Ultra Learning: Book Notes
Book notes from reading Ultra Learning by Scott Young.
What’s Ultra Learning?
Ultra learning is a strategy for acquiring skills and knowledge to advance your career and make more money.
“You already expend much of your energy working to earn a living. In comparison, ultra learning is a small investment, even if you went so far as to temporarily make it a full-time commitment. However, rapidly learning hard skills can have a greater impact than years of mediocre striving on the job. Whether you want to change careers, take on new challenges, or accelerate your progress, ultra learning is a powerful tool.” [page 27]
Meta Learning (Learning How To Learn)
Expert Interview Method: The best way to research your learning goal is to talk to people who’ve already achieved what you want to achieve. If that person doesn’t think your learning project will help you accomplish your goal, your motivation and project might be misaligned.
10 Percent Rule: Generally, you should spend 10% of your learning project time on pre-research. Taking this time up front will save you from a lot of wasted time later on.
Directness (Doing The Thing!)
Learn By Doing: Tie your learning as closely as possible to the context you’ll use it in. There are many indirect forms of learning - like learning theories of programming. To learn directly, spend a lot of time doing the thing you want to get better at. If you want to learn to write, write. If you want to master programming, then code.
Project-Based Learning: One of the best ways to learn by doing is taking on a project. Unlike classes, where you spend a lot of time on theory, building is a great way to validate your learning. Two students at Pitt cheaply built an AI-powered communication solution using a serverless tech stack with AWS.1 It’s open source, so their Python code base, bill of material, process, and everything is on GitHub. I plan to rebuild it as my starting point to learn to code.
Drills (Improve Your Weaknesses)
In chemistry, the rate limiting step is the slowest part of a chain of reactions, forming a bottleneck for the rest of the chain. Ultimately, the speed of the rate determining step decides how long a chemical reaction takes. Learning works similarly, with certain aspects forming a bottleneck.
Direct-Then-Drill Approach: Figure out where and how the skill will be used. Then match that situation when practicing. For example, write software. Then analyze the results to isolate the parts that are holding you back.
Time Slicing: Repeatedly practice the most challenging thing until it’s perfect. Then integrate it back into the broader context.
Prerequisite Chaining: Start with a skill you don’t have all the prerequisites for. When you inevitably struggle, go back a step, learn that foundational topic, and repeat.
Types Of Feedback
Outcome Feedback: The most common type of feedback (and in some cases, the only type of feedback available). It tells how you’ve done overall, but no indication as to what you’re doing good or bad.
Informational Feedback: Tells you what you’re doing wrong - but not necessarily how to fix it.
Corrective Feedback: The rarest but best kind of feedback because it shows you not only what you’re doing wrong - but how to fix it, too. This feedback is only available with a coach or mentor.
Signal vs. Noise: When receiving feedback there’s (i) signal - the useful info you want to process, and (i) noise - random factors you shouldn’t pay attention to. When writing online, most articles won’t attract attention. But when one does, it could be because of factors outside your control like someone with a lot of followers reposting it on LinkedIn.
Retention (How To Not Forget What You’ve Learned)
The forgetting curve, discovered by Hermann Ebbinghaus, shows that we tend to forget things quickly after learning them. Thankfully, there’s a few ways to beat the forgetting curve:
Spaced Repetition: Rather than grinding for 7 hours in one day, spread your learning evenly over 7 days.
Over Learning: Going one level above a certain set of skills. Moving to more advanced skills - like from Algebra to Calculus - enables earlier skills to be reinforced, thus preventing forgetting.
Intuition (Developing a Mental Model)
When asked a question, beginners tend to look at superficial features of the problem. Experts use a mental model they’ve developed after seeing a large volume of similar problems to categorize, and solve the problem. A strong mental model is developed by:
Grapple With Hard Problems: Even if you can’t solve a problem right now, struggling with for a while primes you for handling it better next time.
Ask “Dumb” Questions: Avoiding asking questions is a vain attempt to be knowledgeable. Instead, ask “dumb” questions.
Explain It!: Write how you’d explain a concept to someone who knows nothing about it.2 If you struggle with this, go back to fill your knowledge gaps.
Experimentation (Breaking Through To New Levels Of Expertise)
At the start of your ultra learning journey, it’s often sufficient to follow the example of someone who’s further along than you - a process called meta learning. Eventually, following someone no longer helps and you need to experiment on your own.
Introduce Artificial Constraints: Initially, the challenge of learning is that you don’t know what to do. Eventually, the challenge of learning is that you think you already know what to do. Introducing artificial constraints can help you break through to new levels of expertise.
Skill Stacking: Combining two skills that don’t necessarily overlap can be a great strategy for creative fields. For example, Paul Graham is great at painting and computer programming.3 Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, combined his background in an office job with drawing comics.
Push To New Extremes: As a painter, Van Gough broke many conventions. His colors were bold. His paint application was thick. Compared to other painters, his art took many techniques to an extreme. Playing it safe reduces the number of possible approaches. For many skills, the best option takes something to an extreme.
How To Start Your First Ultra Learning Project
It’s better to start narrow, then go wide as time goes on. “Learn how to execute a Python script” is more constrained than “Learn how to code.” As you learn and develop new interests, dive into those rabbit holes as you desire. Once your learning project is complete you have three options:
Maintenance: If you don’t use it you lose it. A great way to maintain a new skill is to slowly taper your practice. For example, I write a blog post about every month now, to keep myself sharp for where I’m ready to reinvest time into writing.
Relearning: For many skills, the cost of relearning it later are smaller than the costs of keeping it continuously sharp. Doing a refresher course can often be enough to reactivate a previously developed, but dormant, skill.
Mastery: Continually improving in subtopics as an extension to your original learning plan.
Some Ultra Learning Advice
Create An Inspirational Goal: Rather than starting a project based on what would be most useful, build a project around an inspirational goal. For example, I want to learn to code. Initially, I looked at the technical skills for dream jobs of mine. That said, I’d love to have an app that helps me maintain and grow my professional network. That would be a more exciting project than learning new programming languages to check boxes on a resume.
Do Something Brand New: If you’re learning a skill in a domain that’s new to you, make your project unique. That way, instead of comparing yourself to others (potentially getting discouraged), you can measure progress against your past self.
— Grant Varner
It can also be helpful for your learning to create your own diagrams, too.
Paul Graham’s Hackers & Painters is a great essay about combining two creative pursuits.
Ultra Learning is exactly what I did after earning my Master’s Degree in Reading but took it a step further to become certified in Orton-Gillingham instructional strategies. My two years of learning included a supervised (amazing mentors!!) practicum over time. And I use the gained skills daily in my work with current students, so I’m constantly practicing and honing my learned skills. I highly recommend Ultra Learning no matter your career! Great article!