How to Embrace UltraLearning to Learn any Skill
Learning a language. What would be your first step? The author of UltraLearning, Scott Young, went 3 months to Spain with the condition of not speaking a single word in English. Not even on the phone or with his traveling friend. Brazil, China, and Korea followed. These were 4 Ultralearning projects, lasting over 12 months.
But what exactly makes an UltraLearning Project different from any other learning goal? It is both self-directed and intense.
Self-Direction: Traditional education is not self-directed. You enter a classroom and are taught a one-size-fits-all curriculum. It does not matter if most of what you're learning is not serving you, or if it has a real-world application. On the opposite way, with a self-directed approach, you embark on a learning journey where you get to pick multiples teachers, techniques, and construct your own path.
Intensity: Intensity is also a key component of an UltraLearning project, but I don’t get to incorporate it in most learning projects. When I decide to learn a new skill, I focus on making consistent progress every day, even if for a couple of minutes. It's a valid approach and it's been a great help to learn video-editing, writing, drumming, and so on. But an UltraLearning project is different — you are supposed to go deep and immerse yourself completely into a new skill. That is, the main goal is to accelerate your progress.
Now that you know which 2 characteristics an UltraLearning project must have, there are 3 main steps you should follow to embark on this journey.
1) Develop a meta-learning map: Spend 5-10% of your time understanding every bit of information and content you need to reach the desired level of mastery. Ask yourself: "If I want to do ________, what concepts do I need to understand, what facts do I need to memorize, what procedures do I need to practice?"
As an example: If I want to hold a conversation in Mandarin, I need to understand how sentences are structured, memorize words, verbs and conjugations, and the procedures of mandarin tones.
Use the web, books, experts, and any other source to understand the different components of a skill and build a meta-learning map. You can revisit your map frequently and update it alongside your own understanding of the subject. Once you have your map structured, you need to identify which of those will be critical for your success.
2) Design practice drills: What are the key activities you must really good at? Assess your level on each activity and prioritize the ones you’re weaker at, the bottlenecks, as they are compromising your progress and efficiency.
If you want to grow your biceps, you should practice isolation bicep exercises consistently. If you want to be a public speaker, focus on delivering any speech with the right tone and posture. Drills are decisive practices to help you succeed.
3) Overlearn: Once you have your drills, commit to overlearning certain components. That is, become extraordinarily good by going a step further than your initial target. This will make what you are learning stick for long periods of time. Ask yourself: "What's my target performance and what's my next level?" Do it.
With these 3 steps in mind, you can start any UltraLearning project and commit to making progress in a short period of time. Scott Young still mentions a sequence of sub-steps that will ease the process.
a) Focus: You can't learn deeply without deep concentration. In order to focus, I follow a sequence of steps:
Prepare your environment;
Decide exactly which activity you will be performing;
Set a timer (25-60 minutes);
Put your phone away;
Focus!;
Reward yourself (making progress in any skill, by itself, is already a great reward).
b) Directness: This principle requires doing what is important and not what is comfortable. When learning a new skill it is far more satisfying to review what is already known, than it is to throw ourselves into unknown territory. But it is only by embracing different challenges and subskills that we got to improve. If your goal is to keep a conversation in a different language, test your skills by speaking directly with a native speaker, and not by re-reading your notes.
c) Retrieval: The traditional education system is built in a way where testing is done once or twice per year to evaluate the overall performance. But as multiple studies have shown, testing your knowledge consistently increases your level of ability of a certain skill and it is far more effective than any other study method.
Quizzes are a form of active recall as they require knowledge retrieval instead of passively skimming through the material — the more effortful the retrieval, the deeper the learning. If you want to learn in-depth about retrieval and how it can improve your learning capabilities, read this post.
d) Feedback: When testing yourself through a retrieval method, you must receive feedback as soon as possible. If you're employing quizzes, the feedback is immediate. The same happens when you play a wrong note on the piano.
e) Retention: Ideally, you want to learn a new skill and be able to use it for a long time. This is where spacing out your retrieving sessions in time comes in handy. With a calendar, you can plan retrieving sessions of different topics ahead and enhance the retention of any skill.
f) Intuition: The more you practice, the more you can trust your intuition.
g) Experimentation: Incorporate different experiments into your learning sessions. Van Gogh experimented with hundreds of different styles and failed at some. Eventually, he was able to develop his own style and technique. If you’re learning photography, try landscapes, portraits, macro photography, architecture, etc.
With this approach, you are able to become a Skill-Learner, and eventually, an UltraLearner.
“Your deepest moments of happiness don’t come from doing easy things; they come from realizing your potential and overcoming your own limiting beliefs about yourself.”