Ultra-learning: How to Learn Anything Faster

this is tristan de montebello he's a very interesting guy based in los angeles california and one day he decided to challenge his skills on public speaking tristan did not have any experience in the field however he decided to compete in toastmasters world championship the most famous public speaking competition in the world he managed to become public speaking expert within a few months and eventually he made it into the top 10. how did he achieve all that the answer is scott young one of the most famous self-development bloggers out there and a person that devoted his

life in creating strategies on how to accelerate the process of learning his most recent book ultra learning is considered the autodux stream it's a manual that offers concrete and practical advice on how to learn anything fast it draws inspiration from scott's own experience and also from significant figures across history that managed to transcend the norm and showcase unprecedented mastery in their field of choice i love the idea of ultra learning because learning in itself is an activity absolutely elemental to our existence thus taking learning to the next level isn't something trivial rather it is something

that can prove momentous in one's life prefix meta comes from the greek word meta which means beyond we use meta to signify something related to itself i something self-referential in our case meta learning means learning about learning or learning how to learn so again the idea of meta learning is that if you're going to embark on a learning project you should first spend a little bit of time learning how to do the learning project that seems a little bit recursive but it's also obvious because if you're going to learn a new language and you've never

done this before there's many many many ways to do it and many many pitfalls and so if you spend a couple hours doing research ahead of time you're going to get a much more optimized path forward than if you just oh this is the first book i saw this is the first resource they saw or oh this app seems to be popular let's download it like that approach to to learning things which is what most people do the acquisition of every skill in the beginning seems like a strenuous act the only way to ameliorate this

process is to understand the mechanics of the skill first learn how to learn is the basic motto behind ultra learning and the core idea that needs to be espoused before embarking on a learning journey in scott's words meta learning forms the map showing you how to get to your destination without getting lost when bill gates first met warren buffett their host at dinner gate's mother asked everyone around the table to identify what they believed was the single most important factor in their success through life gates and buffett gave the same one-word answer focus there's nothing

more powerful than focus in life i can personally attest to that and the aforementioned parable reinforces my point focus isn't an easy thing and it often constitutes a form of superpower in a distraction-oriented world every one of us has to face daily numerous obstacles that impede our ability to stay concentrated in a task obstacles like procrastination inability to maintain focus and even a failure to create the right kind of focus but this can be normal especially when we face novelty and challenges that seem arcane to our environment resistance starts to creep in and our ability

to focus suffers as a result there is no easy way to tackle that conundrum we need to just accept it as a standard tenet of the learning process and quit being too judgmental with ourselves whenever we fail to overcome it as code states in the book recognize where you are and start small if you're the kind of person who can't sit still for a minute try sitting still for half a minute half a minute soon becomes one minute then two over time the frustrations you feel learning a particular subject may become transmuted into genuine interest

one of the major issues one has to face when dealing with a new skill is that of directness directness refers to the ability of the learner to approach the most crucial aspects of the skill head-on usually instead of immersing ourselves in the skill itself we try to find shortcuts or hacks that can make the skill easier to acquire scott explains that beautifully in the book we want to speak a language but try to learn mostly by playing fun apps rather than conversing with actual people we want to work on collaborative professional programs but mostly code

scripts in isolation we want to become great speakers so we buy a book on communication rather than practice presenting in all these cases the problem is the same directly learning the thing we want feels too uncomfortable boring or frustrating so we settle for some book lecture or app hoping it will eventually make us better at the real thing the best way to learn directly is to immerse in projects relevant to the field from the beginning despite the innate challenging nature of such an endeavor the benefits are immense benjamin franklin was considered by many the greatest

polymath of all time he was a politician and entrepreneur an inventor and a great writer especially when it came to writing franklin would constantly try to come up with methods that would allow him to improve this extremely important skill for instance he would read the spectator and he would take notes on articles that appeared there he would then leave the notes for a few days and come back to them trying to reconstruct the original article from memory by doing this many times he would familiarize himself with the concepts and eventually automate the ways he would

internalize them such a method is considered a drill and drills allow you through repetition to improve on weaknesses in your learning process drilling is really i think a lot of us have a bad feeling about drills we remember you know doing our times tables when we were kids or memorizing something and it feels like drudgery it doesn't feel as fun and often it feels like it's tedious or unnecessary and i think the problem is that if you just give someone a drill and say okay you're going to do this 100 times then they often don't

know why they're learning it and it's often not driven by any kind of need it's just that's what's next on the list to learn is do this drill 100 times and the way i like to think of drills is that if you do drills properly in an ultra learning project then they actually feel super useful because what you're doing is that you're encountering some real learning challenge it's too difficult and so you're breaking it apart or breaking it down so that you're working on a simpler aspect and then going back and trying to reintegrate it

to to work back into the original problem let's say you're a student and you have to prepare for an exam you have three different options i propose how to allocate your time passive review go over your notes in the book create a concept map write down the main concepts in the diagram and see how they're related to each other and free recall retrieve the knowledge from the book or remember what was in it passive review and concept mapping are inefficient free recall is the best way to go human beings can't know with confidence how well

they've learned something instead they need to constantly test their knowledge by evaluating how easy it is to remember it the thing is is that free recall is actually a lot more similar to what you actually have to do on tests and it's a lot more similar to what you have to do in real life very often is that it's not just merely oh i'm looking at this information have i seen this before which is what the sort of self-check is when you're reviewing but here's a question what's the answer or can you activate this knowledge

