by Scott Young
Here are some questions to ask yourself to determine whether you’re slipping from the ideal:
Metalearning. Have I done research into what are the typical ways of learning this subject or skill? Have I interviewed successful learners to see what resources and advice they can recommend? Have I spent about 10 percent of the total time on preparing my project?
Focus. Am I focused when I spend time learning, or am I multitasking and distracted? Am I skipping learning sessions or procrastinating? When I start a session, how long does it take before I’m in a good flow? How long can I sustain that focus before my mind starts to wander? How sharp is my attention? Should it be more concentrated for intensity or more diffuse for creativity?
Directness. Am I learning the skill in the way I’ll eventually be using it? If not, what mental processes are missing from my practice that exist in the real environment? How can I practice transferring the knowledge I learn from my book/class/video to real life?
Drill. Am I spending time focusing on the weakest points of my performance? What is the rate-limiting step that is holding me back? Does it feel as though my learning is slowing down and that there’s too many components of the skill to master? If so, how can I split apart a complex skill to work on smaller, more manageable components of it?
Retrieval. Am I spending most of my time reading and reviewing, or am I solving problems and recalling things from memory without looking at my notes? Do I have some way of testing myself, or do I just assume I’ll remember? Can I successfully explain what I learned yesterday, last week, a year ago? How do I know if I can?
Feedback. Am I getting honest feedback about my performance early on, or am I trying to dodge the punches and avoid criticism? Do I know what I’m learning well and what I’m not? Am I using feedback correctly, or am I overreacting to noisy data?
Retention. Do I have a plan in place to remember what I’m learning long term? Am I spacing my exposure to information so it will stick longer? Am I turning factual knowledge into procedures that I’ll retain? Am I overlearning the most critical aspects of the skill?
Intuition. Do I deeply understand the things I’m learning, or am I just memorizing? Could I teach the ideas and procedures I’m studying to someone else? Is it clear to me why what I’m learning is true, or does it all seem arbitrary and unrelated?
Experimentation. Am I getting stuck with my current resources and techniques? Do I need to branch out and try new approaches to reach my goal? How can I go beyond mastering the basics and create a unique style to solve problems creatively and do things others haven’t explored before?
Together these principles serve as directions, not destinations. In each case, look at how you’re currently progressing through your materials, and see what you could do differently. Do you need to switch resources? Do you need to stick to the same resources but spend more time on a different kind of practice? Should you seek out new environments for feedback, directness, or immersion? These are all subtle adjustments you can make along the way.
Step 4: Review Your Results
After your project is finished (or if you end up putting it on pause for some reason), you should spend a little time analyzing it. What went right? What went wrong? What should you do next time to avoid making those same mistakes?
Not all of your projects will be successful. I’ve had ultralearning projects that I felt good about. I’ve had others that didn’t work out as well as I had hoped. Although the tendency is to blame willpower and motivation, very often the problems with projects can be traced back to their conception. I worked on one project devoted to improving my Korean, after my trip, by investing five hours per week. It wasn’t as successful as I had hoped because I didn’t invest enough time in focusing on immersive, direct practice from the get-go. Instead, my study method depended a lot on textbook exercises, which were boring and didn’t transfer too well to the real world. If I had thought a little more about it, I would have spent a week or two ahead of time trying to find places to practice, instead of trying to pivot midway, when I was already losing some motivation. This struggle illustrates that mastering the principles is a lifelong process. Even after many experiences learning languages, and knowing what works well, I slipped into a less effective approach because I didn’t plan my project adequately. In other cases a project might not work out as you had hoped, but that lesson will still be valuable. I started with a project to learn cognitive science more deeply, going from a book list. Eventually, however, a lot of that project morphed into a desire to do research for this book, which put me into contact with a lot of science, now combined with an outlet for a more direct way to apply it.
Even your successful projects are worth analyzing. They can often tell you more than your failures because the reasons a successful project succeeded are the very elements you want to retain and replicate for the future. With ultralearning, as with all self-education, the goal isn’t merely to learn one skill or subject but to hone and enhance your overall learning process. Each successful project can be refined and improved for the next one.
Step 5: Choose to Maintain or Master What You’ve Learned
After you’ve learned your skill and analyzed your efforts, you have a choice to make. What do you want to do with the skill? With no plan in place, most knowledge eventually decays. This can be alleviated somewhat by following the principles of ultralearning. However, all knowledge decays without any form of intervention, so the best time to make a choice about how you’re going to handle that is right after you learn something.
