7 MUST-KNOW STRATEGIES TO LEARN ANYTHING FASTER
Ultralearning is my approach to learning things well.
There’s no one exact method for ultralearning, but there are some common principles amongst all ultralearners:
1. Self-education.
Even if you’re in school, a self-education mindset puts you in the driver’s seat, controlling how and what you learn. Ultralearners don’t passively absorb education, they create it.
2. Deep focus.
Ultralearning isn’t a passive task. It demands hard, intense focus. The rewards for this effort, however,
are large and it allows ultralearners to quickly develop
skills that other people spend years unable to get a grasp on.
3. Scientifically informed.
Ultralearners don’t treat learning as a mystery. Instead, they use the best available understanding of the science of memory and skill-aquisition to use an approach that makes learning anything a step-by-step process.
Ultralearning takes many forms, and the best way to recognize it is to first see some examples, so I’ll start by sharing my ultralearning projects, then move to explaining how you can start your own.
TECHNIQUES USED:
1. Watching lectures at 1.5x-2x the speed with VLC player.
2. Practice triage. Focus on the hardest problems first,
rather than an even coverage. Check solutions after each problem to gain feedback faster.
THE YEAR WITHOUT ENGLISH
This project was to learn four languages in one year, traveling to Spain, Brazil, China and Korea to learn Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin and Korean. The main method: Don’t speak English!
I didn’t do this project alone, and was accompanied by Vat Jaiswal, who also learned the languages.
TECHNIQUES USED:
1. Aim for total immersion. Only speak the language you’re learning, even with your travelling companions.
2. Use Spaced Repetition Systems to build base vocabularies. Particularly useful for hard languages like Chinese and Korean.
3. Overlearn the basic words and phrases. The core vocabulary is the most useful, but most people stop practicing it after they’ve “learned it”. Overlearning via immersion learns the language in a way that you’ll never forget it.
Learning principle 1
DESIGN YOUR PROJECT WELL.
One commonality amongst all my learning projects is that they are projects!
A good ultralearning project starts off with a well-designed plan. For that reason, I often spend nearly as much time thinking about the project as I actually do executing them. The reason for this is simple: many learners rush into learning endeavors that are ill-conceived, and when they inevitably encounter difficulties they get frustrated and give up.
HERE’S HOW TO DESIGN A GOOD ULTRALEARNING PROJECT:
1. Pick your constraints carefully. In each of my challenges, I carefully chose constraints that would limit what I was trying to learn or how I was going to learn it. These constraints make the project easier to work on because they eliminate all the possible distractions you could encounter.
2. Set aside enough time. Set aside clear chunks of time to work on your project and make them a priority. Ultralearning is worth the effort. But it doesn’t work if you don’t make it work.
3. Limit your materials and methods. It’s easy to go over-board and try to learn everything. Pick a few key resources and a few key methods to start. Only once those fail should you think about branching out.
Learning principle 2 TRAIN FOCUS AND PRODUCTIVITY
Being productive and knowing how to focus deeply are invaluable assets that enable you to get projects done. Ultralearning projects benefit particularly, because, by their nature, they tend to be hard to do and easy to give up on. By training productivity and focus you can go much further.
HERE’S HOW TO BECOME MORE PRODUCTIVE AND FOCUSED:
1. Eliminate distractions. Work without internet, cellphones, TV or distractions. If you need breaks, do something relaxing but not distracting like getting a glass of water, meditating or going for a walk. Don’t turn on the TV because you’re bored.
2. Create a productivity system. Schedule your time and work carefully. If you plan it out in advance, you’ll rarely be in a situation where it’s impossible to work on your project because of other priorities. If you don’t schedule your day, then you’ll always be playing catch-up.
3. Progressively train your focus. Don’t start out trying to lift the world in a day. Start small and progressively build up. If you can only focus for 15 minutes at a time, aim for 20 minutes. As you get better, you’ll be able to sustain concentration for longer without giving up.
Learning principle 3
LEARN ACTIVELY
The opposite of active learning is passive studying, which most students do. This is re-reading notes, skimming a textbook or passively listening in a classroom.
Some passive learning (attending lectures, reading assignments) is probably unavoidable. But I usually recommend trying to compress this as much as possible, to get to doing the real work of learning – practice – as quickly as possible. Only when you don’t understand something does it make sense to go back and re-read notes.
Learning principle 4
QUICKER, DEEPER, MORE
ACCURATE FEEDBACK CYCLES
very useful concept from learning is a feedback cycle. This means applying your knowledge or skill, then getting information about where you can improve. In math, this might mean doing a problem, then seeing the solution. In languages, this might mean speaking to someone and then seeing
whether they understood you. In drawing, this might mean doing a sketch, then seeing how well it matches what you were intending.
THERE ARE KNOBS YOU CAN DIAL UP IN YOUR FEEDBACK CYCLES TO ACCELERATE THE LEARNING PROCESS. THOSE ARE:
1. Do the cycles more quickly. Instead of waiting until the entire assignment is done to compare your work to the solution, why not do it after each question? Faster feedback is faster learning.
2. Do the cycles more deeply. The more elaborately you can practice, the more you’ll test comprehensive skills. Doing a full project, therefore, can teach you things that doing flashcards won’t. This principle sometimes pushes you in the opposite direction as #1, so I often will do two types of feedback cycles: long and deep plus quick and shallow.
3. Get more accurate feedback. If you can improve the accuracy of your feedback, you’ll need fewer cycles to make corrections. I did this in drawing by overlaying the reference photo on top of my sketches so I would know exactly what mistakes I made.
Learning principle 5
SPACE YOUR PRACTICE OUT
The learning research is clear: spacing out your practice results in much stronger, longer memories than bunching it in one spot.
One way to apply this is to do frequent review testing on material you’ve already learned. By adding more practice over time, after you’ve first learned something, you can make those memories and knowledge last much longer .
Learning principle 6
Process deeply to retain more
others you ask them to read a list, but don’t tell them why. The
second group you split by processing instructions. You tell one
half to mentally note which words contain the letter “e”. You
tell the other half to note which words are pleasant or not.
Which condition, motivation or processing, do you expect mat-
matters more for memory?
Surprisingly the answer is overwhelming: it’s processing that
matters. Motivation doesn’t actually do much at all for
memory, but processing words more deeply (such as thinking about
their pleasantness) caused participants to remember almost
twice as much.
The conclusion:There’s more than one way to absorb informa-
tion. If you can do it by processing deeply (say by paraphrasing
your notes, rather than writing them down verbatim; sum-
marizing rather than highlighting while reading) you’ll retain
more.
Learning principle 7 Over-learning
If you first start practicing a skill, you’ll get better and better at it – for awhile. Then, you’ll stop seeing much improvement. At this point, you’ve mastered the skill. Does
that mean it’s time to stop practicing and move onto some-
thing else?
Actually, when you continue to practice beyond what you need
to perform a skill, this causes you to improve your ability to
retain the skill. So the first phase of learning improves your
ability, the second phase, what scientists call over-learning, causes
you to remember the skill longer.
There are two ways you can use this. The first is to over-learn
the most useful components of the skill you’re practicing. If
you’re learning a language, you want to over-learn the most
frequent parts of speech. If you’re learning math, you want to
over-learn common algebraic patterns.
The second is that if you want to maintain a skill for life, it’s
important to practice it beyond where you feel you’re not
seeing improvement anymore.