without having it in front of you and that is a much more difficult task and it's something that you actually have to actively practice i told chris rock i was going to the comedy cellar here in new york he said i'm going to come down i said christy i'm working on some stuff come down i want to know what you think we're close and we always give each other opinions on what we're doing and where we feel this can go or that can go just punch up so he comes down he's like oh my god

kev funny i said you going up he said yeah i'ma try some stuff out too chris goes up dave pops in later that night me and chris were there talking chappelle comes in we say you going up he said yeah me and chris go downstairs so we can watch dave keep in mind me and chris are excited we just worked on new material right chris gave me some good beats he went on i gave him some good beats dave went on stage and was so good right and me and chris just took what we had

we balled it up we threw it away we threw it in the trash we threw it i said i said i'm so disgusted with where my level of thinking was after seeing where dave was i gotta go back in the gym comedy cellar is a comedy club in new york it is designed for a small crowd and famous comedians go there to test new material it is the best way for them to gather feedback and evaluate whether or not the new material is worth using in bigger shows feedback constitutes a great way to assess one's

level of competence in any field but feedback can be tricky what is good feedback and what isn't scott has done extensive research on the topic and his analysis can be very enlightening a lot of feedback isn't actually very helpful and if the feedback distracts from your ability to do the task or worse it has a demotivating influence on your performance then it can actually be bad and so if i tell you for instance oh you're so great at this you're so smart when you're learning as a teacher that actually has a negative effect one of

those things that they found was praise is not useful for students because praise if it doesn't have any information the student can use to improve has a demotivating effect oh i'm doing this really well okay i'm not going to work so hard now and so i thought that was really interesting because we often know that really harsh and critical feedback you're such an idiot you know no one wants to hear that but also the opposite is also not great for feedback either feedback can oftentimes make us feel harsh and uncomfortable ego usually gets in the

way as well as the intentions and experience of the person offering feedback extracting the signal from the noise can be challenging but it is a challenge we ought to embrace nigel richards is a scrabble legend they call him the tiger woods of scrabble but clearly only referencing tiger's abilities on the green cause listen to these numbers richards has won the thailand king's cup 11 times the uk opened six times the u.s national championship five times the english world championships three times and his most recent victory was the french world championship against an actual french-speaking player

a friend of his told the new zealand herald that richard studied the french scrabble dictionary for eight weeks specifically to learn the words and not the language i guess some of the language rubbed off on him because richards actually won a challenge against his opponent who just a reminder could speak french nigel richards obviously possesses a great memory but that's not what made him a scrabble champion in one of his interviews richards said the following it's hard work you have to have dedication to learn elsewhere adding i'm not sure there is a secret it's just

a matter of learning the words it's self-evident that the learning ethos combined with a good memory can help you go a long way you forget for different reasons like time overriding old memories with new ones or inability to access specific parts of your memory however memory despite its obscure nature can be manipulated through different mechanisms mechanisms like spacing proceduralization overlearning and mnemonics these are all great techniques used by ultra learners they can effectively counteract your short and long term rates of forgetting and end up making a huge difference in your memorization richard feynman was one

of the most beautiful minds of the previous century what made him such a prolific figure amongst scientists wasn't just his intelligence but also his unparalleled ability to continuously seek knowledge but if you realize all the time what's kind of wonderful that as we expand our experience into wilder and wilder regions of experience every once in a while we have these integrations in which everything is pulled together in a unification which it turns out to be simpler than it looked before the surface wasn't of interest to him what mattered the most was how deep he could

delve into a problem because if you go deep enough anything can become interesting and through depth you develop intuition intuition occurs when we do things naturally when there is no struggle entailed in our thinking process when you do and feel things intuitively you operate on a level beyond comprehension it is a level where you know the outcome of something before you even deal with it this is the secret behind most geniuses and this is probably the first step into any form of mastery this is the starry night one of my favorite paintings and a piece

of art that along with others made vincent van gogh one of the most influential painters across space and time van gogh was a prodigy of his time he started painting at the age of 26 with no previous experience in any form of art and within 10 years he managed to ascend to the upper echelons of the art scene of his era the sad thing however is that like many great artists van gogh was celebrated the most posthumously during his life he was considered weird and crazy by some he was extremely introverted and shy and more

often than not he would be isolated by his peers what kept him going was his unfaltering obsession with drawing he would draw for days straight changing sceneries and persistently trying to improve his style scott in his book raises a great point with regards to van gogh's evolution how can we explain these discrepancies how does someone who starts late with no obvious talent and many handicaps nonetheless become one of the world's greatest artists with one of the most recognizable and distinctive styles of course tenacity played a significant role in his development but most importantly it was

his willingness to constantly experiment that made him stand out so fast to really master something to really reach the levels of creativity and genius that we associate with the kind of end products of a learning goal you really need to experiment because eventually you get onto a path that no one's been here before right when you are mastering a skill at that high level you are doing something that no one's done before so learning in that sense is not something you can just ask some expert what's the right way to learn this because you are

often approaching limits of things that you know no one has done it exactly that way before so you have to sort of develop that approach yourself all of these principles are only starting points the art of learning will always be projecting new challenges to one's life but when you get the fundamentals right the substrate becomes more solid and you become more ready to engross yourself into new ideas and skills and as god eloquently suggests towards the end of the book true mastery comes not just from following the path thrown by others but also from exploring

possibilities they haven't yet imagined