Option 1: Maintenance
The first option is to invest enough practice to sustain the skill but without any concrete goal of getting it to a new level. This can often be accomplished by setting up a habit of regular practice, even if it is a minimal one. As mentioned in the chapter on retention, one of the worries I had after the year without English project was that learning languages so intensively over a short period of time might lead not just to rapid learning but to rapid forgetting. As a result, I made an effort to continue practice after the trip finished, spending thirty minutes a week on each language in the first year and thirty minutes a month on each language in the year after that.
Another option is to try to integrate the skill into your life. This is how I maintain my programming skills, where I write Python scripts to handle work tasks that would otherwise be cumbersome or annoying. This kind of practice is more sporadic, but it ensures that I will keep it up enough to make it usable. This kind of lightweight usage is far from the deep math and algorithms I learned from my MIT coursework, but it is enough to keep a foot in the door if I want to embark on a bigger project at a later time.
Forgetting, as was discovered by Hermann Ebbinghaus more than a hundred years ago, falls off with an exponentially decaying curve. That means that memories that are retained for longer are less and less likely to be forgotten when you follow up at a later date. This pattern suggests that maintenance practice, too, can fall off on a decaying rate, so that the bulk of the knowledge you’ve acquired will be preserved. This means you might want to start with a habit of more serious practice but reduce the time spent on it a year or two after your project is finished to still get most of the benefit, as I did with the languages I studied.
Option 2: Relearning
Forgetting isn’t ideal, but for many skills the costs of relearning the skill later are smaller than the costs of keeping it continuously sharp. There are a couple reasons for this. First, you may have learned more than you actually need, so if some of that knowledge selectively decays due to disuse, it is automatically going to be the less important knowledge that you acquired. I studied a lot of MIT subjects that I don’t think I’ll ever use again, although understanding the gist of them might come in handy later. Therefore, keeping my ability to prove theorems of modal logic, for example, up to date has only marginal value. Knowing what modal logic is and where I might apply it in case I want to learn something that requires it is probably e
nough.
Relearning is generally easier than first-time learning. Although performance on tests drops off dramatically, the knowledge is likely inaccessible rather than completely forgotten. This means that doing a refresher course or practice series can be enough to reactivate most of it in a fraction of the time it took to learn it initially. This may be the optimal strategy for subjects that you need to use infrequently and for which situations for using them won’t pop up without warning. Often, recognizing that a certain domain of knowledge is helpful for a particular problem type is more important than the details of solving the problem, since the latter can be relearned but forgetting the former will cut you off from solving those problems.
Option 3: Mastery
The third option, of course, is to dive deeper into the skill you have learned. This can be done through continued practice at a lighter pace or by following up with another ultralearning project. A common pattern I’ve noticed in my own learning is that an initial project covers a wider territory and some basics and exposes new avenues for learning that were previously obscured. You might identify a subtopic or branch of skill within the domain you were learning before that you want to follow up. Otherwise, you may decide to transfer a skill learned in one place to a new domain. One of my goals after returning from my trip to China was to learn to read Chinese better, which had been only an incidental goal while I was traveling there.
Mastery is a long road that extends far beyond a single project. Sometimes the barriers you overcome in your initial effort are enough to clear the way for a slow process of accumulation to reach eventual mastery. In many domains, getting started is quite frustrating, so it’s difficult to practice without a certain amount of effort. After that threshold is reached, however, the process switches to being one of accumulating huge swaths of knowledge and therefore can proceed at a more patient pace. On the other hand, some projects will get stuck, and you will need to spend time unlearning and push through your frustrations again to get ahead. Those kinds of projects benefit more from the precise and aggressive methods of ultralearning to reach eventual mastery.
Alternatives to Ultralearning: Low-Intensity Habits and Formal Instruction
At the start of this book, I pointed out that ultralearning is a strategy. Being a strategy implies that it is good for solving certain problems. Given that the practice is somewhat uncommon, I wanted to spend the book focused on this strategy, rather than try to give a diffuse description of all possible ways you can learn effectively. However, now that I’ve done that, I think it’s worthwhile to touch on two other strategies that can work with ultralearning, in different contexts.
None of the ultralearners I encountered approaches learning the same way for every kind of learning they do. Benny Lewis, for example, does do intensive learning projects for languages, but he has learned most of his languages over repeat visits to the countries they are spoken in, digging deeper into languages he previously established in intense bursts. Roger Craig did learn aggressively to win at Jeopardy!, but he also engaged in more leisurely acquisition of trivia when his appearance on the game show wasn’t imminent. Being an ultralearner doesn’t imply that everything one learns has to be done in the most aggressive and dramatic fashion possible. I want to briefly consider the two main alternative strategies to ultralearning to see how they fit into a bigger picture of lifelong learning.
