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Foreword © James Clear 2019

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DEDICATION

To Zorica

CONTENTS

COVER

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT

DEDICATION

FOREWORD BY JAMES CLEAR

CHAPTER 1: Can You Get an MIT Education Without Going to MIT?

CHAPTER 2: Why Ultralearning Matters

CHAPTER 3: How to Become an Ultralearner

CHAPTER 4: Principle 1—Metalearning: First Draw a Map

CHAPTER 5: Principle 2—Focus: Sharpen Your Knife

CHAPTER 6: Principle 3—Directness: Go Straight Ahead

CHAPTER 7: Principle 4—Drill: Attack Your Weakest Point

CHAPTER 8: Principle 5—Retrieval: Test to Learn

CHAPTER 9: Principle 6—Feedback: Don’t Dodge the Punches

CHAPTER 10: Principle 7—Retention: Don’t Fill a Leaky Bucket

CHAPTER 11: Principle 8—Intuition: Dig Deep Before Building Up

CHAPTER 12: Principle 9—Experimentation: Explore Outside Your Comfort Zone

CHAPTER 13: Your First Ultralearning Project

CHAPTER 14: An Unconventional Education

APPENDIX

FOOTNOTES

NOTES

INDEX

PRAISE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

FOREWORD

My relationship with Scott Young began in mid-2013. On July 10, I sent him an email asking if he wanted to set up a call for the following month. We had met at a conference a few days earlier, and I was hoping he would be willing to continue the conversation.

“Possibly,” he replied. “I’ll be in Spain then, and the language-learning focus of my upcoming project may take precedence.”

It wasn’t the response I was hoping for, but it seemed reasonable. Managing calls while traveling internationally can be tricky, and I understood if he wanted to wait until he returned. However, I quickly found out that he would not be returning anytime soon, and it was not the time change nor a spotty internet connection that would postpone our conversation.

No, it would be hard to catch up with Scott because he was planning to speak no English for an entire year.

Thus began my introduction to Scott Young and his commitment to ultralearning. Over the next twelve months, I would trade sporadic emails with Scott as he traveled to Spain, Brazil, China, and Korea, and proceeded to become conversational in each of the respective languages along the way. He was true to his word: it was not until the following summer in 2014 that we carved out time to catch up regularly and began chatting with each other every few months.

I was always excited for my calls with Scott—primarily for selfish reasons. One of my core interests as a writer is the science of how to build good habits and break bad ones. Someone like Scott, who had so clearly mastered his own habits, was exactly the type of person who could teach me a thing or two. And that’s precisely what happened. I can scarcely remember finishing a call with Scott and not learning something during the previous hour.

That’s not to say his insight took me by surprise. Scott had already been on my radar by the time we met at that conference in 2013. He had catapulted to internet fame one year prior by learning the entire MIT undergraduate computer science curriculum and passing all of the final tests in less than a year—four years’ worth of classes in under twelve months. I had seen the TEDx Talk summarizing his experience, and I read a few of his articles on learning and self-improvement before tracking him down at the conference.

The idea of taking on an ambitious project—like studying MIT’s undergraduate curriculum in one year or learning a new language every three months—is inspirational to many people. I certainly found these bold projects fascinating. But there was something else about Scott’s projects that resonated with me on a deeper level: he had a bias toward action.

This is something I have always appreciated about Scott’s approach and something I believe you will appreciate as a reader of this book. He isn’t focused on simply soaking up knowledge. He is committed to putting that knowledge to use. Approaching learning with an intensity and commitment to action is a hallmark of Scott’s process. This approach speaks to me, in part, because I see similar patterns in my own life and career. Some of my most meaningful experiences have been the result of intense self-directed learning.

Although I didn’t know the word ultralearning at the time, one of my first ultralearning projects was photography. In late 2009, I moved to Scotland for a few months. It was my first time living abroad, and given the beautiful scenery throughout the Scottish Highlands, I figured I should buy a decent camera. What I hadn’t expected, however, was that I would fall in love with the process of taking photos. What followed was one of the most creative periods of my life.

I learned photography through a variety of methods. I studied the portfolios of famous photographers. I scouted locations and searched for compelling perspectives. But, most of all, I learned through one simple method: I took over 100,000 photos that first year. I never enrolled in a photography class. I didn’t read books on how to become a better photographer. I just committed to relentless experimentation. This “learning by doing” approach embodies one of my favorite chapters in this book and Scott’s third principle of ultralearning: directness.

Directness is the practice of learning by directly doing the thing you want to learn. Basically, it’s improvement through active practice rather than through passive learning. The phrases learning something new and practicing something new may seem similar, but these two methods can produce profoundly different results. Passive learning creates knowledge. Active practice creates skill.

This is a point that Scott more fully clarifies and refines in chapter 6: directness leads to skill development. You can research the best instructions on the bench press technique, but the only way to build strength is to practice lifting weights. You can read all of the bestselling sales books, but the only way to actually get customers is to practice making sales calls. Learning can be very useful, of course, but the danger is that the act of soaking up new facts can be disconnected from the process of refining a new skill. You can know every fact about an industry and still lack real-world expertise because you haven’t practiced the craft.

Scott understands the difficulty of actually learning new skills. I respect him not only for the quality of his writing but also for the simple fact that he is a practitioner of his own ideas. I can’t say enough about how important this is: he has skin in the game. Many ideas sound brilliant on paper but fail in the real world. As the saying goes, “In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But in practice, there is.”*

As for my photography quest, it didn’t take long for my commitment to direct practice to pay off. A few months after I bought my camera, I traveled to Norway and ventured above the Arctic Circle to capture an image of the aurora borealis. Not long afterward, I was named a finalist for Travel Photographer of the Year thanks to that image of the Northern Lights. It was a surprising outcome, but also a testament to how much progress you can make during a short but intense period of learning.

I never pursued a career as a photographer. It was an ultralearning project I did for fun and personal satisfaction. But a few years later, right around the time I first met Scott, I began another period of intense learning with a more utilitarian outcome in mind: I wanted to be an entrepreneur, and I figured writing would be one path that could get me there.

Once again, I had selected a domain where I had little formal experience. I had no entrepreneurs in my family, and I had taken only a single college English class. But as I read through Ultralearning, I was startled to find that Scott explained, in nearly step-by-step fashion, the process I followed to go from unproven entrepreneur to bestselling author.

Principle #1: Metalearning—I started by examining other popular bloggers and authors. Their methods helped me to create a map for what I needed to do to become a successful writer.

Principle #2: Focus—I went full-time as a writer nearly from the start. Aside from a few freelance projects I took on to pay the bills, the vast majority of my time was spent reading and writing.

Principle #3: Directness—I learned writing by writing. I set a schedule for myself to write a new article every Monday and Thursday. Over the first two years, I produced more than 150 essays.

Principle #4: Drill—I systematically broke down each aspect of writing articles—the headline, the introductory sentence, the transitions, the storytelling, and more—and put together spreadsheets filled with examples of each segment. Then I set about testing and refining my ability to perform each small aspect of the larger task.

Principle #5: Feedback—I personally emailed nearly all of my first ten thousand subscribers to say hello and to ask for feedback on my writing. It didn’t scale, but it taught me a lot in the beginning.

… and so on.

My point is that Scott’s method works. By following the techniques he lays out in this book, I was able to build a writing career, create a successful business, and, ultimately, write a New York Times bestselling book. When I released Atomic Habits, it was the culmination of years of work centered around the process of ultralearning.

I think it’s easy to hear stories about writing a bestselling book or learning four languages in a year and think, “That’s for other people.” I disagree. Learning something valuable and doing it fast doesn’t have to be confined to some narrow set of geniuses. It’s a process anyone can embrace. It’s just that most people never do it because they never had a playbook to show them how. Until now.

There are good reasons to pursue ultralearning—whether you are conducting a project for personal or professional interests.

First, deep learning provides a sense of purpose in life. Developing skills is meaningful. It feels good to get good at something. Ultralearning is a path to prove to yourself that you have the ability to improve and to make the most of your life. It gives you the confidence that you can accomplish ambitious things.

Second, deep learning is how you get outsized returns. The simple truth is most people will never intensely study your area of interest. Doing so—even if it’s just for a few months—will help you stand out. And once you stand out, you can get a better job, negotiate for a higher salary or more free time, network with more interesting people, and otherwise level up your personal and professional life. Ultralearning helps you develop leverage that you can use elsewhere.

Finally, deep learning is possible. Paul Graham, the famous entrepreneur and investor, once noted, “In many fields a year of focused work plus caring a lot would be enough.”* Similarly, I think most people would be surprised by what they could accomplish with a year (or a few months) of focused learning. The process of intense self-directed learning can fashion skills you never thought you could develop. Ultralearning can help you fulfill your potential, and that is perhaps the best reason of all to pursue it.

