Reread - 5/1/21 - 20/1/21 (Audio and Physical for notes). 5/5.
Personally really enjoyed this book and will be employing much of these notes as a template for future learning endeavours (have already created learning templates for my Task Manager app Omnifocus and also utilised the Metalearning concept for some subjects I have taken on this year to good effect)
Notes below:
Ultralearning: A strategy for acquiring skills and knowledge that is both self-directed and intense.\
- Ultralearning is a strategy (well suited for some situations but not others)
- Ultralearing is self-directed
- Ultralearning is intense
With ultralearning, deeply and effectively learning things is always the main priority.
Traits of Ultralearners:
- They usually worked alone, often toiling for months and years without much more than a blog entry to announce their efforts.
- Their interests tended toward obsession. T
- hey were aggressive about optimizing their strategies, fiercely debating the merits of esoteric concepts such as interleaving practice, leech thresholds, or keyword mnemonics.
- Above all, they cared about learning. Their motivation to learn pushed them to tackle intense projects, even if it often came at the sacrifice of credentials or conformity.
Ultralearning isn’t easy. It’s hard and frustrating and requires stretching outside the limits of where you feel comfortable.
Case for Ultralearning:
1. For your work
2. For your personal life
3. Economics: Average is over
- Globalisation, regionalisation etc.
4. Education: Tuition is too high
- Skill gaps
“Ultimately, it doesn’t matter if ultralearning is a suitable replacement for higher education. In many professions, having a degree isn’t just nice, it’s legally required. Doctors, lawyers, and engineers all require formal credentials to even start doing the job. However, those same professionals don’t stop learning when they leave school, and so the ability to teach oneself new subjects and skills remains essential.”
5. Technology: New Frontiers in Learning
- Online courses, space repetition system, forums, document readers, etc.
6. Ultralearning project can augment the other skills and assets you’ve cultivated in your work
7. Benefit of skills learnt
- blend the practical reasons for learning a skill with an inspiration that comes from something that excites them
8. Stretching self-conception
- “There’s an added benefit to ultralearning that transcends even the skills one learns with it. Doing hard things, particularly things that involve learning something new, stretches your self-conception. It givs you confidence that you might be able to do things that you couldn’t do before”
Talent vs Learning:
“I take a middle position between those two extremes. I think that natural talents exist and that they undoubtedly influence the results we see….I also believe that strategy and method matter, too. Throughout this book, I will cover science showing how making changes to how you learn can impact your effectiveness. Each of the principles is something that, if applied appropriately, will make you a better learner regardless of whether your starting point is dull or brilliant.”
Time for Ultralearning:
1. Pursuing ultralearning part-time
“Spending fifty hours a week on a project will accomplish more than spending five hours a week on it, even if the efficiency is the same, and thus the most captivating stories usually involve heroic schedules. Though this makes for good storytelling, it’s actually unnecessary when it comes to pursuing your own ultralearning projects. The core of the ultralearning strategy is intensity and a willingness to prioritize effectiveness.”
2. Pursuing ultralearning during gaps in work and school
3. Integrate ultralearning principles into the time and energy you already devote to learning
Principles:
1. 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.”
“Over the short term, you can do research to focus on improving your metalearning before and during a learning project. Ultralearning, owing to its intensity and self-directed nature, has the opportunity for a lot higher variance than normal schooling efforts do. A good ultralearning project, with excellent materials and an awareness of what needs to be learned, has the potential to be completed faster than formal schooling. ”
“Over the long term, the more ultralearning projects you do, the larger your set of general metalearning skills will be. You’ll know what your capacity is for learning, how you can best schedule your time and manage your motivation, and you’ll have well-tested strategies for dealing with common problems. As you learn more things, you’ll acquire more and more confidence, which will allow you to enjoy the process of learning more with less frustration.”
Note: “A good rule of thumb is that you should invest approximately 10 percent of your total expected learning time into research prior to starting.”
i. Determine Why (motives to learn - focus project on what matters to you)
- Instrumental learning: learning with purpose of achieving a different, nonlearning result
- Tactic: The Expert Interview Method
- talk to people who have already achieved what you want to achieve
- The key is to write a simple, to-the-point email “explaining why you’re reaching out to them and asking if they could spare fifteen minutes to answer some simple questions. Make the email concise and nonthreatening. Don’t ask for more than fifteen minutes or for ongoing mentorship. Though some experts will be happy to help you in those ways, it’s not good form to ask for too much in the first email.”
