Business Book Club: Ultralearning
I've set myself a goal to read one self-development book per month. To make sure I truly reflect on what I'm reading, I'm going to extract the wisdom from the best business and personal development books and share it with you.
This time, I've been reading Ultralearning by Scott Young
The Book
As a learning and development professional, my daily focus is helping people to learn skills and knowledge in the workplace, so when I saw this book I was understandably keen to know more about this idea of Ultralearning. Ultralearning is an intense, self-directive and immersive way of acquiring vast amounts of knowledge and skills on a subject in a short period of time.
In Ultralearning, Scott Young shares stories of some impressive Ultralearners as well as details of three of his own projects: doing the equivalent of an MIT degree in a year; learning 4 languages in a year by spending 3 months in four different countries (and starting out in each country with not a single word of the target language); and teaching himself to sketch faces accurately in 30 days. You might be forgiven for thinking that rapid learning means taking short cuts in the quality of study. In fact, it is something quite different. It's about learning how to learn effectively and adopting the most effective methods that enable you to apply the skills you wish to acquire.
At a time where medium-skilled jobs are increasingly being lost due to automation, this ability to teach ourselves how to learn and upskill very quickly seems like a skill we will all need to develop.
What did I learn?
Nine principles of Ultralearning
Being able to master complex subjects in a short period of time sounds great but how is it done?
Ultralearning isn’t a ‘hack’ or trick. It’s about choosing your topic, truly committing time and effort to it and then embarking on a project in which you will work out the most effective ways to learn your subject. It’s intense, it’s hard work and you have to be willing to throw yourself in at the deep end. More importantly, it requires you to be willing to fail fast and learn faster.
In the book, Scott outlines nine core principles of Ultralearning:
Meta-learning: learning how to learn your topic. The ability to break down your subject’s core concepts.
Focus: not only being able to focus in the first place but also the ability to maintain and sustain it throughout your project.
Directness: making your learning environment as close to the real environment as possible.
Drilling your skills: drilling the key skills and knowledge that are going to make you successful.
Retrieval: your ability to recall and retrieve what you've learned. Being able to recall it when you need it.
Feedback: embracing feedback as a source of learning
Retention: how to keep your learning fresh in your mind over time.
Intuition: learning to the point where things become intuitive. Having an in-depth understanding of the subject rather than just acquiring knowledge.
Experimentation: a willingness to experiment until you find what works for you and a readiness to seek out a variety of resources and methods.
Here, I'm going to focus on three of these principles:
Meta-learning
Directness
Retrieval
Meta-learning
Meta-learning is learning about learning. Rather than diving into exercises on your chosen subject, start by taking time to understand the different conceptual levels of your topic and identifying the ideas you need to learn in order to be able to grasp your subject properly.
Young suggests looking for 'the rate-determining step' (a term he has borrowed from the field of chemistry). This is the concept that, if I were to understand it, would allow me to learn everything else quicker. Take golf for example. If I understand the difference that my grip, my stance and my body shape make, I would then understand how to alter each when I'm learning different types of shots, such as pitching, putting or driving. If I get those concepts first, it speeds up my ability to learn how to execute the different shots and is much quicker than if I took each type of shot in turn and just started drilling them. Before starting an Ultralearning project, Young suggests spending about 10%of your allocated time on identifying the meta-levels of your subject. You need to be able to identify:
The core concepts
The facts and knowledge that you need to commit to memory
The procedures or skills you need to master
Of course, you don't know what you don't know, so if you don't understand what those different concepts are spend some time exploring this or even better, ask an expert who does know.
Directness
Directness is the idea of reducing the distance between the learning environment and the target environment. What I like in this chapter is the idea of turning the traditional approach to learning on its head. Instead of learning something first and only attempting to apply what you've learnt afterwards, try attempting the skill you want to acquire and you will soon figure out where to focus your learning time.
Let's take the example of earning a language. Instead of going to language classes or using a language learning app before attempting to speak it, visit the country or find a native speaker to converse with and dive straight in. You might need a dictionary or a translation app to hand just to utter a few badly constructed sentences. It will also feel deeply uncomfortable but this approach has two important advantages:
First, it gives you a great incentive to find out the things that you need to know. The desire to learn is essential for learning success and the ability to get what you want and express yourself provides powerful motivation to keep striving.
Second, it makes your learning personal and relevant too because you will seek out what you need to learn for your purposes rather than boring yourself with irrelevant information. Importance and relevance are two major factors for anyone wanting to learn anything and directness in learning will give you both.
Of course, you can't always achieve perfect closeness to the performance environment. If you're learning brain surgery or how to fly a plane then clearly you couldn't just drive straight into it. In that case, you would want to find a way to simulate the environment as close as humanly possible or at least find a way to simulate the application of each aspect or skill.
Retrieval
If you're going to go through this intense, time-consuming ultralearning approach and acquire a lot of knowledge in a short space of time, you need to make sure you're able to retain it and retrieve it.
An interesting idea in the book is the difference between two methods of committing learning to memory:
The first one is the traditional revision strategy of reviewing your course materials and going over notes that you've made. This method gives us the illusion that we've learnt a lot because when we read back over our notes everything seems familiar. We're able to easily grasp the concepts that we're reading and this causes us to perceive that we've learnt more than we really have.
Contrast this to a different method which is to just to sit down with a blank piece of paper and try recalling or writing down as much detail as possible on everything you learnt with no prompts. This doesn't feel as good because it requires us to struggle to retrieve what we learnt, and we may walk away with the impression that we haven't recalled much at all. However, the act of actively struggling to retrieve the information cements our learning in our brain much better.
Add this concept to your studying. Try watching a video or lecture and afterwards write down everything you can remember. Alternatively, you can try using tools like flashcards to help you, or instead of taking notes, you could write down questions for you to answer when you review your learning later. When you come back to revise and answer your questions you may need to grapple for the solutions a little bit but that active process will mean that your learning is deeper and therefore easier to retrieve when you most need it
Conclusion
Needless to say, as someone who works in personal development, I really enjoyed this book. Some of the concepts weren't new to me but it was nice to hear them backed up by new or different research. Some of the principles helped me to see adult learning in a new way.
When you read about some of the amazing feats of Ultralearning in the book, it may seem that these ultralearners are simply geniuses and at first you might think that this kind of learning isn't accessible to most of us. However, Young breaks down the concepts of how they achieved what they did and you quickly begin to see that there are many ideas there that we can all learn from. So if you've been trying to learn a topic or to study for an exam, or if you've tried to master a skill for weeks or months and you haven't got where you want to be yet this book is for you. It explains why you haven't achieved what you want yet and suggests some principles that will help you not only speed up the rate of learning but also the effectiveness of your learning too.
My own ultralearning project
The book is a fascinating read and it has inspired me to undertake my own ultra learning project.
I've been learning Irish on Duolingo for over 200 days now but I still can't really speak it. I know some words and a little bit about sentence structure but I haven't actually done anything with it and I wouldn't feel confident to speak it at all. I've signed up for an online course that takes an ultra learning approach and is run by one of the people featured in the book. I have done more with the language in two days than I have done in over 200 days of using an app, so it has changed the way that I'm approaching what I'm doing.
If you have something you want to learn or wish to develop others, I definitely recommend this book. Even if you don’t, faced with a rapidly-shifting work environment we face in the years ahead, Ultralearning is a skill that I think we could all benefit from
What should I read next?
Have you read Ultralearning? What did you get from it? What should I read next?
If you have any recommendations let me know below or via Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn
Want regular personal development tips and reminders? Sign up for the monthly newsletter and I'll help you to keep focused.