The truth is, despite the success of my writing and photography pursuits, these projects were haphazard. I did them intensely but without guidance or direction. I made a lot of mistakes. I wish I had this book when I was starting out. I can only imagine how much wasted time and energy I would have saved.

Ultralearning is a fascinating and inspiring read. Scott has compiled a gold mine of actionable strategies for learning anything faster. His effort is now your gain. I hope you enjoy this book as much as I did, and, most important, I hope you use these ideas to accomplish something ambitious and exciting in your own life. With the stories and strategies Scott shares in this book, you will have the knowledge. All that is left is to take action.

—James Clear

CHAPTER 1
Can You Get an MIT Education Without Going to MIT?

Only a few hours left. I caught myself glancing out the window as the early-morning light glittered off the buildings in front of me. It was a crisp fall day, surprisingly sunny for a famously rainy city. Well-dressed men carried briefcases and fashionable women pulled miniature dogs beneath my eleventh-story vantage point. Buses dragged reluctant commuters into town one last time before the weekend. The city might have been rousing from its slumber, but I had been awake since before dawn.

Now is not the time for daydreaming, I reminded myself and shifted my attention back to the half-finished math problems scribbled on the notebook in front of me. “Show that ∫∫RcurlF · n̂ dS = 0 for any finite part of the unit sphere …” the problem began. The class was Multivariate Calculus for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The final exam would start soon, and I had little time left to prepare. What was curl, again … ? I closed my eyes and tried to form a picture of the problem in my head. There’s a sphere. I know that. I conjured a bright red ball in my mind’s eye, floating in empty space. Now what was n̂? The n̂ stands for normal, I reminded myself, meaning an arrow that points straight up from the surface. My red ball became furry, with hairlike vectors standing straight at all ends. But what about curl? My imagination turned to waves of tiny arrows pulsating in a vast sea. Curl marked the eddies, swirling around in little loops. I thought again to my furry, red ball with the static-charged hairdo. My fuzzy sphere had no whorls, so there must not be any curl, I reasoned. But how do I prove it? I scratched down some equations. Better double-check it. My mental pictures were clear, but my symbol manipulation was a lot sloppier. There wasn’t much time left, and every second of preparation counted. I needed to grind through as many problems as possible before time ran out.

That was nothing unusual for an MIT student. Tricky equations, abstract concepts, and difficult proofs are all a normal part of one of the most prestigious educations in math and science in the world. Except that I was not an MIT student. In fact, I had never even been to Massachusetts. All of this was taking place in my bedroom, twenty-five hundred miles away in Vancouver, Canada. And although an MIT student typically covers the entirety of multivariate calculus over a semester, I had started only five days before.

THE MIT CHALLENGE

I have never attended MIT. Instead, my college days were spent studying business at the University of Manitoba, a middle-ranked Canadian school I could actually afford. After graduating with a bachelor of commerce, I felt as though I had picked the wrong major. I wanted to be an entrepreneur and so had studied business, thinking that would be the best route to becoming my own boss. Four years later, I discovered that a business major was largely a finishing school for entrants into the world of big corporations, gray suits, and standard operating procedures. Computer science, in contrast, was a major where you actually learned to make things. Programs, websites, algorithms, and artificial intelligence were what had interested me in entrepreneurship in the first place, and I was struggling to decide what to do about it.

I could go back to school, I thought. Enroll again. Spend another four years working toward a second degree. But taking out student loans and giving up a half decade of my life to repeat the bureaucracy and rules of college didn’t seem very appealing. There had to be a better way to learn what I wanted.

Around that time, I stumbled across a class taught at MIT and posted online. It had fully recorded lectures, assignments, and quizzes; even the actual exams used in the real class with the solution keys were provided. I decided to try taking the class. To my surprise, I found that the class was much better than most of the classes I had paid thousands of dollars to attend in university. The lectures were polished, the professor was engaging, and the material was fascinating. Digging further, I could see that this wasn’t the only class MIT offered for free. MIT had uploaded the materials from hundreds of different classes. I wondered if this could be the solution to my problem. If anyone could learn the content of an MIT class for free, would it be possible to learn the content of an entire degree?

Thus began almost six months of intense research into a project I named the MIT Challenge. I looked up the actual MIT curriculum for computer science undergrads. I matched and compared the list with the resources MIT offered online. Unfortunately, that was a lot easier said than done. MIT’s OpenCourseWare, the platform used for uploading class material, had never been intended as a substitute for attending the school. Some classes simply weren’t offered and needed to be swapped out. Others had such scant material that I wondered if they would even be possible to complete. Computation Structures, one of the required courses, which taught how to build a computer from scratch using circuits and transistors, had no recorded lectures or assigned textbook. To learn the class content, I would have to decipher abstract symbols written on a slideshow meant to accompany the lecture. Missing materials and ambiguous evaluation criteria meant that doing every class exactly as an MIT student would was out of the question. However, a simpler approach might work: just try to pass the final exams.

This focus on final exams later expanded to include programming projects for the classes that had them. These two criteria formed the skeleton of an MIT degree, covering most of the knowledge and skills I wanted to learn, with none of the frills. No mandatory attendance policy. No due dates on assignments. The final exams could be taken whenever I was ready and retaken with an alternate exam if I happened to fail one. Suddenly what had initially seemed like a disadvantage—not having physical access to MIT—became an advantage. I could approximate the education of an MIT student for a fraction of the cost, time, and constraints.

Exploring this possibility further, I even did a test class using the new approach. Instead of showing up to prescheduled lectures, I watched downloaded videos for the class at twice the normal speed. Instead of meticulously doing each assignment and waiting weeks to learn my results, I could test myself on the material one question at a time, quickly learning from my mistakes. Using these and other methods, I found I could scrape through a class in as little as a week’s time. Doing some quick calculations and adding some room for error, I decided it might be possible to tackle the remaining thirty-two classes in under a year.

Although it began as a personal quest, I started to see that there were bigger implications beyond my little project. Technology has made learning easier than ever, yet tuition costs are exploding. A four-year degree used to be an assurance of a decent job. Now it is barely a foot in the door. The best careers demand sophisticated skills that you’re unlikely to stumble upon by chance. Not just programmers but managers, entrepreneurs, designers, doctors, and nearly every other profession is rapidly accelerating the knowledge and skills required, and many are struggling to keep up. In the back of my mind, I was interested not only in computer science but in seeing if there might be a new way to master the skills needed in work and life.

As my attention drifted once more to the scene developing outside my window, I thought about how all this had started. I thought about how I wouldn’t be attempting my odd little experiment at all had it not been for a chance encounter with an intense, teetotaling Irishman on another continent almost three years earlier.

FLUENT IN THREE MONTHS?

“My problem isn’t with the French—just Parisians,” Benny Lewis vented to me in an Italian restaurant in the heart of Paris. Lewis was vegetarian, not always easy to accommodate in a country famous for steak tartare and foie gras. Eating a plate of penne arrabbiata, a favorite he had picked up while working in a youth hostel in Italy, Lewis spoke in fluent French, not minding much if any of the locals overheard his complaints. His discontent stemmed from a particularly dreary year working as a stagiaire in an engineering firm in Paris. He had found it hard to adjust to the notorious job demands and social life in France’s biggest city. Still, he thought, perhaps he shouldn’t be too critical. It was that experience, after all, that had led him to leave his life as an engineer and travel around the world learning languages.

I had been introduced to Lewis during a moment of personal frustration. I was living in France as part of a student exchange program. I had left home with high hopes of ending the year speaking effortless French, but things didn’t seem to be turning out that way. Most of my friends spoke to me in English, including the French ones, and it was starting to feel as though one year wouldn’t be enough.

I complained about this state of affairs to a friend from home; he told me about a guy he had heard of who traveled from country to country, challenging himself to learn a language in three months. “Bullshit,” I said, with more than a hint of envy. Here I had been struggling to chat with people after months of immersion, and this guy was challenging himself to do so after only three months. Despite my skepticism, I knew I needed to meet Lewis to see if he understood something about learning languages that I didn’t. An email and a train ride later, and Lewis and I were meeting face-to-face.

“Always have a challenge,” Lewis told me as he continued with his life advice, now guiding me on a postlunch tour of central Paris: Lewis’s earlier feelings about Paris were starting to soften, and as we walked from the Notre Dame to the Louvre, his mood turned nostalgic about his days in the city. His strong opinions and passions, I would later learn, not only fueled his desire to take on ambitious challenges but could also get him into trouble. He was once detained by Brazilian federal police after an immigration officer overheard him cursing her in Portuguese to friends outside when she had denied him a visa extension. The irony was that his visa had been denied because she didn’t believe his Portuguese could be so good from such a short stay, and she suspected him of secretly trying to immigrate to Brazil outside the terms of his tourist visa.

