Ultralearning

Goodreads

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44770129-ultralearning

Things to remember

Immersion is the process of surrounding yourself with the target environment in which the skill is practiced. This has the advantage of requiring much larger amounts of practice than would be typical, as well as exposing you to a fuller range of situations in which the skill applies. (Basically my startup idea)

▪ Ultralearning: A strategy for acquiring skills and knowledge that is both self-directed and intense.

• First, ultralearning is a strategy.
• Second, ultralearning is self-directed.
• Finally, ultralearning is intense.

▪ I believe there are three main cases in which this strategy for quickly acquiring hard skills can apply: accelerating the career you have, transitioning to a new career, and cultivating a hidden advantage in a competitive world.

▪ Instead it was a compelling vision of what they wanted to do, a deep curiosity, or even the challenge itself that drove them forward.

▪ The best ultralearners are those who blend the practical reasons for learning a skill with an inspiration that comes from something that excites them.

▪ Metalearning: First Draw a Map. Start by learning how to learn the subject or skill you want to tackle. Discover how to do good research and how to draw on your past competencies to learn new skills more easily. Focus: Sharpen Your Knife. Cultivate the ability to concentrate. Carve out chunks of time when you can focus on learning, and make it easy to just do it. Directness: Go Straight Ahead. Learn by doing the thing you want to become good at. Don’t trade it off for other tasks, just because those are more convenient or comfortable. Drill: Attack Your Weakest Point. Be ruthless in improving your weakest points. Break down complex skills into small parts; then master those parts and build them back together again. Retrieval: Test to Learn. Testing isn’t simply a way of assessing knowledge but a way of creating it. Test yourself before you feel confident, and push yourself to actively recall information rather than passively review it. Feedback: Don’t Dodge the Punches. Feedback is harsh and uncomfortable. Know how to use it without letting your ego get in the way. Extract the signal from the noise, so you know what to pay attention to and what to ignore. Retention: Don’t Fill a Leaky Bucket. Understand what you forget and why. Learn to remember things not just for now but forever. Intuition: Dig Deep Before Building Up. Develop your intuition through play and exploration of concepts and skills. Understand how understanding works, and don’t recourse to cheap tricks of memorization to avoid deeply knowing things. Experimentation: Explore Outside Your Comfort Zone. All of these principles are only starting points. True mastery comes not just from following the path trodden by others but from exploring possibilities they haven’t yet imagined.

▪ Benchmarking The way to start any learning project is by finding the common ways in which people learn the skill or subject.

▪ The Emphasize/Exclude Method involves first finding areas of study that align with the goals you identified in the first part of your research.

▪ The second part of the Emphasize/Exclude Method is to omit or delay elements of your benchmarked curriculum that don’t align with your goals.

▪ A good rule of thumb is that you should invest approximately 10 percent of your total expected learning time into research prior to starting.

▪ Metalearning research isn’t a onetime activity you do only before starting your project. You should continue to do research as you learn more.

▪ This type of analysis depends on something known as the Law of Diminishing Returns. This states that the more time you invest in an activity (such as more research), the weaker and weaker the benefits will be as you get closer and closer to the ideal approach.

▪ This confidence and ability are the ultimate goals of ultralearning, even though they’re often hard to see from the outset.

▪ Why do we procrastinate? The simple answer is that at some level there’s a craving that drives you to do something else, there’s an aversion to doing the task itself, or both.

▪ But most motives to procrastinate are silly when you verbalize them, yet that doesn’t stop them from ruling your life. Which brings me to the first step to overcoming procrastination: recognize when you are procrastinating.

▪ The concept behind the 5-Minute Rule is simple: if you’re struggling to begin a task or feeling overwhelmed, commit to working on it for just five minutes. The idea is that five minutes is a short enough time to feel manageable, so it’s easier to push yourself to get started. Once you get going, you often find that the task isn’t as difficult or unpleasant as anticipated, and you’re likely to continue working well beyond those initial five minutes.

▪ Pomodoro Technique

▪ Eventually, if working on your project is not troubled by extreme procrastination, you may want to switch to using a calendar on which you carve out specific hours of your day in advance to work on the project.

