Principle 1: Meta-Learning

Each project you do will improve your general meta-learning. Every project has the opportunity to teach you new learning methods, new ways to gather resources, better time management, and improved skills for managing your motivation. Success in one project will give you confidence to execute your next one with boldness and without self-doubt and procrastination.

How Ultra-learners Apply Meta-Learning

  • Why: determine your motivation
    • The Expert Interview Method: Ask the experts if you are on the right track, and if the skills you want to learn will align with your instrumental goal (the notion of instrumental vs. intrinsic motivation was useful)
  • What: determine the key elements of your learning
    • Concepts / Facts / Procedures: Concepts are often more abstract, but important for pursuits like mathematics or CS. Facts are things that you have to remember, like in learning languages. Procedures are things that you have to repeat and practice, like cooking or playing an instrument. Analyzing the things that you have to learn in this way will help you establish the bottlenecks that you have to overcome.
  • How: How do we do the learning
    • Benchmarking: This basically means piggyback on curriculum that has already been developed by others
    • The Emphasize / Exclude Method: Emphasize the things that are directly relevant to your goal (the WHY section), and exclude or de-emphasize the things that are not directly related to your goal

Here is some additional advice from Scott on Cal Newport’s blog on how to draw a map for what you need to do (i.e. practicing the meta-learning skill).

How Much Should You Plan for Meta-Learning

  • 10% Rule: As a rule of thumb, you should spend 10% of your total learning hours on planning, give or take. For larger projects, the time for planning is probably 5%.
  • Be aware of diminishing returns: Make sure to do cost-benefit analysis to understand if doing additional research is still beneficial compared to doing the actual learnings.

Principle 2: Focus

The struggles with focus that people have generally come in three broad varieties: starting, sustaining, and optimizing the quality of one’s focus. Ultra-learners are relentless in coming up with solutions to handle these three problems, which form the basis of an ability to focus well and learn deeply.

Starting & Avoiding Procrastination

To battle procrastination, we must know if 1) we are having a craving that drives us to do something else, or 2) have an aversion for the task that we need to do in the first place, or both. If it is the latter, then:

  • You can mentally set these “crutches” to tell you that some of these unpleasant feelings are temporary, and you will let it sit for a few minutes, usually once you start doing the task, you will continue doing it.
  • Pomodoro technique or set aside time in your calendar to focus.

Sustain Focus & Avoid Distractions

It’s hard to have flow when you are deliberately trying to improve your skill, so make peace with it. Make sure you focus on the duration of your learning. Usually, a 50-minute focus session + 10 minutes break is good. You can also use inter-leaving and study multiple subjects at once to improve your effectiveness. More importantly, you should remove distractions:

  • Your environment can be distracting, make sure you get rid of things that can distract you
  • Your task can be distracting, choose tools that allow you to focus better. You can even modify your task to make it easier to work on
  • Your emotions can be distracting, and you need to learn how to modulate your emotions. “Learn to let it arise, note it, release it and let it go”

Optimizing Your Focus

How can you optimize your focus? Research has shown that it depends on two factors: arousal and task complexity.

  • Arousal: is your overall energy and level of alertness. When you are sleeping, you have low arousal, and when you are exercising, you have high arousal. Typically, the level of arousal affects your attention.
    • High arousal usually means high alertness and is great for performing specific, simple tasks
    • Low arousal usually means a more diffuse type of alertness and is great for more complex tasks
  • Task Complexity: How hard a given task is
    • Usually for more complex tasks like math, reasoning, and creative work. It’s better to have low arousal and let your brain work on the problem, even in the background.

If you are working on a complex task like a math problem, you are better off doing it in a low arousal environment. If you are doing something pretty simple, you can work in an environment like a coffee shop.

Principle 3: Direct

Directness is the concept of being able to learn in the context that you will use it in

Scott talked about the “dirty secrets” of traditional education programs, where students cannot transfer their learnings to a different context, or when they face the same problems with different variations. He argued that learning directly can solve this problem.

Techniques For Better Direct Practices

  • Project-based Learning: To the extent that you can, try to learn by doing. If you are learning programming, try to build software. If you are learning a language, try to converse with other people.
  • Immersive Learning: is the process of surrounding yourself in the target environment where your skill is practiced. Immersing yourself in a foreign country to learn the language that you are trying to master is a great example. Joining communities and embracing ideas is a great way for us to learn directly.
  • The flight simulator method: Being able to simulate the task that you want to perform is another way to directly practice. This often helps you to practice the cognitive aspect of the skill you want to learn.
  • The overkill method: Raise the bar so you can get feedback that is more explicit and apparent. Doing standup comedy with middle school kids who are ruthless.
  • Learn from the source: This is not included in the book, but it’s something Brian Chesky has mentioned. You go to the source / person who created the idea, and you learn from them how exactly that skill should be practiced.

