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

Tactic 3: Introduce New Constraints

One important type of metafeedback is your learning rate. This gives you information about how fast you’re learning, or at least how fast you’re improving in one aspect of your skill.

First, it’s obvious that a clear, calm mind is best for focusing on almost all learning problems. A mind filled with angers, anxieties, frustrations, or sadness will be harder to study with. This means that if you’re struggling with problems in your life, you’ll have a harder time learning well, and you may want to look at dealing with those first.

The Dunning-Kruger effect occurs when someone with inadequate understanding of a subject nonetheless believes he or she possesses more knowledge about the subject than the people who actually do.15 This can occur because when you lack knowledge about a subject, you also tend to lack the ability to assess your own abilities. It is true that the more

If retrieval practice—trying to recall facts and concepts from memory—is so much better for learning, why don’t students realize

Three Types of Experimentation

If you have ten hours to learn something, therefore, it makes more sense to spend ten days studying one hour each than to spend ten hours studying in one burst. Obviously, however, if the amount of time between study intervals gets longer and longer, the short-term effects start to outweigh the long-term ones.

The idea of desirable difficulties in retrieval makes a potent case for the ultralearning strategy. Low-intensity learning strategies typically involve either less or easier retrieval. Pushing difficulty higher and opting for testing oneself well before you are “ready” is more efficient.

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