Ultralearning

By Engr. Carlos V. Cornejo

This best-selling book teaches us a unique way of learning that is effective and straight to the point.  “Ultralearning: Accelerate Your Career, Master Hard Skills and Outsmart the Competition” by Scott Young.  It teaches us how to learn anything such as swimming, speaking Spanish or computer programming without wasting time on learning the non-essentials.  Learn only what is necessary to be practiced in the real world because what is taught usually in universities have no bearing in actual practice at the work place.  This is a self-paced and quick way of learning.  The author makes use of three Ultralearning strategies:  Make a Metalearning Map, Design Drills, and Overlearn.

Make a Metalearning Map

First, answer the following three questions, “What concepts do I need to understand, what facts do I need to memorize, and what procedures do I need to practice to reach my performance goal?” Second, conduct online searches, skim books, and reach out to subject experts to determine what concepts you need to understand.  If you want to able to understand and speak Mandarin for example you only need to memorize the essential characters.   Third, find out the facts to memorize, if you are learning Spanish, you should memorize a list of common verbs, nouns, and conjugations.  Lastly, figure out the procedures to practice.  If you’re learning Mandarin, you need to practice Mandarin tones.

Design Drills

Once you’ve created a list of things you need to understand, memorize, and practice; circle a few items on your list that you think will be challenging to learn and critical to your success.

When Benjamin Franklin, one of founding Fathers of America, was a young man, he developed his writing skills by designing two writing exercises. In the first exercise, Franklin took a piece of prose he had written and replaced as many words with synonyms as possible, while still maintaining the rhyme of the original prose. In the other exercise, Franklin read articles in his favorite magazine, ‘The Spectator,’ and wrote notes in the margins. Days later, Franklin reconstructed the main argument of each article from memory. After each attempt, Franklin went back to the original articles to learn how he could’ve made his arguments more compelling.

Like Franklin, you can take items that you need to understand, memorize, and practice, and design drills for them. Executing a practice drill is like isolating a key muscle, like a bodybuilder doing dips to develop his triceps.

Overlearn

Overlearning means going beyond the requirements of your target performance to make your learning stick.  If you are learning Algebra, try teaching others what you have learned because the retention of the material would be doubled or even tripled if you teach it to others.  Or if you are preparing a graduation speech for college students, try to prepare a speech for grade 7 students first, because this crowd have a shorter attention span and are tougher to please.  If you are successful in giving a graduation speech to 7^th graders then giving a speech to a more mature audience would be a walk in the park.