I want to familiarize myself with methods and procedures for quickly picking up new skills which will help me prepare for a fast-pacing future.

#Ultralearning is a strategy for acquiring skills and knowledge

Ultralearning is a strategy for acquiring skills and knowledge that is both self-directed and intense. Self-direction is about who is in charge, who is deciding about what to learn and why. It’s not about where the learning takes place. Ultralearning is a good strategy for the future when skill polarization in the economy will be more diverse. You need to learn things quickly, and you need to do it constantly. Ultralearning is a valuable skill for dealing with a changing world. The ability to learn hard things quickly will become increasingly more valuable. Doing hard things stretches your self-conception. It gives you confidence that you might be able to do things that weren’t possible for you before.

#Passive learning creates knowledge—active practice creates skill

You can research the best instructions on the bench pressing technique, but the only way to build strength is to actually practice lifting weights. You can read all the books you want on a particular subject, but the only way to make it part of you is to practice.

Learning can be very useful but the danger is that the act of soaking up new facts can be disconnected from the process of actually refining a skill. You can know every fact of an industry but still lack the real-world expertise because you haven’t practiced the craft. Know the difference between learning and practice. Directness is what leads to skill development.

#A metaskill is the kind of skill that assists with other skills

Public speaking is a metaskill that helps with other skills: confidence, storytelling, writing, and selling skills. It touches on many things. A metaskill is sort of like the glue that connects your other skills.

#Ways of doing ultralearning

There are three main ways you can apply ultralearning to your schedule:

  1. New part-time projects.
  2. Learning sabbaticals.
  3. Reimagining existing learning efforts. Ultralearning doesn’t have to be a separate activity. It could be applied to the time you already spend learning.

#Principles for ultralearning

Principles allow you to solve problems you haven’t encountered before. Principles make sense of the world. They help you in a way that a recipe or mechanical procedure never could. Principles provides guidance.

For an ultralearning project there are nine underlying principles:

  1. Metalearning—Draw your map
  2. Focus—Sharpen your knife
  3. Directness—Go straight ahead
  4. Drill—Attack your weakest point
  5. Retrieval—Test to learn
  6. Feedback—Don’t dodge the punches
  7. Retention—Don’t fill a leaky bucket
  8. Intuition—Dig deep before building up
  9. Experimentation—Explore outside your comfort zone

#Use metalearning to figure out underlying principles

Metalearning is an abstraction—the underlying principle compared to direct learning.

It’s about learning how knowledge is structured within a specific subject. How could it be acquired? Metalearning forms the map, showing you how to get to your goals without getting lost.

Linguistic examples are normally easier to study because there is a direct separation between metalearning and regular learning. Learning French vocabulary won’t help you much with Chinese vocabulary (direct learning), but understanding how vocabulary acquisition works in French will also help with learning Chinese (metalearning).

The more Ultralearning projects you can practice from, the more skills and knowledge you’ll pick up for how to do it well. The benefits of metalearning are long-term. They don’t affect only the current project you’re working with, but influence your overall strength as a learner.

#The Feynman technique

A strategy to help developing intuition about the ideas you are learning.

  1. Write down the concept or problem you want to understand at the top of a piece of paper.
  2. In the space below, explain the idea as if you had to teach someone else. If it’s a concept: ask yourself how you would convey it to someone who has never heard it before. If it’s a problem: explain how to solve it and why that solution procedure makes sense to you.
  3. When you get stuck, go back to your book, notes or reference to find the answer.

#Use a struggle timer as you work on problems

When you feel like giving up on figuring out the solution to a hard problem, set a timer for another ten minutes to push yourself a bit further.

#Turn factual knowledge into procedures

This will help you retain the learning. It will get ingrained in how you do things. Proceduralize your practice before moving on. You need to make it sticky in your mind. Think about how you never forget how to ride a bike.

Learning a skill proceeds through stages, starting declarative but end up procedural with more practice.

For instance when you start learning to type on a keyboard it’s declarative—you have to remember the position of all the keys. But as you practice more the fingers will move effortlessly, and without thought, over the keys. Proceduralization serves as cues or access points for other knowledge.