As we continued to walk, now on the grounds in front of the Eiffel Tower, Lewis explained his approach: Start speaking the very first day. Don’t be afraid to talk to strangers. Use a phrasebook to get started; save formal study for later. Use visual mnemonics to memorize vocabulary. What struck me were not the methods but the boldness with which he applied them. While I had timidly been trying to pick up some French, worrying about saying the wrong things and being embarrassed by my insufficient vocabulary, Lewis was fearless, diving straight into conversations and setting seemingly impossible challenges for himself.

That approach had served him well. He was already fluent in Spanish, Italian, Gaelic, French, Portuguese, Esperanto, and English and had recently reached a conversational level while staying in the Czech Republic for three months. But it was his newest challenge he was planning that intrigued me the most: fluency in German after just three months.

It wasn’t, strictly speaking, Lewis’s first time with German. He had taken German classes for five years in high school and had briefly visited Germany twice before. However, like many of the students who spent time learning a language in school, he still couldn’t speak it. He admitted with embarrassment, “I couldn’t even order breakfast in German if I wanted to.” Still, the unused knowledge built up from classes taken over a decade earlier would probably make his challenge easier than starting from scratch. To compensate for the reduced difficulty, Lewis decided to raise the stakes.

Normally, he challenged himself to reach the equivalent of a B2 level in a language after three months. The B2 level—the fourth out of six levels beginning A1, A2, B1, and so on—is described by the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) as upper intermediate, allowing the speaker to “interact with a degree of fluency and spontaneity that makes regular interaction with native speakers quite possible without strain for either party.” However, for his German challenge, Lewis decided to go for the highest exam level offered: C2. This level represents a complete mastery of the language. To reach a C2 level, the learner must “understand with ease virtually everything heard or read” and “express themselves spontaneously, very fluently and precisely, differentiating finer shades of meaning even in the most complex situations.” The Goethe-Institut, which administers the exam, recommends at least 750 hours of instruction, not including extensive practice outside the classroom, to reach this benchmark.

A few months later, I heard back from Lewis about his project. He had missed his goal of passing the C2 exam by a hair. He had passed four of five criteria for his exam but had failed the listening comprehension section. “I spent too much time listening to the radio,” he chastised himself. “I should have done more active listening practice.” Fluency in three months of intensive practice had eluded him, although he had come surprisingly close. In the seven years after my first encounter with the Irish polyglot, he has gone on to attempt his three-month challenge in half a dozen more countries, adding to his linguistic repertoire some Arabic, Hungarian, Mandarin Chinese, Thai, American Sign Language, and even Klingon (the invented Star Trek language).

What I didn’t realize at the time but understand now was that Lewis’s accomplishments weren’t all that rare. In the space of linguistic feats alone, I have encountered hyperpolyglots who speak forty-plus languages, adventurer-anthropologists who can start speaking previously unknown languages after a few hours of exposure, and many other travelers, like Lewis, who hop from tourist visa to tourist visa, mastering new languages. I also saw that this phenomenon of aggressive self-education with incredible results wasn’t restricted to languages alone.

HOW ROGER CRAIG GAMED JEOPARDY!

“What is The Bridge on the River Kwai?” Roger Craig hastily scribbled the question on his screen. Despite first fumbling over the legibility of the film title’s final word, Craig was correct. He had won $77,000—the highest single-day winnings in Jeopardy! history at the time. Craig’s victory wasn’t a fluke. He broke records again, amassing nearly two hundred thousand dollars, the highest ever five-game winning streak. Such a feat would be remarkable on its own, but what was more incredible was how he did it. Reflecting on the moment, Craig says, “My first thought wasn’t ‘Wow, I just won seventy-seven thousand dollars.’ It was ‘Whoa, my site really worked.’”

How do you study for a test that can ask any question? That was the essential problem Craig faced as he prepared to compete. Jeopardy! is famous for stumping home audiences with trivia questions that can ask about anything from Danish kings to Damocles. Thus the great champions of Jeopardy! tend to be brainy know-it-alls who have spent a lifetime amassing the huge library of factual knowledge needed to spit out answers on any topic. Studying for Jeopardy! might feel like an impossible task, as you would need to study almost every conceivable subject. Craig’s solution, however, was to rethink the process of acquiring knowledge itself. To do that, he built a website.

“Everybody that wants to succeed at a game is going to practice the game,” Craig contends. “You can practice haphazardly, or you can practice efficiently.” To amass the wide-ranging trivia needed to break records, he decided to be ruthlessly analytical about how he acquired knowledge. A computer scientist by trade, he decided to start off by downloading the tens of thousands of questions and answers from every Jeopardy! game ever aired. He tested himself on those during his free time for months, and then, as it became clear that he was going to go on television, he switched to aggressively quizzing himself on the questions full-time. He then applied text-mining software to categorize the questions into different topics, such as art history, fashion, and science. He used data visualization to map out his strengths and weaknesses. The text-mining software separated the different topics, which he visualized as different circles. The position of any given circle on his graph showed how good he was in that topic—higher meant he knew more about that topic. The size of the circle indicated how frequent that topic was. Bigger circles were more common and thus better choices for further study. Beneath the variety and randomness in the show, he started to uncover hidden patterns. Some clues in the show are “Daily Doubles,” which allow a contestant to double his or her score, or lose it all. These extremely valuable clues may seem randomly placed, but having the entire Jeopardy! archives at his fingertips, Craig found that their position followed trends. One could hunt out the valuable Doubles by hopping between categories and focusing on high-point clues, breaking the conventional approach to the show of sticking within a single category until it was completed.

Craig also found trends within the types of questions asked. Although Jeopardy! could conceivably ask questions on any topic, the format of the game is designed to entertain a home audience, not to challenge competitors. Following this reasoning, Craig found that he could get away with studying the best-known trivia within a category, rather than digging deep into any particular direction. If a subject was specialized, he knew the answers would be geared toward the best-known examples. By analyzing his own weakness on archival questions, he could see which topics he needed to study more to be competitive. For example, he found that he was weak on fashion and focused on studying that topic more deeply.

Using analytics to figure out what to study was only the first step. From there, Craig employed spaced-repetition software to maximize his efficiency. Spaced-repetition software is an advanced flash card algorithm first developed by the Polish researcher Piotr Woźniak in the 1980s. Woźniak’s algorithm was designed to optimally time when you need to review material in order to remember it. Given a large database of facts, most people will forget what they learn first, needing to remind themselves of it again and again for it to stick. The algorithm fixes this problem by calculating the optimal time for reviewing each fact so you don’t waste energy overdrilling the same information, but also so you don’t forget what you’ve already learned. This tool allowed Craig to efficiently memorize the thousands of facts he would need for his later victory.

Although the show airs only one episode per day, Jeopardy! tapes five episodes at a time. Craig was coming back to his hotel room after winning five games straight, and he couldn’t sleep. He said, “You can simulate the game, but you can’t simulate winning two hundred thousand dollars in five hours and setting the single-day record on a game show you’ve wanted to be on since you were twelve years old.” Combining unorthodox tactics and aggressive analysis, he had gamed the game show and won.

Roger Craig wasn’t the only person I found who had seen his fortunes change as a result of aggressive self-education. I didn’t know it at the time, but in 2011, the same year my MIT Challenge would begin, Eric Barone was starting his own obsession. Unlike mine, however, his efforts would extend for nearly five years and require mastering many completely different skills.

FROM MINIMUM WAGE TO MILLIONAIRE

Eric Barone had just graduated from the University of Washington Tacoma with a degree in computer science when he thought, Now’s my chance. He had decided that he wanted to make his own video games and that now, before he got comfortable in a salaried programming job, was his opportunity to do something about it. He already had his inspiration. He wanted his game to pay homage to Harvest Moon, a charming Japanese series of games in which the player must build a successful farm: grow crops, raise animals, explore the countryside, and form relationships with other villagers. “I loved that game,” he said about his childhood experience with the title. “But it could have been so much better.” He knew that if he didn’t follow through with his own vision, that improved version would never be a reality.

Developing a commercially successful video game isn’t easy. AAA game companies budget hundreds of millions of dollars and employ thousands of people on their top titles. The talent required is similarly broad. Game development requires programming, visual art, musical composition, story writing, game design, and dozens more skills, depending on the genre and style of game developed. The breadth of skills required makes game development much harder for smaller teams than other art forms such as music, writing, or visual arts. Even highly talented independent game developers generally have to collaborate with a few people to span all the skills required. Eric Barone, however, decided to work on his game entirely alone.

Deciding to work alone came from a personal commitment to his vision and an indefatigable self-confidence that he could finish the game. “I like to have complete control over my own vision,” he explained, saying that it might have been “impossible to find people who were on the same page” regarding the design. However, that choice meant that he would need to become proficient in game programming, music composition, pixel art, sound design, and story writing. More than just a game design project, Barone’s odyssey would entail mastering each aspect of game design itself.

