Ultralearning

Imagine trying to navigate a new city with no map and no sense of direction. That, Scott Young argues, is how most people approach learning. The first principle of ultralearning, metalearning, is about creating your map before you begin. Instead of diving blindly into tutorials or textbooks, you take time to learn how to learn—you study the terrain of the skill itself. This preparatory step lets you identify your goals, the obstacles you’ll face, and the most efficient routes to mastery.

Learning How to Learn

Young illustrates metalearning through linguist Daniel Everett’s remarkable ability to start speaking unknown languages quickly. In demonstrations, Everett could begin forming sentences in half an hour with speakers whose languages he didn’t know—because he drew on decades of understanding about grammar systems and fieldwork methods. Rather than “being a genius,” Everett possessed a map for learning new languages efficiently. Similarly, bilingual students learning a third language outperform monolinguals not because they’re smarter but because they’ve internalized strategies for learning itself. (This parallels Barbara Oakley’s findings in A Mind for Numbers, which emphasizes metacognition as a multiplier of learning efficiency.)

Over time, as you complete more ultralearning projects, your metalearning ability compounds. Each success expands your repertoire: how to manage focus, tackle procrastination, or choose whether to drill or experiment next. It’s why ultralearners often seem “naturally talented”—what looks like innate intelligence is really accumulated knowledge about learning itself.

Why, What, and How

Young divides metalearning into three questions:

• Why? Clarify your motivation. Are you learning for a purpose (to advance your career) or for intrinsic joy (to play guitar for fun)? This determines depth, pace, and methods. If your reason is instrumental, research whether the skill will truly open the doors you expect—talk to experts or professionals using what you aim to learn.
• What? Map the terrain of the subject. Break it into concepts (ideas to understand), facts (things to memorize), and procedures (skills to perform). This analysis reveals where you’ll need understanding versus repetition. For instance, in calculus, differentiating formulas (procedure) depends on grasping what a derivative means (concept), while trigonometric identities are better memorized (facts).
• How? Choose your approach. Benchmark proven curriculums or professionals’ methods (“How do programmers actually learn JavaScript?”). Then decide what to emphasize or drop using the Emphasize/Exclude Method—highlight what helps you reach your goal fastest and omit what doesn’t. A tourist learning French might skip grammar drills to focus on conversation fluency.

From Research to Action

Metalearning isn’t an excuse to stall in research mode. Young cautions against “analysis paralysis”—doing endless planning instead of learning. A practical rule: spend about 10 percent of your project time on research. If you expect to devote 100 hours to learning guitar, use about 10 to study resources, techniques, and paths, then start playing. Revisit research periodically when you hit plateaus. Each pass through this “learn–test–adjust” loop refines your approach without overwhelming you.

Over multiple projects, your general metalearning skill becomes a powerful meta ability. You stop thinking “I’m bad at learning languages” or “I can’t draw” and start thinking, “I just haven’t mapped this subject yet.” Every new skill is another country—you can learn the language faster when you know how to learn languages in general. That shift from seeing learning as random effort to systematic exploration is what distinguishes ultralearners from dabblers. Like Everett decoding a tongue from scratch, you’ll learn not by luck, but by knowing where to look and how to think.

In a noisy, distracted world, Young argues that focus is your most valuable cognitive asset. The second ultralearning principle, Focus, is about cultivating sustained attention even under imperfect conditions. Rather than requiring a monastery’s silence, Young shows—through stories like Mary Somerville’s, the nineteenth-century mathematician who studied while running a household—that deep focus is a trainable skill; it’s the ability to work intently despite interruptions, boredom, or doubt.

Starting Focus: Overcoming Procrastination

Procrastination is learning’s silent killer. It’s not laziness but avoidance of discomfort—the fear of frustration or failure. Young suggests simple psychological “crutches” to trick your brain past initial resistance: tell yourself you’ll work for only five minutes. Once started, momentum often carries you further. If that fails, use structured bursts such as the Pomodoro Technique: twenty-five minutes of focused effort followed by a five-minute rest. Gradually lengthen sessions as concentration improves.

Sustaining Focus Amid Distractions

Even after you start, maintaining focus is tougher. Interruptions come from three sources: your environment (noisy rooms, phone alerts), the task (boring reading versus engaging problems), and your mind (anxieties and daydreams). Young recommends addressing each layer systematically: declutter your workspace, choose more active learning formats like problem solving over passive reading, and practice mindfulness to gently return attention to the task when the mind wanders. Over time, this self-awareness builds focus “muscle memory.”

The Right Kind of Attention

Drawing on cognitive psychology, Young explains that optimal focus depends on task complexity and arousal (alertness). High-energy concentration suits simple, execution-heavy tasks (like language drills or coding tests). Low-arousal, calm focus fosters creativity and abstract thinking (like writing essays or solving proofs). Too little energy breeds boredom; too much causes stress. The key is to match your state to your task: experiment with time of day, caffeine, background music, or location until focus feels clear rather than forced.

