How To Learn ANYTHING Fast - Ultralearning

Quick Wins This Week:

Get the SKILL Framework Workbook (Free)

A simple guide to go from $0 to $150k per year.

Get It

Join The Community (Free)

Improve your accountability with weekly calls.

Join Now

What would your life look like if you could learn any skill you wanted quickly and deeply?

Imagine becoming fluent in a language or a world-class public speaker in a matter of months.

Or if you could get an MIT-level education in less than a year, think how much that could help your career.

Well, in this book, the author has found people who've done all these things and more.

By studying them, the author started to uncover patterns in how they did it.

Then, by combining these patterns with his own learning experiences and cognitive science research, he's created what he calls ultralearning.

Ultralearning

A strategy for acquiring skills and knowledge that is both self-directed and intense.

In the book, the author reveals the nine principles of ultralearning.

Today, I'll take you through each principle so that you can apply them to your own projects.

Principle 1: Metalearning

The first principle is Metalearning, or learning how to learn.

The better you are at learning, the more effective every hour you spend on your project will be.

So, before starting a project, you need to research and create a clear plan for learning.

Your research should take about 10% of the total project time for longer projects and less for shorter ones.

Principle 2: Focus

Unsurprisingly, sustained focus is a real challenge for most people, but you can improve it over time.

The simplest way to start improving is to reduce three types of distractions:

Your Environment: First, improve your learning environment by removing your phone etc.
Your Task: Consider what kinds of tasks you find easy to focus on naturally and prioritise those.
Your Mind: Practise focussing even when you're feeling angry or have other negative emotions.

Principle 3: Directness

Research has proven that humans are very bad at transferring things they've learnt from one context to another.

To combat this, you need to incorporate a way of directly using your skill in your learning project.

You can immerse yourself in an environment to make sure you practise in the real world.

Or you can create a project, like learning to code by creating a software program.

Principle 4: Drills

Drills focus on just one aspect of the skill or subject that's limiting your progress overall.

To create drills, focus on just one mental aspect of the task or dedicate more time to just one aspect of it.

Principle 5: Retrieval

Research has shown that remembering information you've previously learnt without prompts is a great way to remember it long-term.

You could use flashcards or try to write down everything you remember on a blank piece of paper after learning something new.

Principle 6: Feedback

The more useful feedback you get, the more you can iterate your methods and improve your skill quickly.

There are three kinds of feedback:

Outcome Feedback: How well you're doing.
Informational Feedback: What you're doing wrong.
Corrective Feedback: Shows your mistakes and how to improve.

The more constructive feedback you can get, the faster you will improve.

Principle 7: Retention

Earlier, I talked about how to improve your ability to remember more of what you've learnt.

But, unfortunately, our brains will still slowly forget things over time.

However, we can improve our chances of retaining information by spacing out our study sessions.

Research shows regular, shorter sessions are better than occasional long ones.

Principle 8: Intuition

So far, we've talked about expanding the breadth of your knowledge, but you also need to know how to build depth.

This is your intuition.

The deeper your knowledge, the easier it will be to combine different ideas and facts to create unique solutions.

A simple way to improve your depth of knowledge is to teach concepts to others.

This will quickly show where your gaps are and allow you to build much more depth.

Principle 9: Experimentation

This is really a guiding principle for the whole book.

You need to constantly test different learning, feedback, and drill approaches to find what works for you.

Here are some of my favourite ways that the author suggests we can experiment in our learning:

Copy, then create: Try to reduce the things you need to master by simply copying something else.
Compare methods: Try your skill using different techniques and compare the results.
Use constraints and extremes: Add constraints to your work or force yourself to work only in extremes.

Summary

We can massively improve our ability to learn quickly and deeply by embracing the nine principles of ultralearning:

Metalearning
Focus
Directness
Drills
Retrieval
Feedback
Retention
Intuition
Experimentation

Next week I'll be releasing a video explaining this concept in more detail with more practical ways to implement these principles in your project.

In the meantime, I've restarted uploading videos to YouTube again after a short break. (You can check them out below.)

As ever, I'd love to know what you thought of this email or the new videos - just hit reply and let me know.

Thanks, have a great week!

Tim