Pixel art was Barone’s biggest weakness. This style of art harkens back to the earlier era of video games when rendering graphics was difficult to do on slow computers. Pixel art is not done with fluid lines or photorealistic textures. Instead, a compelling image must be created by placing pixels, the colored dots that make up computer graphics, one at a time—painstaking and difficult work. A pixel artist must convey movement, emotion, and life from a grid of colored squares. Barone liked to doodle and draw, but that didn’t prepare him for the difficulty. He had to learn this skill “completely from scratch.” Getting his art skills to a commercial level wasn’t easy. “I must have done most of the artwork three to five times over,” he said. “For the character portraits, I did those at least ten times.”

Barone’s strategy was simple but effective. He practiced by working directly on the graphics he wanted to use in his game. He critiqued his own work and compared it to art he admired. “I tried to break it down scientifically,” he explained. “I would ask myself, ‘Why do I like this? Why don’t I like that?’” when looking at other artists’ work. He supplemented his own practice by reading about pixel art theory and finding tutorials that could fill gaps in his knowledge. When he encountered a difficulty in his art, he broke it down: “I asked, ‘What goal do I want to reach?’ and then ‘How might I get there?’” At some point in his work on the game, he felt his colors were too dull and boring. “I wanted the colors to pop,” he said. So he researched color theory and intensively studied other artists to see how they used colors to make things visually interesting.

Pixel art was just a single aspect Barone had to learn. He also composed all of the music for his game, redoing it from scratch more than once to make sure it met his high expectations. Whole sections of the game mechanics were developed and scrapped when they failed to meet his rigorous standards. This process of practicing directly and redoing things allowed him to get steadily better at all of the aspects of game design. Although it lengthened the time it took to complete the game, it also enabled his finished product to compete with games created by an army of specialized artists, programmers, and composers.

Throughout the five-year development process, Barone avoided seeking employment as a computer programmer. “I didn’t want to get involved in something substantial,” he said. “I wouldn’t have had the time, and I wanted to give game development my best shot.” Instead, he worked as a theater usher, earning minimum wage so that he wouldn’t get distracted. His meager earnings from his job, combined with support from his girlfriend, allowed Barone to get by as he focused on his passion.

That passion and dedication to mastery paid off. Barone released Stardew Valley in February 2016. The game quickly became a surprise hit, outselling many of the big-studio titles offered on the computer game platform Steam. Across multiple platforms, Barone estimates that within the first year of its release, Stardew Valley had sold well over 3 million copies. In months, he went from an unknown designer earning minimum wage to a millionaire named one of Forbes’ “30 Under 30” stars within game development. His dedication to mastering the skills involved played no small part in that success. Destructoid, in its review of Stardew Valley, described the artwork as “incredibly endearing and beautiful.” Barone’s commitment to his vision and aggressive self-education had paid off handsomely.

THE MIT CHALLENGE AND BEYOND

Back in my cramped apartment, I was grading my calculus exam. It was tough, but it looked as though I had passed. I was relieved, but it wasn’t a time to relax. Next Monday, I would be starting all over again, with a new course, and I still had almost a year to go.

As the calendar changed, so did my strategies. I switched from trying to do a single class in several days to spending a month doing three to four classes in parallel. I hoped that would spread the learning over a longer period of time and reduce some of the negative effects of cramming. As I made more progress, I also slowed down. My first few classes were done with aggressive haste so I could stay on schedule to meet my self-imposed deadline. After it seemed likely that I could finish, I was able to shift from studying sixty hours per week to studying thirty-five to forty. Finally, in September 2012, less than twelve months after I had begun, I finished the final class.

Completing the project was eye-opening for me. For years, I had thought the only way to learn things deeply was to push through school. Finishing this project taught me not only that this assumption was false but that this alternate path could be more fun and exciting. In university, I had often felt stifled, trying to stay awake during boring lectures, grinding through busywork assignments, forcing myself to learn things I had no interest in just to get the grade. Because this project was my own vision and design, it rarely felt painful, even if it was often challenging. The subjects felt alive and exciting, rather than stale chores to be completed. For the first time ever, I felt I could learn anything I wanted to with the right plan and effort. The possibilities were endless, and my mind was already turning toward learning something new.

Then I got a message from a friend: “You’re on the front page of Reddit, you know.” The internet had found my project, and it was generating quite a discussion. Some liked the idea but doubted its usefulness: “It’s sad that employers won’t really treat this in the same way as a degree, even if he has the same amount (or more) knowledge than a graduate does.” One user claiming to be the head of R&D for a software company disagreed: “This is the type of person I want. I really do not care if you have a degree or not.” The debate raged. Had I actually done it or not? Would I be able to get a job as a programmer after this? Why try to do this in a year? Was I crazy?

The initial surge of attention led to other requests. An employee at Microsoft wanted to set me up for a job interview. A new startup asked me to join its team. A publishing house in China offered me a book deal to share some studying tips with beleaguered Chinese students. However, those weren’t the reasons I had done the project. I was already happy working as a writer online, which had supported me financially throughout my project and would continue to do so afterward. My goal for the project wasn’t to get a job but to see what was possible. After just a few months of finishing my first big project, ideas for new ones were already bubbling up inside my head.

I thought of Benny Lewis, my first example in this strange world of intense self-education. Following his advice, I had eventually reached an intermediate level of French. It had been hard work, and I was proud that I had been able to push against my initial difficulty of being surrounded by a bubble of English speakers to learn enough French to get by. However, after finishing my MIT experience, I was injected with a new confidence I hadn’t had in France. What if I didn’t make the mistake I made last time? What if, instead of forming a group of English-speaking friends and struggling to pop out of that bubble once my French was good enough, I emulated Benny Lewis and dived straight into immersion from the very first day? How much better could I be, if as in my MIT Challenge, I held nothing back and optimized everything around learning a new language as intensely and effectively as possible?

As luck would have it, around that time my roommate was planning on going back to grad school and wanted some time off to travel first. We’d both been saving, and if we pooled our resources and were frugal in how we planned our trip, we figured we might be able to do something exciting. I told him about my experiences in France, both of learning French and of secretly believing that much more was possible. I told him about the social bubble that had formed when I had arrived without speaking the language and how difficult it had been to break out of it later. What if, instead of just hoping you’d practice enough, you don’t give yourself an escape route? What if you commit to speaking only the language you’re trying to learn from the first moment you step off the plane? My friend was skeptical. He had seen me study MIT classes for a year from across our apartment. My sanity was still an open question, but he wasn’t as confident in his own ability. He wasn’t sure he could do it, although he was willing to give it a shot, as long as I didn’t have any expectations of him to succeed.

That project, which my friend and I titled “The Year Without English,” was simple. We’d go to four countries, three months each. The plan in each country was straightforward: no speaking English, either with each other or with anyone we’d meet, from the first day. From there we’d see how much we could learn before our tourist visas ran out and we were pushed to a new destination.

Our first stop was Valencia, Spain. We had just landed in the airport when we encountered our first obstacle. Two attractive British girls came up to us, asking for directions. We looked at each other and awkwardly sputtered out the little Spanish we knew, pretending we didn’t speak any English. They didn’t understand us and asked us again, now in an exasperated tone. We stumbled over some more Spanish and, believing we couldn’t speak English, they walked away in frustration. Already, it seemed, not speaking English was having unintended consequences. Despite that inauspicious beginning, our Spanish ability grew even faster than I had anticipated. After two months in Spain, we were interacting in Spanish beyond what I had achieved in an entire year of partial immersion in France. We would go to our tutor in the morning, study a little at home, and spend the rest of the day hanging out with friends, chatting at restaurants, and soaking up the Spanish sun. My friend, despite his earlier doubts, was also a convert to this new approach to learning things. Although he didn’t care to study grammar and vocabulary as aggressively as I did, by the end of our stay, he too was integrating seamlessly into life in Spain. The method worked far better than we had hoped, and we were now believers.

We continued the trip, going to Brazil to learn Portuguese, China to learn Mandarin, and South Korea to learn Korean. Asia proved a far harder task than Spain or Brazil. In our preparation, we had assumed those languages would be only a little more difficult than the European ones, although it turned out that they were much harder. As a result, our no-English rule was starting to crack, although we still applied it as much as we could. Even if our Mandarin and Korean didn’t reach the same level of ability after a short stay, it was still enough to make friends, travel, and converse with people on a variety of topics. At the end of our year, we could confidently say we spoke four new languages.

Having seen the same approach work for academic computer science and language-learning adventures, I was slowly becoming convinced that it could be applied to much more. I had enjoyed drawing as a kid, but like most people’s attempts, any faces I drew looked awkward and artificial. I had always admired people who could quickly sketch a likeness, whether it be street-side caricaturists to professional portrait painters. I wondered if the same approach to learning MIT classes and languages could also apply to art.