▪ The second problem people tend to encounter is an inability to sustain focus.

▪ Distraction Source 1: Your Environment

▪ It’s better to rid yourself of this vice than to strengthen bad habits of ineffective learning.

▪ Distraction Source 2: Your Task

▪ Whenever you have a choice between using different tools for learning, you may want to consider which is easier to focus on when making that decision.

▪ Distraction Source 3: Your Mind

▪ I may feel as though I’m returning my attention to a task, only for it to jump away fifteen seconds later, repeating again and again for an hour or more. In such moments, recognize that by not reacting to the emotion at the level of abandoning your task entirely, you’ll diminish its intensity in the future. You’ll also strengthen your commitment to continue working in future situations like this, so they will become easier.

▪ learn to let it arise, note it, and release it or let it go,

▪ Problem 3: Failing to Create the Right Kind of Focus

▪ This laboratory experiment shows that you should find out what works best for your own ability to focus through self-testing.

▪ My advice is this: recognize where you are, and start small. If you’re the kind of person who can’t sit still for a minute, try sitting still for half a minute. Half a minute soon becomes one minute, then two.

▪ many of us are building the wrong portfolio of skills for the kinds of career and personal achievements we want to create. We want to speak a language but try to learn mostly by playing on fun apps, rather than conversing with actual people. We want to work on collaborative, professional programs but mostly code scripts in isolation. We want to become great speakers, so we buy a book on communication, rather than practice presenting.

▪ The simplest way to be direct is to learn by doing. Whenever possible, if you can spend a good portion of your learning time just doing the thing you want to get better at, the problem of directness will likely go away.

▪ 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.

▪ Tactic 1: Project-Based Learning

▪ The rationale is simple: if you organize your learning around producing something, you’re guaranteed to at least learn how to produce that thing.

▪ Tactic 2: Immersive Learning

▪ For example, novice programmers might join open-source projects to expose themselves to new coding challenges.

▪ Tactic 3: The Flight Simulator Method

▪ When evaluating different methods for learning, those that significantly simulate the direct approach will transfer a lot better.

▪ Tactic 4: The Overkill Approach

▪ One way you can overkill a project is to aim for a particular test, performance, or challenge that will be above the skill level you strictly require.

▪ Direct-Then-Drill Approach

▪ The first step is to try to practice the skill directly. This means figuring out where and how the skill will be used and then trying to match that situation as close as is feasible when practicing. Practice a language by actually speaking it. Learn programming by writing software. Improve your writing skills by penning essays. This initial connection and subsequent feedback loop ensure that the transfer problem won’t occur.

▪ The next step is to analyze the direct skill and try to isolate components that are either rate-determining steps in your performance or subskills you find difficult to improve because there are too many other things going on for you to focus on them.

▪ The final step is to go back to direct practice and integrate what you’ve learned.

▪ The earlier you are in the learning process, the faster this cycle should be.

▪ The first is figuring out when and what to drill.

▪ The second difficulty with this principle is designing the drill to produce improvement.

▪ The easiest way to create a drill is to isolate a slice in time of a longer sequence of actions.

▪ Look for parts of the skill you’re learning that can be decomposed into specific moments of time that have heightened difficulty or importance.

▪ Sometimes what you’ll want to practice isn’t a slice in time of a larger skill but a particular cognitive component.

▪ The Magnifying Glass Method is to spend more time on one component of the skill than you would otherwise.

▪ One strategy I’ve seen repeatedly from ultralearners is to start with a skill that they don’t have all the prerequisites for. Then, when they inevitably do poorly, they go back a step, learn one of the foundational topics, and repeat the exercise. This practice of starting too hard and learning prerequisites as they are needed can be frustrating, but it saves a lot of time learning subskills that don’t actually drive performance much.

▪ Instead of being forced to do them for unknown purposes, it is now up to you to find a way to enhance the learning process by accelerating learning on the specific things that you find most difficult.

▪ The actual results, however, weren’t even close. Testing yourself—trying to retrieve information without looking at the text—clearly outperformed all other conditions.

▪ Karpicke’s research points to a possible explanation: Human beings don’t have the ability to know with certainty how well they’ve learned something.

