky BucketSpending a lot of time learning something is almost useless if you don't retain what you've learned. Some things are essential to keep in your memory, while others can be looked up if needed in the future.8. Intuition: Dig Deep Before Building UpKnowing a skill so well that you can apply it to different situations. Having such a deep understanding of a subject, you know all the possibilities to solve a problem and when to use which solution.9. Experimentation: Explore Outside Your Comfort ZoneExperimentation helps you learn because it forces you to try new things to accomplish a task or goal. Experimentation expands your knowledge and understanding of the topic in unexpected ways. Experimentation is accomplished by using different resources, techniques, or styles.Some of my favorite highlights in the book:• "Passive learning creates knowledge. Active practice creates skill."• "Your deepest moments of happiness don't come from doing easy things; they come from realizing your potential and overcoming your own limiting beliefs about yourself."• "What could you learn if you took the right approach to make it successful? Who could you become?"• "Flow is the enjoyable state between boredom and frustration; when a task is neither too hard nor too easy."• When learning, "Sometimes what's the most fun isn't very effective and what's effective isn't easy."• "…enjoyment tends to come from being good at things."• "…one of the most important educational tasks is to teach self-education."• "It is when one learns to do something that nobody else can do that learning becomes truly valuable."• "The better one gets, the more one recognizes how much better one could become."Of course, there's a lot more in the book, and I have more questions than answers after reading it. Since ultralearning is a personal thing, I'm not sure I'll be able to apply it strictly to teaching others, but I've developed some ideas about how to improve my content by reading this book.If you truly want to master a skill, you may want to check out Ultralearning and follow the book's principles, tactics, and strategies to start your own ultralearning project.

As my title said, it is a good way to slap my face and refocus. This kind of book gives me hints of potential solutions. For someone who has ADHD, this book could assist and realign my hyperfocus. The book gave me the tools that I needed the most. So now I’m super curious about the project assignment that the book just gave to me. It could be something that you need too. A nudge…just saying

This book makes me want to tackle an ultra learning project myself. Like learning how to draw in anime style and getting good at video editing.

Although I don’t consider myself an obsessive ultralearner like the polyglots and “Jeapordy!” champion that Scott Young talks about in “Ultralearning,” I’ve always had an interest in how to improve learning. My first exposure started over 30 years ago when I read Harry Lorayne's “Page-a-Minute Memory Book,” which anyone serious about learning should read. Following his techniques, I learned enough Hebrew to pass a professional licensing exam in Israel, memorize two combined decks of cards, and commit to long-term memory many of the laws in the Bible. As Scott Young would point out, though, there is more to learning than just memorizing. (Harry Lorayne, on the other hand, would say that all learning requires having enough information in your head so that you can really think about it.)In Young’s book, he tells about some of his amazing feats of ultralearning, including how he could learn the information of an MIT undergraduate degree by himself for free. He explains that such an undertaking requires a lot of planning, suggesting that someone devoting time to a such a project should allot about 10% of the total time to just preparing. He provides strategies for dealing with the unpleasantness of working too hard for too long, and also provides some practical suggestions to handling procrastination: “Try to get yourself to do five minutes of the project, since that is a small bite to start with. Once you’re able to get to do that, try the Pomodoro Technique: 25 minutes of work followed by a five-minute break. Once you are able to do that, then begin to put scheduled work periods on the calendar. From time to time, you will have setbacks, in which case go back to the beginning using the five-minute rule.”He makes an excellent point about an educational term known as “direct learning.” Simply put, direct learning means learning the specific thing you want to know. If you’d like to know how to do algebra, learn algebra. Don’t study some more general fields to improve your skills of analysis and hope to apply that to algebra; that would be indirect. The research that Young offers in his book points out how unsuccessful indirect learning is, and, in fact, that it’s a waste of time. He briefly asks a question that I wish more people would ask: “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…. In government run schools, they want to show that something is happening so they do all sorts of indirect learning which… does not really prepare people for anything… Direct learning is more difficult, and the schools don’t really want to challenge students.”The conclusion that readers should take away from this book is that there are so many great ways to learn. My life changed decades ago when I read Harry Lorayne. Scott Young discovered that he could get an MIT degree in a quarter of the time as everyone else. And there are so many other options as well. If that’s the case, why don’t we let people direct their own education? Why do we rely on huge government bureaucracies to raise our children when we know that, on average, they do a pretty mediocre job? (Or worse! Consider that 75% of black California boys don’t meet state reading standards.) Read Scott Young’s book and I bet that once you’ve tasted the power of real education, you’ll wonder why you wasted your youth in government institutions instead of in a well-run, creative, small, educational setting. Perhaps home schooling, charter schools, unschooling? In the end, we need to stop the government monopoly on running our schools and allow freedom for courageous thinkers like Scott Young to inspire people to love learning and to succeed in self-education. For more on the topic of improving the education of all children, not just those select few lucky enough to come across Scott Young, read “The Case against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money by Bryan Douglas Caplan.”

Arrived just as I expected