I decided to spend a month improving my ability to draw faces. My main difficulty, I realized, was in placing the facial features properly. A common mistake when drawing faces, for instance, is putting the eyes too far up the head. Most people think they sit in the top two-thirds of the head. In truth, they’re more typically halfway between the top of the head and the chin. To overcome these and other biases, I did sketches based on pictures. Then I would take a photo of the sketch with my phone and overlay the original image on top of my drawing. Making the photo semitransparent allowed me to see immediately whether the head was too narrow or wide, the lips too low or too high or whether I had put the eyes in the right spot. I did this hundreds of times, employing the same rapid feedback strategies that had served me well with MIT classes. Applying this and other strategies, I was able to get a lot better at drawing portraits in a short period of time (see below).

courtesy of the author

UNCOVERING THE ULTRALEARNERS

On the surface, projects such as Benny Lewis’s linguistic adventures, Roger Craig’s trivia mastery, and Eric Barone’s game development odyssey are quite different. However, they represent instances of a more general phenomenon I call ultralearning.* As I dug deeper, I found more stories. Although they differed in the specifics of what had been learned and why, they shared a common thread of pursuing extreme, self-directed learning projects and employed similar tactics to complete them successfully.

Steve Pavlina is an ultralearner. By optimizing his university schedule, he took a triple course load and completed a computer science degree in three semesters. Pavlina’s challenge long predated my own experiment with MIT courses and was one of the first inspirations that showed me compressing learning time might be possible. Done without the benefit of free online classes, however, Pavlina attended California State University, Northridge, and graduated with actual degrees in computer science and mathematics.

Diana Jaunzeikare embarked on an ultralearning project to replicate a PhD in computational linguistics. Benchmarking Carnegie Mellon University’s doctoral program, she wanted to not only take classes but also conduct original research. Her project had started because going back to academia to get a real doctorate would have meant leaving the job she loved at Google. Like many other ultralearners before her, Jaunzeikare’s project was an attempt to fill a gap in education when formal alternatives didn’t fit with her lifestyle.

Facilitated by online communities, many ultralearners operate anonymously, their efforts observable only by unverifiable forum postings. One such poster at Chinese-forums.com, who goes only by the username Tamu, extensively documented his process of studying Chinese from scratch. Devoting “70–80+ hours each week” over four months, he challenged himself to pass the HSK 5, China’s second highest Mandarin proficiency exam.

Other ultralearners shed the conventional structures of exams and degrees altogether. Trent Fowler, starting in early 2016, embarked on a yearlong effort to become proficient in engineering and mathematics. He titled it the STEMpunk Project, a play on the STEM fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics he wanted to cover and the retrofuturistic steampunk aesthetic. Fowler split his project into modules. Each module covered a particular topic, including computation, robotics, artificial intelligence, and engineering, but was driven by hands-on projects instead of copying formal classes.

Every ultralearner I encountered was unique. Some, like Tamu, preferred punishing, full-time schedules to meet harsh, self-imposed deadlines. Others, like Jaunzeikare, managed their projects on the side while maintaining full-time jobs and work obligations. Some aimed at the recognizable benchmarks of standardized exams, formal curricula, and winning competitions. Others designed projects that defied comparison. Some specialized, focusing exclusively on languages or programming. Others desired to be true polymaths, picking up a highly varied set of skills.

Despite their idiosyncrasies, the ultralearners had a lot of shared traits. They usually worked alone, often toiling for months and years without much more than a blog entry to announce their efforts. Their interests tended toward obsession. They were aggressive about optimizing their strategies, fiercely debating the merits of esoteric concepts such as interleaving practice, leech thresholds, or keyword mnemonics. Above all, they cared about learning. Their motivation to learn pushed them to tackle intense projects, even if it often came at the sacrifice of credentials or conformity.

The ultralearners I met were often unaware of one another. In writing this book, I wanted to bring together the common principles I observed in their unique projects and in my own. I wanted to strip away all the superficial differences and strange idiosyncrasies and see what learning advice remains. I also wanted to generalize from their extreme examples something an ordinary student or professional can find useful. Even if you’re not ready to tackle something as extreme as the projects I’ve described, there are still places where you can adjust your approach based on the experience of ultralearners and backed by the research from cognitive science.

Although the ultralearners are an extreme group of people, this approach to things holds potential for normal professionals and students. What if you could create a project to quickly learn the skills to transition to a new role, project, or even profession? What if you could master an important skill for your work, as Eric Barone did? What if you could be knowledgeable about a wide variety of topics, like Roger Craig? What if you could learn a new language, simulate a university degree program, or become good at something that seems impossible to you right now?

Ultralearning isn’t easy. It’s hard and frustrating and requires stretching outside the limits of where you feel comfortable. However, the things you can accomplish make it worth the effort. Let’s spend a moment trying to see what exactly ultralearning is and how it differs from the most common approaches to learning and education. Then we can examine what the principles are that underlie all learning, to see how ultralearners exploit them to learn faster.

CHAPTER 2
Why Ultralearning Matters

What exactly is ultralearning? While my introduction to the eclectic group of intense autodidacts started with seeing examples of unusual learning feats, to go forward we need something more concise. Here’s an imperfect definition:

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

First, ultralearning is a strategy. A strategy is not the only solution to a given problem, but it may be a good one. Strategies also tend to be well suited for certain situations and not others, so using them is a choice, not a commandment.

Second, ultralearning is self-directed. It’s about how you make decisions about what to learn and why. It’s possible to be a completely self-directed learner and still decide that attending a particular school is the best way to learn something. Similarly, you could “teach yourself” something on your own by mindlessly following the steps outlined in a textbook. Self-direction is about who is in the driver’s seat for the project, not about where it takes place.

Finally, ultralearning is intense. All of the ultralearners I met took unusual steps to maximize their effectiveness in learning. Fearlessly attempting to speak a new language you’ve just started to practice, systematically drilling tens of thousands of trivia questions, and iterating through art again and again until it is perfect is hard mental work. It can feel as though your mind is at its limit. The opposite of this is learning optimized for fun or convenience: choosing a language-learning app because it’s entertaining, passively watching trivia show reruns on television so you don’t feel stupid, or dabbling instead of serious practice. An intense method might also produce a pleasurable state of flow, in which the experience of challenge absorbs your focus and you lose track of time. However, with ultralearning, deeply and effectively learning things is always the main priority.

This definition covers the examples I’ve discussed so far, but in some ways it is unsatisfyingly broad. The ultralearners I’ve met have a lot more overlapping qualities than this minimal definition implies. This is why in the second part of the book I’ll discuss deeper principles that are common in ultralearning and how they can enable some impressive achievements. Before that, however, I want to explain why I think ultralearning matters—because although the examples of ultralearning may seem eccentric, the benefits of this approach to learning are deep and practical.

THE CASE FOR ULTRALEARNING

It’s obvious that ultralearning isn’t easy. You’ll have to set aside time from your busy schedule in order to pursue something that will strain you mentally, emotionally, and possibly even physically. You’ll be forced to face down frustrations directly without retreating into more comfortable options. Given this difficulty, I think it’s important to articulate clearly why ultralearning is something you should seriously consider.

The first reason is for your work. You already expend much of your energy working to earn a living. In comparison, ultralearning is a small investment, even if you went so far as to temporarily make it a full-time commitment. However, rapidly learning hard skills can have a greater impact than years of mediocre striving on the job. Whether you want to change careers, take on new challenges, or accelerate your progress, ultralearning is a powerful tool.

The second reason is for your personal life. How many of us have dreams of playing an instrument, speaking a foreign language, becoming a chef, writer, or photographer? 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. Ultralearning offers a path to master those things that will bring you deep satisfaction and self-confidence.

Although the motivation behind ultralearning is timeless, let’s start by looking at why investing in mastering the art of learning hard things quickly is going to become even more important to your future.

ECONOMICS: AVERAGE IS OVER

In the words of the economist Tyler Cowen, “Average is over.” In his book of the same title, Cowen argues that because of increased computerization, automation, outsourcing, and regionalization, we are increasingly living in a world in which the top performers do a lot better than the rest.

Driving this effect is what is known as “skill polarization.” It’s well known that income inequality has been increasing in the United States over the last several decades. However, this description ignores a more subtle picture. The MIT economist David Autor has shown that instead of inequality rising across the board, there are actually two different effects: inequality rising at the top and lowering at the bottom. This matches Cowen’s thesis of average being over, with the middle part of the income spectrum being compressed into the bottom and stretched out at the top. Autor identifies the role that technology has had in creating this effect. The advance of computerization and automation technologies has meant that many medium-skilled jobs—clerks, travel agents, bookkeepers, and factory workers—have been replaced with new technologies. New jobs have arisen in their place, but those jobs are often one of two types: either they are high-skilled jobs, such as engineers, programmers, managers, and designers, or they are lower-skilled jobs such as retail workers, cleaners, or customer service agents.

