Ultralearning is the name of Scott Young's book, and it is defined as a strategy for acquiring skills and knowledge that is self-directed and intense, with extra emphasis on intense. Almost all of the work I've put into designing skillathon 2024 comes straight from either Scott's book, his blog posts, or his online course Rapid Learner.
I've attempted ultralearning projects in the past but I always let life get in the way. Something came up, I got too busy, my stoke waned, and the project fizzled. But I've cranked my commitment level for Skillathon to eleven and this is going to be the year, I'm really excited to pull off my first major ultralearning project.
I'm going to explain the main concepts and principles from Scott's work that I'm using in my approach to Skillathon. These aren't exhaustive of his work, I’m cherry picking the top concepts that I think are going to play the most important role this year.
First, draw a map.
Learn how to learn the subject or skill. What's the usual approach? Is there a better approach?
Second, sharpen your knife.
When it comes to learning, your knife is your capacity to focus. I practice digital minimalism, I don't doomscroll, I don't carry my phone around with me. Cal Newport's work on the Deep Life is really relevant here, Cal's another thinker I can't recommend enough. Read his books and listen to his podcast, it is gold.
Directness: Go straight ahead.
The best way to get good at something is to do it a lot. This sounds super obvious but so many people, including me, complain about not being good at things that we've made only a handful of half-assed attempts at. But like so many things in life it's about reps. Everything that I ever got good at was something I did an insane amount of. There's nothing in my life that I'm good at that doesn't have thousands of hours of reps behind it.
Self-efficacy.
Self-efficacy is belief in our ability to succeed at a given action and it is crucial to pulling off ambitious projects. If we don't honestly believe in our ability to succeed at a given task, it's going to be basically impossible to pull it off. Since self-efficacy is built via observation and experience of success, a core praxis of mastery is to study others and then stack wins.
Study others doing the thing, which shows you that it's possible and makes it easier ot visualize yourself doing the thing, and then start doing the thing repeatedly and proving to yourself that you can do it.
The most important thing is to win, which builds self-efficacy, so it's better to start with small wins and build an upward spiraling win loop, than it is to bite off more than you can chew. Winning makes it easier to win. Losing makes it harder to win. So win more and lose better.
Feedback
Feedback is super important, otherwise we can lie to ourselves about how good we are at stuff. In my case, it's very difficult for me to tell if something tastes good or not. If my taste buds were eyes they wouldn't let me drive. So for my cooking month I'm going to need to cook for other people who will give me honest feedback about how the food tastes.
Dill, Teach, Understand the Why, and Play
Drill weak points, try to explain the thing to see if you really understand it, try to understand the why of the thing and not merely memorize procedures, and experiment and play with the thing.
There is more that went into my skillathon design but these are the biggies that I got from Scott Young and I wanted to share them because they're very powerful concepts once you get you head wrapped around them.
I'm really interested to see what I think of all this in a year's time after a full year of ultralearning. What have I missed? What do I think is important now but turns out is a waste of time? How will my approach change? Will I become more or less structured with it? I can't wait to find out, and that's part of the whole point of this project.