- Intrinsic projects: are those that you’re pursuing for their own sake
- “Even if your project is intrinsically motivated, asking “Why?” is still very useful. Most learning plans you might choose to emulate will be based on curriculum designers’ ideas of what is important for you to learn. If these aren’t perfectly lined up with your own goals, you may end up spending a lot of time learning things that aren’t important to you or underemphasizing the things that do matter. For these kinds of projects, it’s useful to ask yourself what you’re trying to learn because it will help you evaluate different study plans for their fit with your goals.”
ii. Determine What (knowledge and abilities that need to be acquired to be successful - concepts, facts, and procedures)
A. Brainstorm
Write down ‘Concepts”, ‘Facts” and Procedures”
- “Then brainstorm all the things you’ll need to learn. It doesn’t matter if the list is perfectly complete or accurate at this stage. You can always revise it later. Your goal here is to get a rough first pass. Once you start learning, you can adjust the list if you discover that your categories aren’t quite right.”
- Concepts: “ideas that you need to understand in flexible ways in order for them to be useful”
- Facts: “write down anything that needs to be memorized. Facts are anything that suffices if you can remember them at all. ”
- Procedures: “write down anything that needs to be practiced. Procedures are actions that need to be performed and may not involve much conscious thinking at all.”
B. Draw your map
- “Once you’ve finished your brainstorm, underline the concepts, facts, and procedures that are going to be most challenging. This will give you a good idea what the major learning bottlenecks are going to be and can start you searching for methods and resources to overcome those difficulties. You might recognize that learning medicine requires a lot of memorization, so you may invest in a system such as spaced-repetition software.”
- “You might look at some of the particular features of the concepts, facts, and procedures you’re trying to learn to find methods to master them more effectively.”
iii. Determine How (resources, environment, methods for learning)
A. Benchmarking
- Finding common ways in which people learn the skill or subject
- Can help design default strategy as a starting point
- e..g syllabus, resources recommended for those not of the academic background of the subject, online recommendations etc
B. Emphasize/Exclude Method
- Once found default curriculum, consider making modifications (“For conceptual subjects or topics where you may not even understand the meaning of the terms in the syllabus, it’s probably better to stick closer to your benchmark until you learn a bit more.”)
- “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.”
2. 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.”
“In the realm of great intellectual accomplishments an ability to focus quickly and deeply is nearly ubiquitous.”
“The struggles with focus that people have generally come in three broad varieties: starting, sustaining, and optimizing the quality of one’s focus. Ultralearners are relentless in coming up with solutions to handle these three problems, which form the basis of an ability to focus well and learn deeply.”
A. Problem 1 - Failing to Start Focusing (aka Procrastinating)
- “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.”
- “Much procrastination is unconscious. You’re procrastinating, but you don’t internalize it that way. Instead you’re “taking a much-needed break” or “having fun, because life can’t always be about work all the time.”
- “The problem is when they’re used to cover up the actual behavior—you don’t want to do the thing you need to be focusing on, either because you are directly averse to doing it or because there’s something else you want to do more. Recognizing that you’re procrastinating is the first step to avoiding it.”
- “Make a mental habit of every time you procrastinate; try to recognize that you are feeling some desire not to do that task or a stronger desire to do something else. You might even want to ask yourself which feeling is more powerful in that moment—is the problem more that you have a strong urge to do a different activity (e.g., eat something, check your phone, take a nap) or that you have a strong urge to avoid the thing you should be doing because you imagine it will be uncomfortable, painful, or frustrating? This awareness is necessary for progress to be made, so if you feel as though procrastination is a weakness of yours, make building this awareness your first priority before you try to fix the problem.”
- “Once you can easily and automatically recognize your tendency to procrastinate, when it occurs, you can take steps to resist the impulse. One way is to think in terms of a series of “crutches” or mental tools that can help you get through some of the worst parts of your tendency to procrastinate. As you get better about taking action on the project you’re working on, these crutches can be changed or gotten rid of altogether when procrastination is no longer a problem.”
- “A first crutch comes from recognizing that most of what is unpleasant in a task (if you are averse to it) or what is pleasant about an alternative task (if you’re drawn to distraction) is an impulse that doesn’t actually last that long. If you actually start working or ignore a potent distractor, it usually only takes a couple minutes until the worry starts to dissolve”
- Five minute rule (to get started)
- Pomodoro Technique (to avoid too many breaks)
- “Keep in mind that it’s essential not to switch to a harder goal when you’re still mostly impeded by an earlier problem. If you still can’t start working, even with the five-minute rule, switching to harder and more demanding crutches may backfire.”
- “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. This approach allows you to make the best use of your limited time. However, it works only if you actually follow it. If you find yourself setting a daily schedule with chunked hours and then frequently ignore it to do something else, go back to the start and try building back up again with the five-minute rule and then the Pomodoro Technique.”