Building a Focus Habit

Young’s advice mirrors modern neuroscience (see Cal Newport’s Deep Work): focus improves through consistent, deliberate practice. Start small—five minutes without distraction—and extend duration. Treat it like lifting weights. Over weeks, your tolerance for mental effort increases, letting you immerse in complex work as fluidly as athletes entering flow states. Somerville’s example proves focus isn’t inherited; it’s cultivated through environment, rhythm, and respect for your mind’s limits. When you learn to sharpen your knife of attention, every other ultralearning principle slices cleaner—because awareness, not time, becomes the true measure of progress.

Most people learn indirectly—studying for the future instead of practicing the present. Young’s third principle, Directness, flips that. To master a skill, practice in the exact way you’ll use it. As Leonardo da Vinci said, “He who can go to the fountain does not go to the water jar.” Direct practice closes the gap between theory and performance, solving what psychologists call the transfer problem—the failure to apply classroom knowledge to real life.

The Power of Going Straight to the Source

Scott illustrates this with architect Vatsal Jaiswal, who after graduating during a recession couldn’t get hired because his portfolio was theoretical. Instead of giving up, he worked at a print shop handling real blueprints, taught himself Revit software—the tool actual firms used—and redesigned a realistic building. Within months, two firms hired him. By working like a professional before he was paid as one, Jaiswal demonstrated the directness mindset: learn in the environment of application.

Traditional schooling, by contrast, relies on indirect learning: memorizing formulas, listening to lectures, reading instead of doing. These create “knowledge about” a skill, not the skill itself. Psychologist Robert Haskell calls the lack of transfer in education an “educational scandal.” His studies show that even top students in physics or psychology often can’t solve slightly altered real problems. Direct learning—using your skill in a real context—bypasses this barrier entirely.

Practical Methods of Direct Learning

• Project-Based Learning: Instead of abstract study, produce something tangible—a program, artwork, or essay. Eric Barone learned game development by building Stardew Valley, mastering code, art, and music directly through creation.
• Immersion: Surround yourself with your target environment, like Benny Lewis immersing himself in Spain and banning English speaking from day one. Real-world exposure accelerates growth through necessity.
• Simulation: When reality is inaccessible or risky, replicate core mental conditions through “flight simulators.” Roger Craig practiced Jeopardy! with an archive of real questions, training decision-making identical to the game show.
• Overkill Approach: Raise the stakes. Tristan de Montebello didn’t just practice speeches privately—he competed in the World Championship of Public Speaking within months. Stretching beyond comfort forces adaptation.

Directness Beyond Education

The principle extends far beyond academics. Professionals can apply directness by saying yes to ambitious projects before feeling “ready,” using work itself as learning. Entrepreneurs can build and test prototypes instead of endlessly planning. Writers learn to write not through theories of style but by publishing and iterating. Every domain rewards those who step from abstraction into direct engagement. When in doubt, Young advises, imitate Jaiswal: stop studying blueprints and start building the building.

Once you’re practicing directly, how do you improve the parts that hold you back? The fourth principle, Drill, answers this by channeling Benjamin Franklin’s teenage writing self-training. Franklin didn’t wait for inspiration—he created deliberate exercises to refine specific writing weaknesses: turning essays into poems to expand vocabulary or reconstructing arguments from notes to strengthen logic. Each drill attacked a rate-determining step—the bottleneck limiting his overall performance.

Find and Fix Bottlenecks

A skill’s growth is often constrained by one weak component. For Franklin, it was persuasive structure; for language learners, it might be pronunciation; for programmers, debugging syntax. Improving that single subskill often multiplies your total ability. Young compares this to chemistry, where a reaction’s slowest step determines its overall rate. By isolating and strengthening that step, learning accelerates dramatically.

The Direct-Then-Drill Cycle

Drills work best in tandem with direct practice. First, you learn by doing the full skill. Then, you identify pain points to isolate and train. Finally, you return to whole-skill practice to integrate improvements. Franklin’s essay reconstructions weren’t ends in themselves—they fed back into real writing. This constant alternation—direct, drill, reintegrate—creates a powerful feedback cycle.

Designing Effective Drills

• Time Slicing: Isolate short sequences within larger performances. Musicians rehearsing difficult bars of a song epitomize this method.
• Cognitive Components: Separate mental tasks. Language learners practice tone drills or conjugation separately from conversation.
• Copycat Method: Copy masters to focus on one dimension. Artists redraw others’ work to practice line control without worrying about composition.
• Magnifying Glass: Overemphasize a component to exaggerate awareness—like dedicating ten times more effort to research while writing one article.
• Prerequisite Chaining: Start with tasks beyond your level; when blocked, step back to fill missing fundamentals, then resume. Eric Barone learned color theory this way during game development.