Principle 4: Drill

Attack your weakest point — Drill allows you to simplify a skill enough so you can spend our cognitive resources on a single aspect of the skill

Unlike practicing directly, sometimes it is important to break up the skill and practice individual components — what Scott called drills. He mentioned the best kind of practice is to have a Direct-then-Drill loop, where you start out with the overall skill you want to practice, then you focus on specific components of the skills, improve it, and then practice the whole skill directly again. This cycle is the best way to drive improvement. The story of how Benjamin Franklin improved his writing using drill is a good illustrative example.

Techniques For Better Drills

  • Time Slicing: This is very common in sports, where people break up a skill into a sequence of time-based components. Like in basketball, it is doing dribbling, or doing layups, etc. You can do the same thing for your own skill, break it down by time, and focus on individual components.
  • Cognitive Components: There are certain things that are cognitively very hard, by focusing on that, you will be able to identify the bottleneck.
  • The Copycat: Leverage the work that has already been done by you or others, and try to practice specific aspects of that finished work to practice the skill you need.
  • The Magnifying Glass Method: You focus on one single thing for an extended period of time.
  • Prerequisite Chaining: You jump right into the skill, slowly figure out what pre-requisites you are missing and need to improve, and keep doing so until you have nailed down all the pre-requisites.

Principle 5: Retrieval

The research is clear: If you need to retrieve something later, you are best off to practice retrieving it

What kind of information should you learn to retrieve? Typically, you can focus on the core concepts and ideas that you are trying to learn, or you can apply directness to let the activities tell you what you need to retrieve and learn how to retrieve those accordingly. But directness-like exercises are not enough, sometimes you don’t know what you don’t know, so a balance is needed.

Techniques For Better Retrieval

  • Flash Card Technique: This is one of the most useful techniques when trying to retrieve a cue and response pair. It’s mostly replaced by spaced repetition programs, but the basic idea is still the same.
  • Free Recall: You consume some resources or books, and then you immediately force yourself to summarize the main points and concepts that were taught.
  • The Question-Book Method: Instead of writing down answers, you deliberately try to reframe the answers into questions, so you can practice more in the future.
  • Self Generated Challenges: you create questions, problems, tasks where you force yourself to retrieve the knowledge you need to do a certain job.
  • Closed-Book Learning: By dis-allowing yourself to revisit the source / materials, you are forced to recreate and retrieve the information from your mind. This is quite similar to “free-recall” actually.

Principle 6: Feedback

The story of Chris Rock giving his jokes to get responses from guests highlights the importance of feedback. In deliberate practice, one of the most important things is getting fast and timely feedback for the skill that you are practicing. In general, there are three kinds of feedback that are useful:

  • Outcome Feedback — “Are you doing it wrong?”: This is the most coarse feedback: a grade, a score, or some outcome that tells you whether you did things well or not.
  • Informational Feedback — “What are you doing wrong?”: This feedback is more specific, it tells you what specific things you have done wrong, but it doesn’t quite tell you how to fix them. You often get this kind of feedback by directly practicing the things that you are trying to practice.
  • Corrective Feedback — “How can you fix what you are doing wrong”: This kind of feedback tells you exactly how to fix the things that you have done wrong, and is usually given by subject matter experts or coaches.

Techniques For Better Feedback

  • Noise Cancellation: Knowing what kind of feedback not to take, and what kind of feedback to take.
  • Hitting the Difficulty Sweet Spot: Observe if the task that you are doing is too hard or too easy. If you are constantly scoring perfectly on the task that you are doing, adjust and increase its level of difficulty. If you are constantly doing poorly, adjust down the difficulty.
  • Meta-Feedback: Instead of focusing on your own performance, focus on the learning rate. This means that you can get a sense of whether your learning strategy is working, and whether you would need to make adjustments. You can also try to simultaneously experiment with different learning strategies to know which one is the best.
  • High Intensity, Rapid Feedback: Sometimes the easiest way to improve feedback is to get a lot of them in a short period of time, this is especially helpful for activities where feedback is infrequent.

I think this section is a bit watery. Everyone understands the importance of feedback, but it wasn’t very specific about how to create it.

Principle 7: Retention

One of the biggest challenges to learning is to remember the things that you have learned. Why is retaining what we learned so hard? There hasn’t been a final verdict on this, but typically, there are a few theories why we tend to forget things:

  • Decay — forgetting with time: The first theory is that memory simply decays with time. We tend to remember more recent things, but this is also not quite true, because sometimes we have vivid memories of even things from childhood.
  • Interference — overwriting old memories with new ones: Another theory is that similar concepts occupy a similar space in our brain. When we introduce a similar concept, our brain needs to find space for this, which can sometimes cause interference. Specifically, there are two kinds of interference:
    • Proactive interference: This happens when previously acquired experience makes it harder to acquire the new one
    • Retroactive interference: happens when the new memory replaces the old one
  • Forgotten Cues: Another theory is that memories are not forgotten but simply not accessible, and require certain cues to retrieve them.