#Tactic - Immersive learning

Immersion is the process of surrounding yourself with people you need to practice your skill. For instance, if you want to learn French, it’s easier to surround yourself with people speaking French because it will give you no option but to start engaging with the language.

#Mnemonics - A picture retains a thousand words

  • Mnemonics is about studying systems for improving memory.
  • Be hyper-specific, design mnemonic strategies to remember very specific patterns of information. The keyword method is about associating a vivid picture of something you know to something you don’t know. This works well with new words from a foreign language.
  • The disadvantage with mnemonics is that it tends to help most with things that aren’t so useful. Like remembering numbers in a sequence for instance. We have computers that help us with these tasks and therefore they’re not so valuable in our current society.

#Experiment with new approaches to unlearn your ineffective ways

Learning during the early phases of a skill is an act of accumulation. Getting better, however, is more a process of unlearning ineffective ways of solving problems and experiment with new approaches. As creativity becomes more valuable, experimentation becomes essential.

#Practice beyond perfect

Patterns that are repeated more than what is necessary for the time is sticking better to your mind and becomes automatic. For example drawing shadows on objects since my drawing course I did six years ago. Learning is not learning every fact and skill evenly. Overlearn a smaller subset of very common patterns.

#Decay - forgetting with time

This theory simply states that memories decay with time. Things learned this year are recalled with better accuracy than things learned a decade ago. But time is not the only explanation to why we forget. Why do we remember childhood memories with more vividly than what we had for breakfast?

Memories are like links to cues, and if the retrieval cue is missing, we won’t be able to access the information. Relearning is closer to repair work, while new learning is more like new construction.

#Directness

Learning something new does not just depend on the articulated knowledge, but on the myriad of tiny details of how that knowledge is transferred and implemented in reality.

Learning by directly applying your skills also have the benefit of transferring over your knowledge to other real-life situations. Always strive to tie new learning directly to the contexts you want to use them in.

Learning directly is hard. It’s often more frustrating and challenging than sitting down to read a book or watch a lecture. But this very difficulty is what creates the source of competitive advantage.

#Retrieval

Retrieval practice, trying to recall facts and concepts from memory, is much better for learning than passively reviewing texts.

You don’t have the ability to know with certainty how well you’ve learned something. It’s only when you close the book and try to recall from memory that you’re actually testing ourselves.

Reviewing only performs better during the minutes immediately after doing the reviewing. You feel that you’ve learned, but retrieval practice is better for the long run. That’s what helps create the long-term memory needed for actual learning.

When encountering a new technique, write a note to demonstrate that technique in an actual example. Creating a list of such small challenges can serve as a prompt for mastering information later in practice. It can expand your library of tools that you’re able to actually apply later on.

#Retention

How can you store knowledge acquired so it’s easily accessible later on? Why is it so easy to forget hard won skills? Our minds are a leaky bucket, with most holes on top, so the water at the bottom leaks out more slowly.

#Create drills for deliberate practice

Identify components of the overall skill. Figure out what matters most to your situation and drill that by coming up with clever ways to emphasize it in your practice. After you have drilled a specific skill that you’re weaker at you need to take it and integrate it back to the context it’s used for. You take the learning and bring back from the subcomponent and implement it in the overall goal. Isolated skills must be “transferred” to a new and more complex context.

Doing drills is hard because you’re seeking what you’re worst at and trying to improve that. It’s more pleasant to spend time with what you’re already good at. Remember that drilling problems without context is mind-numbing. Drills try to solve more complex learning challenges by breaking it into specific parts, and then bring the parts back together.

#Space out to remember your learning

Spreading learning sessions over more intervals of time tends to lower performance for the short run but give much better performance over the long run. If you have ten hours to learn, spread it out over ten days and study one hour each day.

The key though is that the interval cannot be too long. When you space out your repetitions too much you will not be able to pick up from where you left off. How often should you repeat what you’ve learned?

Spaced-repetition systems is a tool for retaining the most knowledge with the least effort. There are open source tools like Anki that helps with this. Another strategy for applying spacing is to semi-regularly do refresher projects. This is good when you can’t incorporate spacing in your daily life and routine.