Exacerbating the trends caused by computers and robots are globalization and regionalization. As medium-skilled technical work is outsourced to workers in developing nations, many of those jobs are disappearing at home. Lower-skilled jobs, which often require face-to-face contact or social knowledge in the form of cultural or language abilities, are likely to remain. Higher-skilled work is also more resistant to shipping overseas because of the benefits of coordination with management and the market. Think of Apple’s tagline on all of its iPhones: “Designed in California. Made in China.” Design and management stay; manufacturing goes. Regionalization is a further extension of this effect, with certain high-performing companies and cities making outsized impacts on the economy. Superstar cities such as Hong Kong, New York, and San Francisco have dominating effects on the economy as firms and talent cluster together to take advantage of proximity.

This paints a picture that might either be bleak or hopeful, depending on your response to it. Bleak, because it means that many of the assumptions embedded in our culture about what is necessary to live a successful, middle-class lifestyle are quickly eroding. With the disappearance of medium-skilled jobs, it’s not enough to get a basic education and work hard every day in order to succeed. Instead, you need to move into the higher-skilled category, where learning is constant, or you’ll be pushed into the lower-skilled category at the bottom. Underneath this unsettling picture, however, there is also hope. Because if you can master the personal tools to learn new skills quickly and effectively, you can compete more successfully in this new environment. That the economic landscape is changing may not be a choice any of us has control over, but we can engineer our response to it by aggressively learning the hard skills we need to thrive.

EDUCATION: TUITION IS TOO HIGH

The accelerating demand for high-skilled work has increased the demand for college education. Except instead of expanding into education for all, college has become a crushing burden, with skyrocketing tuition costs making decades of debt a new normal for graduates. Tuition has increased far faster than the rate of inflation, which means that unless you are well poised to translate that education into a major salary increase, it may not be worth the expense.

Many of the best schools and institutions fail to teach many of the core vocational skills needed to succeed in the new high-skilled jobs. Although higher education has traditionally been a place where minds were shaped and characters developed, those lofty goals seem increasingly out of touch with the basic financial realities facing new graduates. Therefore, even for those who do go to college, there are very often skill gaps between what was learned in school and what is needed to succeed. Ultralearning can fill some of those gaps when going back to school isn’t an affordable option.

Rapidly changing fields also mean that professionals need to constantly learn new skills and abilities to stay relevant. While going back to school is an option for some, it’s out of reach for many. Who has the ability to put their life on hold for years as they wade through classes that may or may not end up covering the situations they actually need to deal with? Ultralearning, because it is directed by learners themselves, can fit into a wider variety of schedules and situations, targeting exactly what you need to learn without the waste.

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter if ultralearning is a suitable replacement for higher education. In many professions, having a degree isn’t just nice, it’s legally required. Doctors, lawyers, and engineers all require formal credentials to even start doing the job. However, those same professionals don’t stop learning when they leave school, and so the ability to teach oneself new subjects and skills remains essential.

TECHNOLOGY: NEW FRONTIERS IN LEARNING

Technology exaggerates both the vices and the virtues of humanity. Our vices are made worse because now they are downloadable, portable, and socially transmissible. The ability to distract or delude yourself has never been greater, and as a result we are facing crises of both privacy and politics. Though those dangers are real, there is also opportunity created in their wake. For those who know how to use technology wisely, it is the easiest time in history to teach yourself something new. An amount of information vaster than was held by the Library of Alexandria is freely accessible to anyone with a device and an internet connection. Top universities such as Harvard, MIT, and Yale are publishing their best courses for free online. Forums and discussion platforms mean that you can learn in groups without ever leaving your home.

Added to these new advantages is software that accelerates the act of learning itself. Consider learning a new language, such as Chinese. A half century ago, learners needed to consult cumbersome paper dictionaries, which made learning to read a nightmare. Today’s learner has spaced-repetition systems to memorize vocabulary, document readers that translate with the tap of a button, voluminous podcast libraries offering endless opportunities for practice, and translation apps that smooth the transition to immersion. This rapid change in technology means that many of the best ways of learning old subjects have yet to be invented or rigorously applied. The space of learning possibilities is immense, just waiting for ambitious autodidacts to come up with new ways to exploit it.

Ultralearning does not require new technology, though. As I will discuss in the chapters to come, the practice has a long history, and many of the most famous minds could be described as having applied some version of it. However, technology offers an incredible opportunity for innovation. There are still many ways to learn things that we have yet to fully explore. Perhaps certain learning tasks could be made far easier or even obsolete, with the right technical innovation. Aggressive and efficiency-minded ultralearners will be the first to master them.

ACCELERATE, TRANSITION, AND RESCUE YOUR CAREER WITH ULTRALEARNING

The trends toward skill polarization in the economy, skyrocketing tuition, and new technology are all global. But what does ultralearning actually look like for an individual? I believe there are three main cases in which this strategy for quickly acquiring hard skills can apply: accelerating the career you have, transitioning to a new career, and cultivating a hidden advantage in a competitive world.

To see how ultralearning can accelerate the career you already have, consider Colby Durant. After graduating from college, she started work at a web development firm but wanted to make faster progress. She took on an ultralearning project to learn copywriting. After taking the initiative and showing her boss what she could do, she was able to get a promotion. By choosing a valuable skill and focusing on quickly developing proficiency, you can accelerate your normal career progression.

Learning is often the major obstacle to transitioning to the career you want to have. Vishal Maini, for instance, was comfortable in his marketing role in the tech world. But he dreamed of being more closely involved with artificial intelligence research. Unfortunately, that was a deep technical skill set that he hadn’t acquired. Through a careful six-month ultralearning project, however, he was able to develop strong enough skills that he could switch fields and get a job working in the field he wanted.

Finally, an ultralearning project can augment the other skills and assets you’ve cultivated in your work. Diana Fehsenfeld worked as a librarian for years in her native New Zealand. Facing government cutbacks and rapid technologization of her field, she was worried that her professional experience might not be enough to keep up. As a result, she undertook two ultralearning projects, one to learn statistics and the programming language R and another on data visualization. Those skills were in demand in her industry, and adding them to her background as a librarian gave her the tools to go from bleak prospects to being indispensable.

BEYOND BUSINESS: THE CALL TO ULTRALEARNING

Ultralearning is a potent skill for dealing with a changing world. The ability to learn hard things quickly is going to become increasingly valuable, and thus it is worth developing to whatever extent you can, even if it requires some investment first.

Professional success, however, was rarely the thing that motivated the ultralearners I met—including those who ended up making the most money from their new skills. Instead it was a compelling vision of what they wanted to do, a deep curiosity, or even the challenge itself that drove them forward. Eric Barone didn’t pursue his passion in solitude for five years to become a millionaire but because he wanted the satisfaction of creating something that perfectly matched his vision. Roger Craig didn’t want to go on Jeopardy! to win prize money but to push himself to compete on the show he had loved since he was a child. Benny Lewis didn’t learn languages to become a technical translator, or later a popular blogger, but because he loved traveling and interacting with the people he met along the way. The best ultra learners are those who blend the practical reasons for learning a skill with an inspiration that comes from something that excites them.

There’s an added benefit to ultralearning that transcends even the skills one learns with it. Doing hard things, particularly things that involve learning something new, stretches your self-conception. It gives you confidence that you might be able to do things that you couldn’t do before. My feeling after my MIT Challenge wasn’t just a deepened interest in math and computer science but an expansion in possibility: If I could do this, what else could I do that I was hesitant to try before? Learning, at its core, is a broadening of horizons, of seeing things that were previously invisible and of recognizing capabilities within yourself that you didn’t know existed. I see no higher justification for pursuing the intense and devoted efforts of the ultralearners I’ve described than this expansion of what is possible. What could you learn if you took the right approach to make it successful? Who could you become?

WHAT ABOUT TALENT? THE TERENCE TAO PROBLEM

Terence Tao is smart. By age two, he had taught himself to read. At age seven, he was taking high school math classes. By seventeen, he had finished his master’s thesis. It was titled “Convolution Operators Generated by Right-Monogenic and Harmonic Kernels.” After that, he got a PhD from Princeton, won the coveted Fields Medal (called by some the “Nobel Prize for mathematics”), and is considered to be one of the best mathematical minds alive today. Though many mathematicians are extreme specialists—rare orchids adapted to thrive only on a particular branch of the mathematical tree—Tao is phenomenally diverse. He regularly collaborates with mathematicians and makes important contributions to distant fields. This virtuosity caused one colleague to liken his ability to “a leading English-language novelist suddenly producing the definitive Russian novel.”