Alternative Strategy 1: Low-Intensity Habits
Low-intensity habits work well when engaging in learning is spontaneous, your frustration level is low, and learning is automatically rewarding. In these cases, when the barriers to learning are fairly low, all you need to do is show up. No fancy project, principles, or effort is required. Once you reach a conversational level in a language, for instance, it’s often fairly easy to travel and live in a country where it is spoken, accumulating more and more vocabulary and knowledge over a longer period of time. Similarly, once you become good enough at programming to use it for your job, the job itself will push you to learn new things at a regular pace. If you’ve mastered the basics of a subject so that you can read denser books about it, reading books on the topic is mostly a matter of putting in time, not developing ingenious learning strategies.
Of course, there’s a spectrum of habits, from zero-effort, spontaneous engagement to the high-effort, rapid skill acquisition of ultralearning. Most habits are somewhere in between, necessitating a bit of effort but perhaps not the full-scale intensity of an ultralearning project. You may have learned enough Excel to create your own spreadsheet macros, but you don’t always find opportunities or time to use it, so you need to push yourself a little to practice. You may have learned public speaking well, but it still takes some guts to go onstage. The decision of whether the right step forward is to set up long-term habits or to create a concentrated ultralearning project is often not crystal clear and may depend more on your personality and life constraints than a hard-and-fast rule.
Habits tend to work best when the act of learning is mostly a process of accumulation, adding new skills and knowledge. Ultralearning and more deliberate efforts are better suited to when improvement in a field requires unlearning ineffective behaviors or skills. Increasing your vocabulary in a foreign language is often a slow process of accumulation; you are learning words you didn’t know before. Improving your pronunciation, on the other hand, is an act of unlearning. You’re training yourself to use different muscular movements that aren’t natural to you. Ultralearning also tends to be better for areas in which learning has greater frustration barriers and psychological obstacles that make any form of practice too great an effort to be an easily established habit.
Throughout this book, we’ve explored the trade-off that occurs between doing what’s effective for learning and what’s easy and enjoyable. Sometimes what’s the most fun isn’t very effective, and what’s effective isn’t easy. This trade-off may push you to opt for easier, more enjoyable forms of learning that sacrifice some effectiveness. However, in my own experience, I’ve noticed that enjoyment tends to come from being good at things. Once you feel competent in a skill, it starts to get a lot more fun. Therefore, although a tension between the two can exist in the short term, I think pursuing aggressive ultralearning projects is often the surer way to enjoy learning more, as you’re more likely to reach a level where learning automatically becomes fun.
Alternative Strategy 2: Formal, Structured Education
In the beginning of this book, I explained that ultralearning is self-directed, although not necessarily solitary. Being self-directed is about who is making decisions, not about whether other people are involved. Therefore, there is no contradiction in pursuing ultralearning within a school or university. That might be the best way to learn the skills you want to acquire. Just treat it like any other resource.
That distinction notwithstanding, I think it’s worth talking about other reasons you might want to pursue formal education rather than ultralearning. The most obvious is to acquire credentials. If those are necessary or recommended for your chosen line of work, you might need to be satisfied with making sacrifices for your learning in order to acquire them. The message of this book isn’t that you should drop out of school to learn on your own but that you should take control over your own learning, wherever that may be. Another reason to pursue formal education is that it creates a learning environment that may be beneficial. Although many aspects of school are woefully indirect and ineffective, others fare much better. Design and art schools often function like apprenticeships. Some programs allow for team projects that are difficult to start on your own. Finally, the postgraduate levels of academia create communities where immersion is possible, so that you acquire not only the ideas that are written down in books and papers but those that are communicated indirectly between experts in their fields. Ultralearning isn’t a rejection of those opportunities, and I would be disappointed if I were to be misread as arguing that they don’t exist or are better replaced with a solitary lea
rning effort. The correct mindset to cultivate isn’t a rejection of anything slower or standardized but a recognition that the possibilities for learning anything are considerably broader than they might first appear.
Lifelong Learning
The goal of ultralearning is to expand the opportunities available to you, not narrow them. It is to create new avenues for learning and to push yourself to pursue them aggressively rather than timidly waiting by the sidelines. This is not going to be a method suitable for everyone, but for those who feel inspired to use it, I hope it provides a start.
Chapter XIV
An Unconventional Education
Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select—doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief.
—Psychologist John Watson
Judit Polgár is widely considered to be the best female chess player of all time. At age seven, she won her first game against a chess master while blindfolded. At twelve, she was ranked fifty-fifth of all chess players in the world by the Fédération Internationale des Échecs (FIDE) (World Chess Federation). By fifteen, she had become the youngest-ever grand master, beating the illustrious Bobby Fischer’s previous record by one month. At her peak, Polgár was ranked eighth in the world and competed in the World Chess Championship, the only woman ever to have done so.