Author – Scott H. Young
Raise a Genius
The Unschooled Mind: How Children Think and how Schools should Teach
“Always have a challenge.“
How to start learning a new language:
The best ultralearners are those who blend the practical reasons for learning a skill with an inspiration that comes from something that excites them.
A good rule of thumb is that you should invest approximately 10 percent of your total expected learning time into research prior to starting.
If you have several hours to study, you’re possibly better off covering a few topics rather than focusing exclusively on one.
The learning activities are always done with a connection to the context in which the skills learned will eventually be used.
Though first covering the material is often essential to begin doing practice, asserts that it’s actually while doing the thing you want to get good at when much of the learning takes place.
Whenever possible, spend a good portion of your learning time just doing the thing you want to get better at.
Rate-determining step: a reaction takes place over multiple steps, with the products of one reaction becoming the reagents for another. = learning.
By identifying a rate-determining step in your learning reaction, you can isolate it and work on it specifically.
Direct-Then-Drill Approach
Which aspect of the skill, if you improved it, would cause the greatest improvement to your abilities overall for the least amount of effort?
Find a way to enhance the learning process by accelerating learning on the specific things that you find most difficult.
Carefully designed drills elicit creativity and imagination as you strive to solve a more complex learning challenge by breaking it into specific parts.
Drills require the learner not only to think deeply about what is being learned, but also figure out what is most difficult and attack that weakness directly, rather than focus on what is the most fun or what has already been mastered. This requires strong motivation and a comfort with learning aggressively.
Something mentally strenuous provides a greater benefit to learning than something easy.
In nearly every biography of great geniuses and contemporary ultralearners some form of retrieval practice is mentioned.
Feedback is one of the most consistent aspects of the strategy ultralearners use.
What often separated the ultralearning strategy from more conventional approaches was the immediacy, accuracy, and intensity of the feedback being provided.
Feedback works well when it provides useful information that can guide future learning.
Ultralearners need to be sensitive to what feedback is actually useful and tune out the rest.
Always strive to seek aggressive feedback and constructive criticism.
If you care about long-term retention, don’t cram.
The Feynman Technique
For many areas of creative or professional skills, another more accessible path is to combine two skills that don’t necessarily overlap to bring about a distinct advantage that those who specialize in only one of those skills do not have.
For instance, you might be an engineer who becomes superb at public speaking. You may not be the best possible engineer or the best possible presenter, but combining those two skills could make you the best person to present on engineering topics for your company at conferences, thus giving you access to new professional opportunities.
Pushing out to an extreme in some aspect of the skill you’re cultivating, even if you eventually decide to pull it back to something more moderate, is often a good exploration strategy.
The goal of ultralearning is to expand the opportunities available to you, not narrow them. It is to create new avenues for learning and to push yourself to pursue them aggressively rather than timidly waiting by the sidelines.
We share our thoughts, ideas, and projects for all to learn and grow as we embark own our venture to gain FFF.