What’s more, there doesn’t seem to be an obvious explanation for his feats. He was precocious, certainly, but his success in mathematics didn’t come from aggressively overbearing parents pushing him to study. His childhood was filled playing with his two younger brothers, inventing games with the family’s Scrabble board and mah-jongg tiles, and drawing imaginary maps of fantasy terrain. Normal kid stuff. Nor does he seem to have a particularly innovative studying method. As noted in his profile in the New York Times, he coasted on his intelligence so far that, upon reaching his PhD, he fell back “on his usual test-prep strategy: last-minute cramming.” Although that approach faltered once he reached the pinnacle of his field, the fact that he breezed through classes for so long points to a powerful mind rather than some unique strategy. Genius is a word thrown around too casually, but in Tao’s case the label certainly sticks.

Terence Tao and other naturally gifted learners present a major challenge for the universality of ultralearning. If people like Tao can accomplish so much without aggressive or inventive studying methods, why should we bother investigating the habits and methods of other impressive learners? Even if the feats of Lewis, Barone, or Craig don’t reach the level of Tao’s brilliance, perhaps their accomplishments also are due to some hidden intellectual ability that normal people lack. If this were so, ultralearning might be something interesting to examine but not something you could actually replicate.

PUTTING TALENT ASIDE

What role does natural talent play? How can we examine what causes someone’s success when the shadow of intelligence and innate gifts looms over us? What do stories like Tao’s mean for mere mortals who just want to improve their capacity to learn?

The psychologist K. Anders Ericsson argues that particular types of practice can change most attributes necessary for becoming an expert-level performer with the exception of the innate traits of height and body size. Other researchers are less optimistic about the malleability of our natures. Many argue that a substantial proportion, perhaps most, of our intelligence is genetically derived. If intelligence comes mostly from genes, why not use that to explain ultralearning instead of ultralearners’ use of a more effective method or strategy? Tao’s success in mathematics doesn’t seem to be owed to something easily replicable by normal human beings, so why assume that any of the ultralearners are any different?

I take a middle position between those two extremes. I think that natural talents exist and that they undoubtedly influence the results we see (especially at extreme levels, as in the case of Tao). I also believe that strategy and method matter, too. Throughout this book, I will cover science showing how making changes to how you learn can impact your effectiveness. Each of the principles is something that, if applied appropriately, will make you a better learner regardless of whether your starting point is dull or brilliant.

My approach in telling stories for this book, therefore, will not be to try to determine what the sole cause is of someone’s intellectual success. Not only is this impossible, but it isn’t particularly useful. Instead, I’m going to use stories and anecdotes to illustrate and isolate what are the most practical and useful things you can do to improve how you learn. The ultralearners I mention should serve as exemplars you can use to see how a principle applies in practice, not a guarantee that you can achieve an identical result with identical effort.

FINDING TIME FOR ULTRALEARNING

Another doubt that may have formed in your mind when reading so far is asking how you’ll find time to do these intensive learning projects. You may worry that this advice won’t apply to you because you already have work, school, or family commitments that prevent you from throwing yourself into learning full-time.

In practice, however, this usually isn’t a problem. There are three main ways you can apply the ideas of ultralearning, even if you have to manage other commitments and challenges in your life: new part-time projects, learning sabbaticals, and reimagining existing learning efforts.

The first way is by pursuing ultralearning part-time. The most dramatic examples of learning success tend to be those where the ultralearner put impressive amounts of time into the project. Spending fifty hours a week on a project will accomplish more than spending five hours a week on it, even if the efficiency is the same, and thus the most captivating stories usually involve heroic schedules. Though this makes for good storytelling, it’s actually unnecessary when it comes to pursuing your own ultralearning projects. The core of the ultralearning strategy is intensity and a willingness to prioritize effectiveness. Whether this happens on a full-time schedule or just a couple hours per week is completely up to you. As I’ll discuss in chapter 10, a spread-out schedule may even be more efficient in terms of long-term memory. Whenever you read about an intensive schedule in this book, feel free to adapt it to your own situation, taking a more leisurely pace while employing the same ruthlessly efficient tactics.

The second way is by pursuing ultralearning during gaps in work and school. Many of the people I interviewed did their projects during temporary unemployment, career transitions, semesters off, or sabbaticals. Although these aren’t as reliable to plan for, a burst of learning may be perfect for you if you know you’re about to have this kind of time off. That was one of my motivations for pursuing my MIT Challenge when I did: I had just graduated, so extending my existing student life another year was easier than pushing it out for four. If I had to do the same project today, I might have done it over a longer period of time, over some evenings and weekends, since my work is less flexible today than it was in that moment of transition from school to working life.

The third way is to integrate ultralearning principles into the time and energy you already devote to learning. Think about the last business book you read or the time you tried to pick up Spanish, pottery, or programming. What about that new software you needed to learn for work? Those professional development hours you need to log to maintain your certification? Ultralearning doesn’t have to be an additional activity; it can inform the time you already spend learning. How can you align the learning and studies you already need to do with the principles for maximizing effectiveness?

As in the section on talent, don’t let the extreme examples dissuade you from applying the same principles. Everything I will share with you can be customized or integrated into what already exists. What matters is the intensity, initiative, and commitment to effective learning, not the particulars of your timetable.

THE VALUE OF ULTRALEARNING

The ability to acquire hard skills effectively and efficiently is immensely valuable. Not only that, but the current trends in economics, education, and technology are going to exacerbate the difference between those with this skill and those without it. In this discussion, however, I’ve ignored perhaps the most important question: Ultralearning may be valuable, but is it learnable? Is ultralearning just a description of people with unusual personalities, or does it represent something that someone who wasn’t an ultralearner before could actually become?

CHAPTER 3
How to Become an Ultralearner

“I’d love to be a guinea pig.” It was an email from Tristan de Montebello. I had first met the charming, half-French, half-American musician and entrepreneur seven years earlier, at almost exactly the same time as my fateful encounter with Benny Lewis. With tousled blond hair and a close-cropped beard, he looked like he belonged on a surfboard on some stretch of California coastline. De Montebello was the kind of guy you liked immediately: confident, yet down to earth, with only the vaguest hints of a French accent in his otherwise perfect English. Over the years, we had kept in touch: me with my strange learning experiments; him hopping around the world, going from working with a Parisian startup that made bespoke cashmere sweaters to guitarist, vagabond, and eventually web consultant in Los Angeles, much closer to the beaches that suited him so well. Now he had heard I was writing a book about learning, and he was interested.

The context of his email was that although I had met and documented dozens of people accomplishing strange and intriguing learning feats, the meetings had been largely after the fact. They were people I had met or heard about after their successes, not before; observations of successes, not experiments that generated them. As a result, it was hard to tell exactly how accessible this ultralearning thing was. If you filter through enough pebbles, you’re sure to find a few flecks of gold. Was I doing the same thing, scouring for unusual learning projects? Sift through enough people, and you’re bound to find some that seem incredible. But if ultralearning had the potential that I imagined it did, it would be nice to find someone before he or she tried a project and watch the results. To test this, I put together a small group of about a dozen people (mostly readers of my blog) who were interested in giving this ultralearning thing a shot. Among them was de Montebello.

BECOMING AN ULTRALEARNER

“Maybe piano?” de Montebello suggested. Although he was interested in the concept of ultralearning, he had no idea which skill he’d like to learn. He had played guitar and been the lead singer for a band. With his musical background, learning to play piano seemed like a relatively safe choice. He had even made a course teaching guitar lessons online, so learning another musical instrument could potentially expand his business. Selfishly, I encouraged him to try learning something farther outside his comfort zone. A musician picking up another instrument didn’t seem like the ideal case to study for seeing whether ultralearning could be applied broadly. We threw more ideas around. A week or two later, he decided on public speaking. His background as a musician had given him experience being onstage, but otherwise he had little experience giving speeches. Public speaking is a useful skill, too, he argued, so it would be worth getting better at even if nothing noteworthy came from the effort.

De Montebello had a private motivation for wanting to become good at public speaking. He had given only a handful of speeches in his life, and most of those had been in college. He related to me one example, from when he had gone to give a talk to a dozen people at a web design firm in Paris: “I cringe every time I think back to that.” He explained, “I could just tell I wasn’t connecting. There were many pieces where I was boring them. There were jokes where I would laugh, because I thought it was funny, but nobody else would.” Being a musician, he was surprised “how little of it translated” to public speaking. Still, it was something in which he saw potential value, if he could get good at it. “Public speaking is a metaskill,” he feels. It’s the kind of skill that assists with other skills: “confidence, storytelling, writing, creativity, interviewing skills, selling skills. It touches on so many different things.” With that in mind, he set to work.

FIRST STEPS OF A FLEDGLING ULTRALEARNER

De Montebello had picked his topic, but he wasn’t sure exactly how he should learn it. He decided to attend a meeting of Toastmasters International, the organization for learning public speaking. At that point, his story had two doses of luck. The first was that in attendance at the very first meeting for his public speaking project was Michael Gendler. Gendler was a longtime Toastmaster, and de Montebello’s combination of charm and obsessive intensity to become good at public speaking convinced him to help coach de Montebello through his project. The second dose of luck was something that de Montebello didn’t fully appreciate at the time: he had showed up just ten days before the deadline to be eligible to compete in the World Championship of Public Speaking.

