Ultralearning. Scott H. Young

the signal from the noise, so you know what to pay attention to and what to ignore.

      7 Retention: Don’t Fill a Leaky Bucket. Understand what you forget and why. Learn to remember things not just for now but forever.

      8 Intuition: Dig Deep Before Building Up. Develop your intuition through play and exploration of concepts and skills. Understand how understanding works, and don’t recourse to cheap tricks of memorization to avoid deeply knowing things.

      9 Experimentation: Explore Outside Your Comfort Zone. All of these principles are only starting points. True mastery comes not just from following the path trodden by others but from exploring possibilities they haven’t yet imagined.

      I organized these nine principles based on my observations of ultralearning projects as well as my own personal experience, referencing, where I could, the vast cognitive science literature. I started with the ultralearners themselves. If one person did something in a certain way, that might be an interesting example, but it might also be an idiosyncrasy of that person. If several people or, better yet, every ultralearner I encountered, did a certain thing in a certain way, it was much stronger evidence that I had stumbled upon a general principle. I then checked those principles against the scientific literature. Are there mechanisms and findings from cognitive science to support the tactics I saw? Better yet, have there been controlled experiments comparing one approach to learning with another? The scientific research supports many of the learning strategies employed by the ultralearners I witnessed. This suggests that ultralearners, with their ruthless focus on efficiency and effectiveness, may have landed on some universal principles in the art of learning.

      Beyond principles and tactics is a broader ultralearning ethos. It’s one of taking responsibility for your own learning: deciding what you want to learn, how you want to learn it, and crafting your own plan to learn what you need to. You’re the one in charge, and you’re the one who’s ultimately responsible for the results you generate. If you approach ultralearning in that spirit, you should take these principles as flexible guidelines, not as rigid rules. Learning well isn’t just about following a set of prescriptions. You need to try things out for yourself, think hard about the nature of the learning challenges you face, and test solutions to overcome them. With that in mind, let’s turn to the first ultralearning principle: metalearning.