Ultralearning Book Summary - Ultralearning Book explained in key points

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Ultralearning summary

Name: Ultralearning
Rating: 4.5 (980 reviews)
Author: Scott H. Young

Scott H. Young

Accelerate Your Career, Master Hard Tasks and Outsmart the Competition

4.5 (980 ratings)

30 mins

Table of Contents

Ultralearning
summarized in 10 key ideas

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Key idea 1 of 10

What’s in it for me? Get the lowdown on how to master hard skills with ease.

Have you always dreamed of speaking fluent French, but dismissed the idea as unrealistic? Would computer programming give you a professional edge if you could only find the time to take a course? Whatever your personal or professional aspirations might be, ultralearning can help you realize them in record time.

Ultralearning is an aggressive, self-motivated approach to learning that enables people to quickly and efficiently master difficult skills. By taking this approach to learning, they become ultralearners. Their feats can seem intimidating at first – think along the lines of learning a new language in less than three months. But the truth is that anyone can adopt the ultralearning strategy and see results.

These blinks will outline the key principles of ultralearning and give you the specific strategies and techniques you need to start your own ultralearning project and successfully pull it off!

Along the way, you’ll discover

why all your learning should begin with metalearning;
why ultralearners succeed where many educational institutions fail; and
what common memorization mistake you’re probably making, and how to fix it.

Ultralearning is the smart, strategic way to skill up for personal fulfillment and professional advantage.

Benny Lewis is a polyglot who takes an average of three months to learn a new language. That makes him an ultralearner: a self-directed learner who can acquire new skills in a short time frame, through adopting an aggressive and strategic learning approach.

Ultralearning projects are self-directed, challenging and time-consuming. Just look at the ultralearning project devised by Eric Barone. Most successful computer games are created by teams of professionals with huge budgets. Barone, an IT graduate working as a theater usher, decided to create one completely on his own. Over five years, Barone refined his game’s mechanics through intensive trial and error. Along the way, he taught himself pixel art, music composition, sound design and story writing.

The finished game, Stardew Valley, was released in 2016. It sold over three million copies that year and landed Barone on Forbes’ ‘30 Under 30’ list.

Your ultralearning project might not land you in the pages of Forbes magazine, but it can bring ‘unrealistic’ dreams, like learning French or mastering watercolor painting, within reach. Beyond being a path to personal fulfillment, though, ultralearning can help you hone your professional edge. And staying competitive professionally has never been more urgent.

As medium-skilled jobs are threatened by automation, workers need to adapt, upskill and retrain to stay competitive. In the new professional landscape, the most desirable workers have hybridized skill sets: librarian/data analyst, architect/textile designer, accountant/Mandarin speaker. Ultralearners can diversify their skill sets without taking time off work to pursue further education or qualifications.

If ultralearning sounds appealing, you’re probably already wondering how it works. The following blinks will break down the principles of ultralearning, and outline how to implement them in your own ultralearning project.

Metalearning is a crucial, yet overlooked, step for reaching a big-picture understanding of your field.

Whether you’re teaching yourself stochastic calculus or perfecting your tennis serve, your ultralearning project should always begin with metalearning: the process of learning how to learn. The idea here is that you shouldn’t start by absorbing information at random. You should first establish how information is structured in your chosen field.

For example, the writing system of Mandarin Chinese isn’t just a bunch of random characters. Instead, the characters are organized by radicals, which are visual markers that express the relationships between those characters. So if you were learning Mandarin, you’d want to start with organizing principles like radicals, rather than just memorizing each character individually.

Simple mental strategies can defend against distractions and refine your focus.

From constant email notifications on your phone to the temptation to binge the latest Netflix series, modern life is full of distractions. But you don’t have to let these distractions stop you from reaching your ultralearning goals! There are some simple techniques you can use to overcome the challenges of finding your focus.

The first challenge to finding your focus? Getting focused in the first place. Trick yourself into getting started by setting a timer for, say, three minutes. Promise yourself that you can stop working when the timer goes off. But at the end of three minutes, you might have found the momentum you need to keep working.

Taking the shortest route from theory to practice allows you to skill up smoothly.

Imagine learning French all through high school, then not being able to hold a simple conversation when you take a trip to Paris. It’s a common situation, and it all comes about through a failure to transfer. Transfer is the process of learning something in one context (like a French class), then transferring it to another (like Paris). Despite its importance, formal education often fails to optimize transfer.

The problem with formal education is that it sets up an indirect path between the learning context and the target environment – the context in which learned skills and knowledge are actually applied. Rote learning French vocabulary in a high school classroom is a far cry from asking the nearest Parisian how to get to the metro station. Ultralearners know to keep the path between their learning environment and their target environment as direct as possible. By doing this, they cultivate a quality of ultralearning called directness.