The World Championship of Public Speaking is a competition put on annually by Toastmasters in which members compete, elimination style, starting in individual clubs and going on to larger and larger units of the organization, until a select few make it to the final stage. De Montebello had little more than a week to prepare. Still, the competition provided a potential structure for his ultralearning project, so he went for it, cranking out the six mandatory qualifying speeches in the coming week, finishing the last in the nick of time.

De Montebello practiced obsessively, sometimes speaking twice in one day. He recorded a video of every speech and analyzed it obsessively for flaws. He asked for feedback every time he gave a speech, and he got plenty of it. His coach, Gendler, pushed him far outside of his comfort zone. Once, when faced with the choice between polishing an existing speech and creating a brand-new one from scratch, de Montebello asked what he should do. Gendler’s response was to do whichever was scariest for him.

His relentless drive pushed de Montebello into unusual places. He took improv classes to work on his spontaneous delivery. There he learned to trust whatever was in his head and deliver it without hesitation. That kept him from stammering over his words or fearing freezing up onstage. He talked to a friend who works as a Hollywood director to give feedback on his delivery. The director taught de Montebello to give his speech dozens of times in different styles—angry, monotone, screaming, even as a rap—then go back and see what was different from his normal voice. According to de Montebello, that helped break him of the “uncanny valley” that happened when his normal speaking delivery felt slightly unnatural.

Another friend with a background in theater gave him tips on stage presence. He took de Montebello through his speech and showed how each word and sentence indicated movement that could be translated to where he moved on the stage. Instead of standing constricted under the spotlight, de Montebello could now move gracefully and use his body to communicate his message on top of his words. He even gave his speech at a middle school, knowing that seventh graders would give the most ruthless feedback of all. After bombing terribly outside the comfort of Toastmasters, he learned to talk to his audience before going onstage: learn their language and emotions and connect with them. That way, applying all he had learned so far, he could change his speech on the fly, so it would be sure to connect with a new audience. Above all, Gendler pushed him relentlessly. “Make me care,” Gendler told him after listening to one of de Montebello’s speeches. “I understand why this is important to you, but the audience doesn’t care about you. You have to make me care.” Diverse advice and voluminous practice would soak those lessons in deeply, allowing de Montebello to quickly surpass his early awkwardness on the stage.

After a month, de Montebello won his area competition, beating out a competitor with two decades of experience in Toastmasters. He won his district and division competitions, too. Finally, less than seven months after he first tried his hand at public speaking, he was going to compete in the World Championships. “There are about thirty thousand people who compete every year,” he noted, adding “I’m pretty confident I’m the fastest competitor in history to make it this far, since if I had started ten days later, I couldn’t have competed.” He made it into the top ten.

FROM SEMIFINALIST TO CAREER CHANGE

“I knew this project was going to be big for me when I started it,” de Montebello told me months after his top ten placement in the international competition. “But it was literally life changing. I didn’t expect it to actually change my life.” Reaching the final competition in the World Championship had been quite a journey, but it was only afterward that he began to realize how much he had learned. “I was learning for this very narrow world of public speaking. It was only after that I realized the depth of all these skills I had worked so much on: storytelling, confidence, communicating.”

Friends who heard of de Montebello’s success started asking if he could help them work on their own speeches. He and Gendler saw an opportunity to help others improve their public speaking skills. The demand was intense. Authors who command five-figure speaking fees started to approach the duo to see if they could be taught to improve their public speaking the ultralearning way. Soon they had landed their first client, to the tune of twenty thousand dollars. Gendler and de Montebello weren’t mercenary; they wanted to focus only on speakers whose message they really believed in. But the fact that they had attracted such high-status clients certainly helped persuade them to make the switch into coaching public speaking full-time. Gendler and de Montebello even decided to name their consultancy UltraSpeaking, as a nod to the strategy that made it all possible.

De Montebello’s story ended up being much more dramatic than either of us had initially expected. His initial hope had been that he could practice intensely for a few months, deliver a great speech somewhere, and have it recorded—a nice memento and a new skill—but not that he would reach the status of an international competitor and eventually experience a complete career change. Of the other dozen or so people I spent some time coaching into ultralearning, none offered so dramatic an example. Some dropped out. Life got in the way (or perhaps revealed that they weren’t actually as committed as they had initially appeared to be). Others had respectable successes, making significant improvements in learning medicine, statistics, comic book drawing, military history, and yoga, even if they didn’t reach de Montebello’s degree of success.

What differentiated de Montebello wasn’t that he thought he could go from near-zero experience to the finalist for the World Championship in six months. Rather, it was his obsessive work ethic. His goal wasn’t to reach some predetermined extreme but to see how far he could go. Sometimes you’ll get lucky and embark on a path that will take you quite far. But even the failure mode of ultralearning is usually that you will learn a skill fairly well. Even those who didn’t have such dramatic results among the small group I spent time coaching, those who stuck with their project still ended up learning a new skill they cared about. You may not compete in world championships or completely switch careers, but as long as you stick with the process, you’re bound to learn something new. What de Montebello’s example encapsulated for me was not only that you can become an ultralearner but that such successes are far from being the inevitable consequences of having a particular kind of genius or talent. Had de Montebello focused on piano instead, his experience with giving speeches would probably have remained that one awkward example from his days in Paris.

PRINCIPLES OF BECOMING AN ULTRALEARNER

De Montebello’s story illustrates that it’s possible to decide to become an ultralearner. But ultralearning isn’t a cookie-cutter method. Every project is unique, and so are the methods needed to master it. The uniqueness of ultralearning projects is one of the elements that ties them all together. If ultralearning could be bottled or standardized, it would simply be an intense form of structured education. What makes ultralearning interesting is also what makes it hard to boil down into step-by-step formulas.

This is a difficult challenge, but I’m going to try to sidestep it by focusing on principles first. Principles allow you to solve problems, even those you may have never encountered before, in a way that a recipe or mechanical procedure cannot. If you really understand the principles of physics, for instance, you can solve a new problem simply by working backward. Principles make sense of the world, and even if they don’t always articulate exactly how you should solve a particular challenge, they can provide immense guidance. Ultralearning, in my view, works best when you see it through a simple set of principles, rather than trying to copy and paste exact steps or protocols.

The principles of ultralearning are going to be the focus of the second part of this book. In each chapter, I’ll introduce a new principle, plus some evidence to back it up both from ultralearning examples and from scientific research. Finally, I’ll share possible ways that the principle can manifest itself as specific tactics. These tactics are only a small sample. But they should provide a starting point for you to think creatively about your own ultralearning challenges.

There are nine universal principles that underlie the ultralearning projects described so far. Each embodies a particular aspect of successful learning, and I describe how ultralearners maximize the effectiveness of the principle through the choices they make in their projects. They are:

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.

2 Focus: Sharpen Your Knife. Cultivate the ability to concentrate. Carve out chunks of time when you can focus on learning, and make it easy to just do it.

3 Directness: Go Straight Ahead. Learn by doing the thing you want to become good at. Don’t trade it off for other tasks, just because those are more convenient or comfortable.

4 Drill: Attack Your Weakest Point. Be ruthless in improving your weakest points. Break down complex skills into small parts; then master those parts and build them back together again.

5 Retrieval: Test to Learn. Testing isn’t simply a way of assessing knowledge but a way of creating it. Test yourself before you feel confident, and push yourself to actively recall information rather than passively review it.

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.

7 Retention: Don’t Fill a Leaky Bucket. Understand what you forget and why. Learn to remember things not just for now but forever.

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.

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.

I organized these nine principles based on my observations of ultralearning projects as well as my own personal experience, referencing, where I could, the vast cognitive science literature. I started with the ultralearners themselves. If one person did something in a certain way, that might be an interesting example, but it might also be an idiosyncrasy of that person. If several people or, better yet, every ultralearner I encountered, did a certain thing in a certain way, it was much stronger evidence that I had stumbled upon a general principle. I then checked those principles against the scientific literature. Are there mechanisms and findings from cognitive science to support the tactics I saw? Better yet, have there been controlled experiments comparing one approach to learning with another? The scientific research supports many of the learning strategies employed by the ultralearners I witnessed. This suggests that ultralearners, with their ruthless focus on efficiency and effectiveness, may have landed on some universal principles in the art of learning.

Beyond 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 these principles as flexible guidelines, not as rigid rules. Learning well isn’t just about following a set of prescriptions. You need to try things out for yourself, think hard about the nature of the learning challenges you face, and test solutions to overcome them. With that in mind, let’s turn to the first ultralearning principle: metalearning.

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