Ultralearning: Master Hard Skills, Outsmart The Competition, And Accelerate Your Career Quotes
"Managing calls while traveling internationally can be tricky, and I understood if he wanted to wait until he returned."
"Approaching learning with an intensity and commitment to action is a hallmark of Scott’s process."
"This 'learning by doing' approach embodies one of my favorite chapters in this book."
"Directness is the practice of learning by directly doing the thing you want to learn."
"Passive learning creates knowledge. Active practice creates skill."
"The danger is that the act of soaking up new facts can be disconnected from the process of refining a new skill."
"He isn’t focused on simply soaking up knowledge. He is committed to putting that knowledge to use."
"Ultralearning is a path to prove to yourself that you have the ability to improve and to make the most of your life."
"Learning something valuable and doing it fast doesn’t have to be confined to some narrow set of geniuses."
"The process of intense self-directed learning can fashion skills you never thought you could develop."
"Being able to see how a subject works, what kinds of skills and information must be mastered, and what methods are available to do so more effectively is at the heart of success of all ultralearning projects."
"Learning French vocabulary won’t help you much with learning Chinese vocabulary, but understanding how vocabulary acquisition works in French will likely also help with learning Chinese."
"Metalearning thus forms the map, showing you how to get to your destination without getting lost."
"Metalearning research avoids this problem and helps you seek out points where you might even be able to get a significant advantage over the status quo."
"With these three questions in mind, let’s take a look at each of them and how you can draw your map."
"As you learn more things, you’ll acquire more and more confidence, which will allow you to enjoy the process of learning more with less frustration."
"If you can’t make these kinds of predictions and come up with these kinds of strategies just yet, don’t worry."
"This approach allows you to make the best use of your limited time."
"You may find yourself starting but then, because the task is unpleasant and focus is hard, taking advantage of the five-minute rule too often to be productive."
"Investments made in pushing through learning now will make skillful practice a much more enjoyable activity down the road."
"Your cognitive resources must be spread over many different aspects of the task."
"In order to improve your performance in one aspect, you may need to devote so much attention to that one aspect that the other parts of your performance start to go down."
"Drills resolve this problem by simplifying a skill enough that you can focus your cognitive resources on a single aspect."
"The tension between learning directly and doing drills can be resolved when we see them as being alternating stages in a larger cycle of learning."
"The first step is to try to practice the skill directly."
"The next step is to analyze the direct skill and try to isolate components that are either rate-determining steps in your performance or subskills you find difficult to improve."
"The final step is to go back to direct practice and integrate what you’ve learned."
"Cycling between direct practice and drills, even within the same learning session, is a good idea when you’re just starting out."
"Being able to look things up is certainly an advantage, but without a certain amount of knowledge inside your head, it doesn’t help you solve hard problems."
"Most skills we learn are incompletely proceduralized. We may be able to do some of them automatically, but other parts require us to actively search our minds."
"Memory Mechanism 3—Overlearning: Practice Beyond Perfect."
"Overlearning is a well-studied psychological phenomenon that’s fairly easy to understand."
"Memory Mechanism 4—Mnemonics: A Picture Retains a Thousand Words."
"The final tool common to many ultralearners I encountered was mnemonics."
"Mnemonics work well, and with practice, anyone can do them."
"To retain knowledge is ultimately to combat the inevitable human tendency to forget."
"The beginning is always today." - Mary Shelley
"Learning is a process of experimenting in two ways."
"Experimentation is the principle that ties all the others together."
"Mastery is a long road that extends far beyond a single project."
"The barriers you overcome in your initial effort are enough to clear the way for a slow process of accumulation to reach eventual mastery."
"In many domains, getting started is quite frustrating, so it’s difficult to practice without a certain amount of effort."
"After that threshold is reached, however, the process switches to being one of accumulating huge swaths of knowledge."
"Some projects will get stuck, and you will need to spend time unlearning and push through your frustrations again to get ahead."
"Those kinds of projects benefit more from the precise and aggressive methods of ultralearning to reach eventual mastery."
"Ultralearning is a strategy, good for solving certain problems."
"None of the ultralearners I encountered approaches learning the same way for every kind of learning they do."
"Being an ultralearner doesn’t imply that everything one learns has to be done in the most aggressive and dramatic fashion possible."
"Low-intensity habits work well when engaging in learning is spontaneous, your frustration level is low, and learning is automatically rewarding."
"Habits tend to work best when the act of learning is mostly a process of accumulation, adding new skills and knowledge."
"Ultralearning and more deliberate efforts are better suited to when improvement in a field requires unlearning ineffective behaviors or skills."
"Enjoyment tends to come from being good at things. Once you feel competent in a skill, it starts to get a lot more fun."
"Ultralearning is self-directed, although not necessarily solitary. Being self-directed is about who is making decisions."
"The goal of ultralearning is to expand the opportunities available to you, not narrow them."
"It is to create new avenues for learning and to push yourself to pursue them aggressively rather than timidly waiting by the sidelines."
"The more one learns, the greater the craving to learn more."
"The better one gets, the more one recognizes how much better one could become."
"By opening a small crack in all the possibly knowable things, you might peer through and find there is far, far more than you had ever imagined."
"A genius is not born but educated and trained."