This book focuses on how to approach learning a new subject, language, skill, etc. For me, I am actively learning how to code and working on my Spanish. I found that having a skill you are actively working helps make the concepts in the book be more actionable.
The author, Scott Young, starts the book by unpacking the idea of what Ultralearning is. In one example, Scott took an entire MIT computer science course in a few months by watching the recorded lectures and completing tests online. Another way he illustrates the point is that a lot of people spend four years going through high school Spanish and yet can’t utter a complete sentence. The author was conversationally fluent in three months in several languages. He doesn’t possess any superpowers. It’s simply the approach to learning and that’s what the book is about.
The rest of the book is divided into nine principles of learning. The most impactful ones for me were:
Principle #1 Meta-learning
This means planning out your journey. You can waste a lot of time if you dive right in and are constantly having to course-correct all the time. A bad approach can slow down your progress. Take time to plan each step.
Depending on what you are learning, sometimes this is done for you. For example, I’m doing Codecademy and they lay out the entire journey for Data Science. Other things you can use are class syllabuses if the topic you are learning is academic
Principle #3 Directness
Learn by doing the exact thing you are trying to practice. If you are learning a language, for example, start speaking with people right away.
This has been a hurdle for me. I typically approach something as I want to learn everything about it and then apply it. As an example, I want to learn everything about Spanish and then speak it. There are a few things wrong with this. You’ll learn more slowly because you aren’t applying what you are learning. You may be getting a false sense of progress during your practice. The second is the idea of frequency. More important concepts or words appear more frequently when directly exposed to the thing you are trying to learn. To illustrate that point, if you know 1,000 words of a language, you can understand most verbal communication or something like that. Exposing yourself right away will reinforce the most important words or concepts. This prevents you from learning a breadth of concepts, most of which you’ll never use anyway. You want to focus on the most important parts of your skill.
This is going to change my approach to Spanish. I was adding all these random vocabulary words from books or other places I saw them and that’s kinda pointless when I have trouble with common phrases for day to day activity. In other words, I’m practicing the wrong things. I need to focus on everyday phrases for travel and find common phrases for business communication. As an example, one should just read a book in their target language knowing one isn’t going to understand every word. If the word is important, it will appear more than once in the book. Hopefully you can pick up what the word means by the context. It’s more important to go through the entire book instead of pausing every 30 seconds because you want to understand every word.
The other important thing here is that I had been putting a lot of weight on reading as the means to learn something new. However, reading is passive. You aren’t actively engaged in your skill so you shouldn’t expect to become a better negotiator just because you read Never Split the Difference, for example. You have to practice it.
Principle #6 Feedback
Feedback is harsh and uncomfortable but you need to seek it out if you want to improve.
The key here is that you can’t practice your skill in solidarity. You have to be public about it (to take a concept our of Atomic Habits). For example, if you are practicing public speaking, you have to go publicly speak. Not only publicly speak, but find an audience who is going to be ruthless and give you negative feedback. The author gave an example where a guy talked to a bunch of six graders because he figured they’d be the harshest critics.
I thought one thing that was missing from this book is to talk more about the struggle period. This is the period once you get past the basics and you sort of hit a wall. It can be difficult to continue learning when you are getting discouraged by making a ton of mistakes. Obviously mistakes are part of the journey, however, I would have liked to hear more insights into how to best manage that.
While the research is relatively recent, there’s a lot of studies showing the impact of sleep on learning and memory retention. The book Why We Sleep is an excellent view of the research. Getting less than 8 hours of sleep can seriously impact your ability to remember and slow down your learning progress. I mention this because I think you can take the concepts of this book to an extreme and spend all night trying to absorb as much material as possible which wouldn’t be a good strategy.
In conclusion, it’s a great read for anyone looking at how to maximize their time when learning something new. Highly recommended.
Check out the book on Good Reads or Amazon