Techniques For Better Retention

  • Spacing — Repeat to remember: This is where spaced repetition systems (SRS) come into play. Intuitively, it’s much better to space out your practice rather than cramming. Many ultra-learners obsessed over the optimal way to space practice, but the general idea of spacing practice out is a good strategy.
  • Proceduralization: For certain skills, if you can embrace declarative-to-procedural transition, you can build muscle memories. There are a few strategies that you can use to enforce this:
    • Ensure that a certain amount of knowledge is completely proceduralized before practice concludes
    • Spend extra effort to proceduralize some skills, which will serve as cues or access points for other knowledge
  • Over-learning: Additional practice, beyond what is required to perform adequately, can increase the length of time that memories are stored. When combined with spacing and proceduralization, this can be a powerful technique. Typically, you can practice over-learning in the context of:
    • Pair over-learning with some kind of immersion or working on extensive projects, after the initial ultra-learning phase has been completed.
    • Advanced practice, going one level above a certain set of skills so that core parts of the lower-level skills are over-learned as one applies them in a more difficult domain.
  • Mnemonics: This is a well-studied field, check out the book “Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything”.

Principle 8: Intuition

The hero story here is Richard Feynman and his seemingly magician-like brilliance. Scott has a thesis that the reason that Feynman is so brilliant is because he has incredible intuition for Physics problems. He argued that Feynman generally adopted the following technique when approaching his work:

  • Don’t give up on problems easily: Feynman works super hard on problems and he doesn’t give up easily. Scott suggested to give yourself some struggle time — give yourself a bit more time before giving up on a problem.
  • Prove things to understand them: Feynman tried to reconstruct the results from papers himself and prove everything. This is hard work but it really helped him to understand things really well. This ties well with the notion of illusion of explanatory depth — we are not very good at judging our understanding, and typically need to use various proxies to decide that. In fact, we are often off.
  • Always start with a concrete example: This is a good way to make things concrete.
  • Don’t fool yourself: Ask a lot of questions, even if they are simple. Be aware of the Dunning-Kruger effect, where people who don’t have adequate knowledge think they know more than the people who truly do.

Techniques For Better Intuition

Scott has a technique called the “Feynman Technique”, which he made up, but it roughly consists of the following:

  • Take a blank sheet of paper, and write down a subject that you wish to understand
  • If it’s a concept, explain it as if you are teaching someone about this subject. If it’s a problem, work through the solution and articulate the process in which you solve the problem
  • When you get stuck, go back to your references, teachers, books, and notes to find a clear answer

Principle 9: Experimentation

The hero story here is van Gogh, where he relentlessly tried new things before he developed his own style. In Scott’s view, experimentation is the key to mastery. Early in one’s learning path, all the learning materials and concepts to learn are pretty standardized. As you get more skillful at the craft that you are practicing, you can’t simply follow the examples of others, you have to find your own ways.

Scott believes there are three types of experimentation:

  • Experimentation with learning resources: This is where you try out different learning materials, medium, to find the best source for you to continue to grow
  • Experimentation with techniques: once you acquire basic proficiency in a skill, the question often changes from “how can I learn this?” to “what can I learn next?”
  • Experimentation with style: Eventually, everyone should develop their own style, this is particularly relevant for knowledge work.

Techniques For Better Experimentation

  • Copy, then Create: I think a better way to put it is — “imitate, then create”. It’s often good to learn from the masters to understand how to do the table stakes things, but you have to gradually develop your own style.
  • Compare methods side-by-side: This is basically doing your own version of A/B testing, where you only vary one variable at a time to figure out what’s working and what’s not.
  • Introduce New Constraints: Sometimes, the best way to spark creativity is to constrain the solution space and what you can do.
  • Find your superpower in multiple fields: This is completely aligned with Scott Adams’s advice on being a double or triple threat.

Check List For Your Ultra-Learning Project

Here are some of the questions to ask yourself before engaging in an ultra-learning project.

Do Your Research

  • What topic are you going to learn? Have you thought through strategically what craft to build?
  • Have you performed the necessary due diligence to figure out the approximate scope?
  • Have you decided on the primary and secondary sources you are going to use?
  • Have you benchmarked your plan with people who have successfully acquired the skills?

Schedule Your Time

Make sure you schedule all learning times so you pre-commit to the plan.

  • Month-level: Have you decided how long the project is going to last?
  • Week-level: Have you foreseen some of the weeks where you will have other obligations?
  • Day-level:
    • Have you decided how much time you will commit (per day) to the project?
    • Have you decided what time during the day you will engage with the learning activities?

Execute Your Plan

  • Are you focused enough to execute? Have you removed all the distractions?
  • Are your activities direct enough that you can practice?
  • Have you decomposed the craft so you can drill practice individual pieces?
  • Are you getting enough feedback during this process?
  • Are you able to retrieve and retain the knowledge you have acquired?
  • Are you able to develop deep intuition?

Review Your Results

  • Have you reviewed your project and figured out what went well / wrong so you can continue the experimentation?

What Comes After Ultra-Learning Project

  • Maintenance: keep your skills learned at the same level of expertise
  • Re-learning: Sometimes you have to re-learn a subject, but the cost is generally lower
  • Mastery: You keep on perfecting your craft

Other modes of learning (not related to ultra-learning) range from low-intensity, casual learnings on the one extreme to structured, formal education on the other extreme. It all depends on your need, schedule, and commitment levels.