▪ The idea, therefore, is to find the right midpoint: far enough away to make whatever is retrieved remembered deeply, not so far away that you’ve forgotten everything.

▪ An interesting observation from retrieval research, known as the forward-testing effect, shows that retrieval not only helps enhance what you’ve learned previously but can even help prepare you to learn better.

▪ Being able to look things up is certainly an advantage, but without a certain amount of knowledge inside your head, it doesn’t help you solve hard problems.

▪ How to Practice Retrieval

▪ One rule I’ve found helpful for this is to restrict myself to one question per section of a text, thus forcing myself to acknowledge and rephrase the main point rather than zoom in on a detail that will be largely irrelevant later.

▪ Retrieval is not a sufficient tool to create genius, but it may be a necessary one.

▪ Ericsson has found that the ability to gain immediate feedback on one’s performance is an essential ingredient in reaching expert levels of performance.

▪ But feedback often backfires when it is aimed at a person’s ego. Praise, a common type of feedback that teachers often use (and students enjoy), is usually harmful to further learning. When feedback steers into evaluations of you as an individual (e.g., “You’re so smart!” or “You’re lazy”), it usually has a negative impact on learning.

▪ This means that when seeking feedback, the ultralearner needs to be on guard for two possibilities. The first is overreacting to feedback (both positive and negative) that doesn’t offer specific information that leads to improvement.

▪ Second, when it is incorrectly applied, feedback can have a negative impact on motivation.

▪ Fear of feedback often feels more uncomfortable than experiencing the feedback itself.

▪ This illustrates that ultralearning isn’t simply about maximizing feedback but also knowing when to selectively ignore elements of it t o extract the useful information.

▪ In general, research has pointed to immediate feedback being superior in settings outside of the laboratory.

▪ How to Improve Your Feedback

▪ Tactic 1: Noise Cancellation

▪ Tactic 2: Hitting the Difficulty Sweet Spot

▪ Ultralearners carefully adjust their environment so that they’re not able to predict whether they’ll succeed or fail. If they fail too often, they simplify the problem so they can start noticing when they’re doing things right. If they fail too little, they’ll make the task harder or their standards stricter so that they can distinguish the success of different approaches.

▪ Tactic 3: Metafeedback

▪ Tactic 4: High-Intensity, Rapid Feedback

▪ By throwing yourself into a high-intensity, rapid feedback situation, you may initially feel uncomfortable, but you’ll get over that initial aversion much faster than if you wait months or years before getting feedback.

▪ Memory is the residue of thought. —Daniel Willingham, cognitive psychologist

▪ There are at least two flavors of this: proactive interference and retroactive interference.

▪ Memory Mechanism 3—Overlearning: Practice Beyond Perfect

▪ Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything.

▪ To retain knowledge is ultimately to combat the inevitable human tendency to forget.

▪ How to Build Your Intuition

▪ Rule 1: Don’t Give Up on Hard Problems Easily

▪ One way you can introduce this into your own efforts is to give yourself a “struggle timer” as you work on problems. When you feel like giving up and that you can’t possibly figure out the solution to a difficult problem, try setting a timer for another ten minutes to push yourself a bit further.

▪ Rule 2: Prove Things to Understand Them

▪ Rule 3: Always Start with a Concrete Example

▪ Rule 4: Don’t Fool Yourself

▪ The Feynman Technique

▪ The method is quite simple: Write down the concept or problem you want to understand at the top of a piece of paper. In the space below, explain the idea as if you had to teach it to someone else. If it’s a concept, ask yourself how you would convey the idea to someone who has never heard of it before. If it’s a problem, explain how to solve it and—crucially—why that solution procedure makes sense to you. When you get stuck, meaning your understanding fails to provide a clear answer, go back to your book, notes, teacher, or reference material to find the answer.

▪ Experimentation

▪ Step 1: Do Your Research

▪ Step 2: Schedule Your Time

▪ As a bonus step, for those who are embarking on longer projects of six months or more, I strongly recommend doing a pilot week of your schedule.

▪ Step 3: Execute Your Plan

▪ Step 4: Review Your Results

▪ 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.

▪ Step 5: Choose to Maintain or Master What You’ve Learned