Ultralearning: Master Hard Skills, Outsmart the Competition, and Accelerate Your Career

The illusion of understanding is very often the barrier to deeper knowledge, because unless that competency is actually tested, it’s easy to mislead yourself into thinking you understand more than you do. Feynman’s and Einstein’s approach to understanding propositions by demonstrating them prevents this problem in a way that’s hard to do otherwise.

Drilling problems without context is mind-numbing. However, once you’ve identified that it’s the bottleneck preventing you from going further, they become instilled with new purpose. In ultralearning, which is directed by the student, not an external source, drills take on a new light. Instead of being forced to do them for unknown purposes, it is

additional step of research: determining whether learning the skill or topic in question will actually help you achieve your goal.

In the experiments mentioned, students were asked to do free recall but weren’t provided any feedback about items they missed or got wrong. The act of trying to summon up knowledge from memory is a powerful learning tool on its own, beyond its connection to direct practice or feedback.

ultralearning is self-directed. It’s about how you make decisions about what to learn and why. It’s possible to be a completely self-directed learner and still decide that attending a particular school is the best way to learn something. Similarly, you could “teach yourself” something on your own by mindlessly following the steps outlined in a text

how the mind of a great intuitionist such as Feynman operated. He, too, focused on principles first, building off examples that cut straight to the heart of what the problem represented rather than focusing on superficial features. His ability to do this was also built off an impressive library of stored physics and math patterns. His mental calcul

Tactic 2: Compare Methods Side-by-Side The scientific method works by carefully controlling conditions so that the difference between two situations is limited to the variable being studied. You can apply this same process to your experiments in learning by trying two different approaches and varying only a single condition to see what the impact i

At the same time, don’t feel guilty if flow doesn’t come automatically. Your goal is to enhance your learning, and this often involves pushing through some sessions that are more frustrating than what could be considered ideal for flow.

Regardless of the exact system used, however, all systems seemed to work according to one of four mechanisms: spacing, proceduralization, overlearning, or mnemonics.