Ultralearning: Master Hard Skills, Outsmart the Competition, and Accelerate Your Career

One of our objective in Kompas Gramedia is to enhance or learning culture toward an exponential learning culture. We define it as all of our employees actively and collaboratively learn anything they need that deliver the biggest impact in our organization. We need that kind of learning culture to enable us working toward an ecosystem approach where every parts of the organization is connected in order to achieve our common goals. We’re a half decade organization and we’ve been working in silos with heavy bureaucracy for too long and that kind of way of work also influence the way of our employees learn, which is most of us only learn things that we’ve been told to and in one’s narrow scope of work only. We need to change that kind of passive learning into firstly becoming an active learning, then move forward into a collaborative learning which will then ultimately embrace exponential learning. 

When passive, active, collaborative and exponential learning above are mostly describe the manner, scope and impact of the learning, I learn that there is one thing that can be add to further classify the learning culture in term of speed/pace of the learning. It is form my 5th book that I’ve read of this year that I learned about the terminology of ultralearning. The book is titled: “Ultralearning: Master Hard Skills, Outsmart the Competition, and Accelerate Your Career” by Scott H. Young. It’s an eye opener book about how we can (and should) not only learning anything we want, but we can be a master of it in a relatively short time. The author, Scott, is someone who actually practice this by getting an MIT education without going to MIT and finish it in a year time, compared to averagely four years for an ordinary MIT student. He also used to learn in mastering new languages in just 3 months period. Using his own experiences combined with learning from other ‘ultralearners’ that he could find plus doing extensive research, he wrote this must read book. If you’re someone that love to learn, like me, then this book must be on your reading list this year, and hopefully we can all be an ultralearners. So, it is now not enough to be just an exponential learner in my organization, the best employees should be the ones who are exponential ultralearners. 

I do really wish for you to read the whole book by yourself as you’ll obviously learn much better from the examples and contexts provided in the book, yet I’ll provide you with a short summary here quoted from the book to tease you. There are nine universal principles to become an ultralearner:

1. Metalearning: First Draw A Map. Start by learning how to learn the subject or skill you want to tackle. Discover how to do good research and how to draw on your past competencies to learn new skills more easily. To draw the map, you need to firstly determine the Why, What and How. To answer the ‘Why’ you can use the tactic of the Expert Interview Method which is you can talk ti people who have already achieved what you want to achieve. In answering the ‘What’ you need to lay down the necessary concepts, facts and procedures for your learning. For the ‘How’ part, you can start with Benchmarking, which is finding the common ways in which people learn the skill or subject. Once you’ve found a default curriculum, you can considering making modifications to it by using the Emphasize/Exclude Method. A good rule of thumb is that you should invest approximately 10 percent of your total expected learning time into research prior to starting.
2. Focus: Sharpen Your Knife. Cultivate the ability to concentrate. Crave out chunks of time when you can focus on learning, and make it easy to just do it. Recognize where you are and start small. If you’re the kind of person who can’t sit still for a minute, try sitting for a half a minute. Half a minute soon becomes a minute, then two. Over time, the frustrations you feel learning a subject may become transmuted into genuine interest. The impulse to engage in distractions will weaken each time you resist it. With patience and persistence, your few minutes may become large enough to accomplish great things.
3. Directness: Go Straight Ahead. Learn by doing the thing you want to be good at. Don’t trade it off for other tasks, just because those are more convenient or comfortable. There are four tactics on this. First, you can do a Project-Based Learning. Second, try Immersive learning by surrounding yourself with the target environment in which the skill is practiced. Third, you can use The Flight Simulator Method. Fourth is the Overkill Approach by putting yourself in an environment where the demands are going to be extremely high, so you’re unlikely to miss any important lessons or feedback.
4. Drill: Attack Your Weakest Point. Be ruthless in improving your weakest points. Break down complex skills into small parts; then master this parts and build them back together again. There are five tactics here. First, you can implement a Time Slicing by isolating a slice in time of a longer sequence of actions. Second, you can practice a particular Cognitive Components instead of a slice in time of a larger skill. Third, just be a Copycat by copying the parts of the skill you don’t want to drill (either from someone else or your past work), so you can focus solely on the component you want to practice. Fourth is using The Magnifying Glass Method by spending more time on one component of the skill than you would otherwise. The fifth would be Prerequisite Chaining by starting with a skill that you don’t have all the prerequisites for and then, when you inevitably do poor, go bas a step, learn one of the foundational topics, and repeat the exercise.
5. Retrieval: Test To Learn. Testing isn’t simply a way of assessing knowledge bu a way of creating it. Test yourself before you feel confident, and push yourself to actively recall information rather than passively review it. Here you can either use a Flash Cards, Free Recall, The Question-Book Method, Self Generated Challenges or Closed-Book Learning, or just do it all. 
6. Feedback: Don’t Dodge The Punches. Feedback is harsh and uncomfortable. Know how to use it without letting your ego get in the way. Extract the signal from the noise, so you know what to pay attention to and what to ignore. There are some concrete tactics that you can apply to get better feedback. The first tactic is Noise Cancellation by modifying and selecting the streams of feedback you pay attention to so you can reduce the noise and get more signal. The second tactic is Hitting the Difficulty Sweet Spot by always trying to avoid situations that always make you feel good (or bad) about your performance, embrace the uncertainties. The third tactic is Metafeedback by evaluating the overall success of the strategy you’re using to learn. The Fourth Tactic is throwing yourself into a High-Intensity, Rapid Feedback situation which initially will make you feel uncomfortable, but you’ll get that initial aversion much faster than if you wait months or years before getting feedback.  
7. Retention: Don’t Fill A Leaky Bucket. Understand what you forget and why. Learn to remember things not just now but forever. We can try to memorize better using one of our mechanisms: Spacing: Repeat to Remember; Proceduralization: Automatic will Endure; Overlearning: Practice Beyond Perfect; and Mnemonics: A Picture Retains A Thousand Word.
8. Intuition: Dig Deep Before Building Up. Develop your intuition through play and exploration of concepts and skills. Understand how understanding works, and don’t recourse to cheap tricks of memorization to avoid deeply knowing things. There are four rules for building your intuition. First, Don’t Give Up on Hard Problems Easily. Second, Prove Things to Understand Them. Third, Always Start with a Concrete Example. Fourth, Don’t Fool Yourself, ask (lots of) questions!
9. Experimentation: Explore Outside Your Comfort Zone. All of These principles are only starting points. True Mastery comes not just from following the path trodden by others but from exploring possibilities they haven’t yet imagined. First thing first is to have the Experimentation Mindset to accompany your Growth Mindset. Then, there are five tactics that you can use to experiment. The first tactic is Copy, Then Create. Second, Compare Methods Side-by-Side. Third, Introduce New Constraints that make the old methods impossible to use. fourth, Find Your Superpower in the Hybrid of Unrelated Skills. Fifth, Explore the Extremes to search the space of possibilities more effectively, while also giving you a broader range of expertise.   

Beyond those principles and tactics is a broader ultralearning ethos. It’s one of taking responsibility for your own learning: deciding what you want to learn, how you want to learn it, and crafting your own plan to learn what you need to. You’re the one in charge, and you’re the one who’s ultimately responsible for the results you generate. If you approach ultralearning in that spirit, you should take those principles as flexible guidelines, not as rigid rules.

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