Use drilling to hone your skills to perfection.

What do elite athletes, piano prodigies and successful ultralearners have in common? They all rely on drilling to perfect their techniques and maintain their competitive edge. So, how can you drill strategically to achieve the best results?

Crucially, you should never begin your project by drilling. Instead, use the direct-then-drill approach. To do this, start with direct practice, whether you’re writing code or weaving tapestry. Use this direct practice to identify the areas where you wish to drill. After drilling, go back to direct practice until it becomes necessary to drill again.

Using challenging recall strategies is the best way to retrieve information you’ve learned.

Learning color theory is a great way to improve your artistic skill and know-how – but only if your hard-won knowledge doesn’t desert you when you’re at your easel. It’s pointless learning new skills, concepts and procedures if you’re unable to retrieve them quickly and efficiently. There are two methods you can use to improve your retrieval rate. But be careful! One of them is far more effective than the other.

The first is review: going back over the materials you’ve just studied. The second is recall: trying to recall facts and concepts from memory.

Elicit high-quality feedback to identify your weaknesses and improve your performance.

No matter what level of expertise you’re at, you need to seek out feedback on your progress if you want to improve. Moreover, you need to learn how to distinguish between different levels of feedback and acquire strategies for eliciting feedback.

Almost all feedback is useful, but not all feedback is created equal. It’s helpful to divide feedback into three different categories. The first and most basic form of feedback is outcome feedback. This feedback can confirm whether or not you’ve reached a desired outcome. Imagine you’re giving a public talk and the audience applauds at the end. That’s outcome feedback. It can be encouraging, but it’s hard to glean any more information from this type of feedback.

Smart, strategically-spaced memorization sessions ensure that what you learn really sticks.

In 2016, Nigel Richards won the World French Scrabble Championships, despite not speaking French. There are 386,000 French words approved for Scrabble, and Richards committed them to memory. That’s extreme ultralearning!

Your ultralearning project might not require so much memorization, but you’ll probably need to memorize some facts, formulas or procedures.

Cultivating deep understanding is the surest path to finding your intuitive brilliance.

Physicist Richard Feynman was known for his uncanny intuition; he had the knack of looking at a complex problem and seemingly plucking the solution out of thin air. The technical term for this ability is intuitive expertise, and it can seem rather mysterious to outside observers. But there’s a perfectly rational explanation for Feynman’s flashes of brilliance: his deep understanding of physics enabled him to intuit unexpected connections and patterns.

Whatever subject you may be studying, it takes time and patience to build up the level of deep understanding on which intuitive expertise is built. But by employing a few simple strategies, you can accelerate the rate at which you acquire it.

Strategic experimentation lays the groundwork for true innovation.

How did Vincent van Gogh go from an art school dropout, whom classmates recalled as an ‘unremarkable’ painter, to the innovative artist who painted masterpieces like Sunflowers and Starry Night? Through sustained, relentless experimentation. Look back over van Gogh’s full oeuvre and you’ll see he didn’t hit on his distinctive aesthetic immediately. Instead, he tirelessly tried different styles and techniques until he mastered his craft. Then, he experimented even more, finally arriving at a unique style.

Experimentation is ultralearning’s secret ingredient – the technique can take you from accomplished practitioner to true innovator. But experimentation can seem a little overwhelming at first. If you’re wondering where to begin, one technique you can use is to copy then create: emulate someone else’s work, then use this as a stepping-stone towards testing your own ideas.

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What is Ultralearning about?

Ultralearners are ordinary people who can master difficult skills with extraordinary speed. As a result, they achieve tremendous personal success and cultivate a serious professional advantage. But how exactly do they pull it off? In Ultralearning (2019), Scott H. Young analyzes the aggressive, self-directed learning strategies of some of the world’s most successful ultralearners and breaks them down into techniques and strategies that anyone can implement.

Who should read Ultralearning?

Anyone who’s tried to learn a new skill and become discouraged.
Workers who want to extend and upgrade their professional skill sets.
Busy people who want to skill up efficiently and effectively.

About the Author

Scott H. Young is a writer, programmer and entrepreneur with a passion for self-mastery and career development. He’s spent years studying the lives and work of ultralearners, uncovering their incredible learning strategies and distilling them into easy-to-apply principles designed to optimize learning for everyone. But Young hasn’t just studied the ultralearners, he is one. Through the principles of ultralearning, he’s taught himself multivariate calculus to a university level and become proficient in Mandarin Chinese, among other languages.

Categories with Ultralearning

Personal Development Education Career & Success

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