Why Ultralearning Matters
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 core of the Ultralearning strategy is intensity and a willingness to prioritize effectiveness.
How to become an Ultralearner?
(Montebello: Scott’s Reader who took up Public Speaking as an Ultralearning Project)
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.
Principles
1. Meta-learning
Meta - Greek word for "beyond". It is a high-level layer of abstraction.
Learning to define the objective of learning something can make it easier to plan them.
- Why?
graph TD; a[Motivation] --> b[Instrumental] --> d[Means to an end] a[Motivation] --> c[Intrinsic] --> e[For the fun of it] - What? Interview those at the other side. Experts, professionals, achievers. In instrumental cases, what you ought to learn can be very different from what’s readily available to learn.
- How?
- See the most common way to learn the thing.
- Include / Exclude stuff based on your needs.
- If you can’t decide, stick to the benchmark.
- Organisational info on Meta learning
- Good rule of thumb is to spend 10% of the time expected to finish a learning project on Meta learning.
- However, this does not scale.
- Benefits of meta-learning decreases with time spent on the project and tend to be non-linear at later stages.
- Ability to Meta learn improves with multiple finished projects and can make future projects easier to take on.
- More often than not, Ultralearners end up valuing the Meta-learning capability acquired during a project more than the individual project itself.