if you wanted to learn a new language or how to draw or perhaps even an entire university degree on your own how would you go about doing it for about a decade I've been following the blog of a writer called Scott Young who talks a lot about these topics Scott is probably most famous for his project to learn the entire four-year MIT computer science course by himself in under a year but he's also done projects where he's taught himself to draw in a month and spent a year without speaking English to force himself to learn four new languages in a sense what drives Scott to undertake these learning projects seems to be a passion for understanding the principles of how we learn as much as the actual learning itself for years he's written about these principles on his blog but recently he finally combined them all into a single book which if you haven't guessed it already is going to be the subject of this video the book is titled ultra learning accelerates your career master hard skills and outsmarts the competition and I've just finished reading it so wanted to give you guys a rundown Scott defines ultra learning as a strategy for acquiring skills and knowledge that is both self-directed and intense now frequently self-improvement books tend to push a single thesis stretched out to fill a publishers demand of 300 pages but this is not the case with ultra learning so it's a little difficult to know how to summarize it what ultra learning does is provide nuanced advice through nine principles those are meta learning focus directness drill retrieval feedback retention intuition and experimentation meta learning meta learning focuses on mapping out your learning journey before you begin the why what and how of your project recognizing bottlenecks and identifying which study methods you'll need to focus on this research and assessment phase should occur at the beginning but be repeated as often as is necessary throughout the project across the whole project it should account for about five to ten percent of your total time focus here methods for overcoming procrastination and avoiding distraction are given as well as some interesting points on the topic of mental arousal that is how wide and alert you are feeling there are certain times when it helps to be highly alert and others where it's actually more beneficial to be less so directness this could be boiled down to doing what is important not what is comfortable the directness principle says you should tailor your learning project to match the context in which you plan to use the skill you do this by assessing what is most necessary to learn and learning it by heading directly towards what your goal is not skirting around the edges by doing what is comfortable so if you want to speak Spanish then your assessment for success is whether you can speak to someone in Spanish not how many duolingo Lingus you have or which level you've reached that being the case the direct thing to do is to go out and start speaking to people in Spanish either face-to-face or via Skype frequently we try to improve in a general fashion levelling up in all areas when in truth it's a few specific ones which are holding us back we do this because it just takes so much less effort in the short term however we don't consider the time it wastes in the long run ultra learning by contrast is very much about putting conscious thought into what you focus on so as to get where you're going in the most efficient manner and actually achieve what you set out to achieve drill this is about breaking big topics down into constituent parts then identifying which part you are worst at and studying it intensely in order to drastically improve your overall performance you could think of it as identifying and removing bottlenecks in performance it follows on from directness assume you've tried speaking to someone in Spanish but really struggled now it's time to work out why you struggle what is your bottleneck a bottleneck is both what you're not good at and also what's key to progression maybe your grammar is good but your pronunciation and vocabulary are both bad well you could improve both but you notice even though your pronunciation is bad people can understand you that means it's not really an immediate bottleneck so you identify your bottleneck to be your vocabulary at which you are both bad and at your current level unable to work around since you know your aim is to speak and your vocabulary is the single biggest thing stopping you speaking it's time to drill vocabulary an hour spent doing so will be multiple times more valuable than an hour spent elsewhere the chapter on drill goes into detail on different methods for breaking apart a topic and for drilling each part as well as when and when not to use them as an example flashcards might be your go-to method for drilling things however while they might be good for learning syntax they tend not to be good for learning concepts retrieval the way our education system tends to work is that first you learn the material and then you take a test to get a grade but in reality the testing phase itself is what provides most of the learning the principle here is to keep testing your ability to make your brain properly process the information I remember telling myself in high school that I didn't need to do the problem questions at the end of the math chapter because I had already read the chapter and thoroughly understood it of course in reality I had only a superficial grasp and when someone challenged me on it I couldn't answer the questions in the words of Richard Fineman the first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool the Terron retrieval goes on to give a variety of methods for testing beyond just sitting an exam such as writing out everything you can remember from a chapter using flashcards rephrasing what you've just read or creating challenge questions for yourself while you read a chapter feedback the most important principle here is that whenever you test yourself you should receive feedback on your answers as soon as possible with the caveat that you have to actually thoroughly attempt to answer the question first not simply check the book immediately the chapter also details different types of feedback in criticism you might get and how to process them as well as where the positive feedback is good or bad retention this chapter dives into the different ways and reasons we forget and provides tips on how you can hold on to what you've spent so much time learning in tuition this chapter deals with intuition and pattern recognition as modes of solving problems versus general memory it deals with true understanding of a topic versus a superficial ability to recall facts and it deals with being true to yourself about what you truly know and understand about something it's one of the more abstract chapters which is difficult to quickly convey but a summary of the chapter would be don't give up on hard problems easily prove things in order to understand them properly use concrete examples over abstract ones and don't fool yourself into thinking you understand what you don't truly understand one of my childhood heroes Richard Fineman also features quite prominently in it as well as a method Scott has long recommended which he calls the Fineman technique for studying in short this method is write down a concept or problem write out an explanation of it as if explaining it to someone else when you get stuck go back to the book that seems incredibly simple but the act of explaining something has the effect of creating a deeper intuitive understanding of a topic to develop more so than just listing some facts or applying a formula does in a test in fact I remember discovering the effectiveness of this technique at age 17 when I had fallen so far behind in my statistics class that I could barely answer a single question in tests none of it made sense to me so I read and summarized the textbook as if I were explaining it to myself as a 2nd person in a week went from bottom to top of the class because I developed a proper understanding of what we were doing and became able to prove the derivations of the techniques and not just plug in the numbers experimentation as your skill at a topic develops the number of educational resources available to you tends to diminish as you move beyond all the beginner material this being the case you need to get more creative in what you do furthermore at the peak of performance experts tend to develop their own unique styles and there becomes no one style that is regarded as the best essentially you have to start experimenting to find your own path as if you want to be successful you cannot just replicate what other people have done a chapter also tells the story of Vincent van Gogh who only began to learn how to paint at age 26 after a failed career as an art dealer he was to all accounts not especially naturally talented and was starting to learn at a very late age even worse he antagonized and fell out with practically everyone he worked with so ended up having to essentially teach himself however by his death at age 37 just 11 years later he had created a number of what are now considered the greatest paintings in the world this came about firstly by his prodigious work ethic but secondly by the fact that he experimented with hundreds of different styles many of which were complete disasters until he eventually found his own and went on to create a unique brand of art ultimately this book is not a single thesis or if it has a thesis it's that ultra learning gets a good thing really the book is a series of steps and explanations and is filled with far more nuance than I can do justice to in a short review as such I do recommend you read it for yourselves it's being released on hardback an audio form on August the 6th but if you preorder before it comes out and email Scott a copy of your receipt he'll send you a bunch of extra content in the form of e-books and videos you can find a link to that promotion in the description by the way while this is a ringing endorsement of the book it's not in any way sponsored by it the only revenue I receive is via the regular Amazon affiliate links finally let me know in the comment section if you're working on any ultra learning project right now and how you are coping as well as whether you are a reader of Scott's blog or have come across him before and if you like this style of content then let me know that too you