Ultralearning by Scott Young: Review and Summary

I recently read the book Ultralearning by Scott Young and would recommend it to anyone who is interested in learning. The book describes methods of several “ultralearners” and I think it can provide a real motivational boost to begin a large study project.

Here’s a description from the website:

Ultralearning is a strategy for aggressive, self-directed learning.

Self-directed means that, rather than waiting to pay for expensive tuition and tutors, you can take back control. Aggressive means that, instead of spending years at something without getting great, your limited time and effort are always directed towards what works.

To build this skill, we’ll start with the ultralearners themselves. People who have accomplished impressive learning feats, such as:

Benny Lewis, who quickly acquires new languages through fearless immersion.

Eric Barone, who became a millionaire nearly overnight after patiently acquiring all the skills to develop his own game.

Tristan de Montebello, who went from near-zero experience to a finalist for the World Champion of Public Speaking in seven months.

Nigel Richards, who became the French Scrabble World Champion, without speaking French.

Next we’ll go beyond individual projects and look at the science of learning. In doing so, we’ll resolve problems that vex students and professionals alike, such as:

• Why does it feel like a lot of what we learn in school is useless? (And what do you need to do to prevent your own projects from having the same fate?)
• Is feedback always helpful? (Hint: It’s not. What kind matters more, and this book will show you what to pay attention to and what to ignore.)
• Is being more focused always better for learning? And how do you avoid the urge to procrastinate when learning something new?
• What underlies the seemingly magical intuition of legendary geniuses such as Albert Einstein and Richard Feynman? (And can you approximate their magic with the right approach?)

Here are a few interesting excerpts.

Trivia questions

Roger Craig’s method for winning the Jeopardy game show:

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.

Public speaking project

There were some interesting comments about the project to learn public speaking well in a few months:

He talked to a friend who works as a Hollywood director to give feedback on his delivery. The director taught [Tristan] 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. … 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 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. … “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.” … 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.

On Richard Feynman

He excelled in math and physics but was abysmal in the humanities. His college grades in history were in the bottom fifth of his class, in literature in the bottom sixth, and his fine arts grades were worse than those of 93 percent of his fellow students. At one point, he even resorted to cheating on a test to pass. His intelligence, measured while he was in school, scored 125. … The secret was his impressive memory for certain arithmetic results and an intuition with numbers that enabled him to interpolate. … Even his magical intuition for physics had its explanation: “I had a scheme, which I still use today when somebody is explaining something that I’m trying to understand: I keep making up examples.” Instead of trying to follow an equation, he would try to imagine the situation it described… Then whenever his interlocutor made a mistake, he could see it. “As they’re telling me the conditions of the theorem, I construct something which fits all the conditions. You know, you have a set (one ball)—disjoint (two balls). Then the balls turn colors, grow hairs, or whatever, in my head as they put more conditions on. Finally they state the theorem, which is some dumb thing about the ball which isn’t true for my hairy green ball thing, so I say, ‘False!’” … However, his intuition, too, would fail him when the subject of his study wasn’t built on those assumptions. Feynman’s mathematician friends would test him on counterintuitive theorems from mathematics. His intuition there would fail when properties of the procedure (such as that an object can be cut into infinitely small pieces) defied the normal physical limitations that aided his intuition elsewhere. … Feynman himself would supply concrete examples even when they were not given. Working through an explicit example in his mind’s eye, he could follow along and see what the math was trying to demonstrate. … Feynman knew he was smart and had no problem asking [questions].

On active recall

Check out the active recall page for some more Ultralearning quotes.

I would recommend this book for anyone who is serious about learning and wants some motivation and ideas. If you’ve already read the book, there’s also a discussion about it in our forum where you can add your own opinions of the book.