Ultralearning

"For those who know how to use technology wisely, it is the easiest time in history to teach yourself something new."

“Over the last twenty years, the amount of knowledge easily accessible from a quick online search has exploded…Yet despite this incredible advance, it is not as if the average person is thousands as times as smart as people were was a generation ago. Being able to look things up is certainly an advantage, but without a certain amount of knowledge inside your head, it doesn’t help you solve hard problems.”

It is a strategy for acquiring skills and knowledge. Ultralearning is a potent skill for dealing with a changing world. It has three main characteristics:

• It is a strategy. A strategy is not the only solution to a given problem, but it may be a good one.
• It's self-directed. It’s about how you make decisions about what to learn and why.
• It's an intense process. Ultralearners always search for and take unusual steps to maximize their effectiveness in learning.

• Economics: Average is over. But even if the economic landscape is rapidly changing may, we can engineer our response to it by aggressively learning the hard skills we need to thrive.
• Education: Ultralearning can fill some of those gaps when going back to school isn’t an affordable option.
• Technology: The space of learning possibilities is immense, just waiting for ambitious autodidacts to come up with new ways to exploit it.

1. Meta-learning: Start by learning how to learn the subject or skill you want to tackle.
2. Focus: Carve out time in your day, and hack back distractions.
3. Directness: Practice the thing you want to learn. Learn by doing.
4. Drill the weakest points: Break down complex skills into small parts.
5. Retrieval: Testing isn’t simply a way of assessing knowledge but a way of creating it.
6. Feedback: Know how to use it without letting your ego get in the way.
7. Retention: Understand what you forget and why. Learn to remember things.
8. Intuition: Develop your intuition through play and exploration of concepts and skills.
9. Experimentation: Get outside your comfort zone by cultivating an experimental mindset.

At some level there’s a craving that drives us to do something else, there’s an aversion to doing the task itself or both.

Much procrastination is unconscious. We’re procrastinating, but we don’t internalize it that way.

• Your environment: be aware of what environment you work best in, and test it. Multitasking may feel like fun, but it’s unsuitable for ultralearning.
• The task you’re trying to learn: certain activities, due to their nature, are harder to focus on than others.
• Your mind: negative emotions, restlessness, and daydreaming can be some of the biggest obstacles to focus.

• Outcome feedback: this tells you something about how well you’re doing overall but offers no ideas as to what you’re doing better or worse.
• Informational feedback: this feedback tells you what you’re doing wrong, but it doesn’t necessarily tell you how to fix it.
• Corrective feedback: the best kind of feedback to get is corrective feedback. This is the feedback that shows you not only what you’re doing wrong but how to fix it.

“Knowledge expands, but so does ignorance, as with a greater understanding of a subject also comes a greater appreciation for all the questions that remain unanswered.”