Drilling may feel repetitive, but deliberate repetition is creative, not mechanical. It asks, “Which screw loosens my machine?” and then tightens it systematically. Ultralearners don’t fear monotony—they turn it into momentum. The reward is progress that compounds exponentially because every strengthened link reinforces the whole chain.

When faced with new material, most people reread or highlight—but what really boosts memory is retrieval: pulling knowledge out of your head, not stuffing more in. Psychologist William James noted, “It pays better to wait and recollect by an effort from within than to look at the book again.” Young’s fifth principle shows that testing yourself is studying. Every act of recall strengthens neural connections, turning fragile knowledge into lasting skill.

The Power of Testing Over Review

Experiments by Jeffrey Karpicke and Janell Blunt found students who practiced free recall remembered almost 50% more than those who repeatedly reread or made concept maps. The paradox: testing feels harder and less productive, yet it creates deeper learning. Difficulty, psychologist Robert Bjork explains, can be “desirable”—when recall is effortful but successful, memory consolidates faster. This explains why flash cards, quizzes, or explaining aloud work better than review.

Retrieval as Active Creation

Retrieving isn’t just remembering—it reshapes understanding. The mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan exemplified this: unable to access textbooks with proofs, he reinvented them himself from theorem lists. That intense self-testing gave him a profound intuition. Similarly, ultralearners rely on retrieval to transform abstract facts into usable knowledge. Each attempt at recall strengthens both memory and awareness of what’s missing, guiding future drills.

Practical Retrieval Tactics

• Flash Cards or Spaced Repetition: Ideal for paired facts—vocabulary, formulas, technical terms.
• Free Recall Notes: After reading, close the book and write everything you remember—forcing recall and highlighting gaps.
• Question Book: Convert notes into questions. “When was the Magna Carta signed?” engages memory more than writing the date again.
• Self-Generated Challenges: Turn reading into tasks—code an algorithm you just learned or explain a chapter to a peer.
• Closed-Book Learning: Force yourself to solve problems without notes; only check them afterward. This small stress makes memory robust.

Retrieval transforms the fear of forgetting into fuel for remembering. The harder you must try, the stickier the memory becomes. For ultralearners, every test is a training session—because knowing something once isn’t enough; you must prove you can summon it when it counts.

A boxer learns by being hit—and so does a learner. The sixth ultralearning principle, Feedback, is about embracing discomfort as data. Young uses comedian Chris Rock’s practice technique to make this vivid: before HBO specials, Rock performs unannounced at tiny clubs, reading jokes from note cards to see what earns laughs. With no lights, no stage swagger, and no mercy, this raw feedback tells him what truly works.

Different Types of Feedback

• Outcome Feedback: Tells you whether you succeed but not why (e.g., a test score, audience laughter).
• Informational Feedback: Reveals what went wrong but not how to fix it (like realizing a listener looks confused during conversation).
• Corrective Feedback: Offers precise direction to improve (a coach explaining how to fix your swing or grammar).

All are useful, but corrective feedback accelerates growth fastest. That’s why experts—from Tristan de Montebello’s speech coach Michael Gendler to athletes and musicians—depend on mentors for direct correction while maintaining the humility to process criticism constructively. However, as researchers Avraham Kluger and Angelo DeNisi found, not all feedback helps: in 38% of studies, it actually worsened performance when it attacked ego instead of behavior. Ultralearners, therefore, must filter signal from noise.

Filtering Noise and Managing Emotion

Use feedback as information, not judgment. Ignore vague praise (“good job”) or destructive negativity that gives no path forward. Instead, track progress quantitatively (scores, hours, success rates) and emotionally separate identity from performance. When fear of failure looms, Young suggests diving into high-intensity feedback environments—like public performances or timed mock exams. The pain quickly normalizes, and learning accelerates.

Metafeedback: Learning from Your Learning Rate

Beyond content feedback, metafeedback asks: Is my current approach working? Measure your improvement rate to decide when to change strategies. If progress stalls, experiment—new drills, new materials, or harder goals. Ultrlearners treat feedback not as judgment but as the lab report of their learning experiments. Like Rock’s low-key gigs or Roger Craig’s daily quiz analysis, they seek fast, frequent, fearless input and adjust relentlessly. The punch, after all, is what makes you sharper for the next round.

Learning that leaks away is wasted energy. The seventh principle, Retention, tackles forgetting—the mind’s leaky bucket. Young opens with Scrabble world champion Nigel Richards, who memorized hundreds of thousands of French words despite not speaking French. His secret: spaced repetition, mental rehearsal, and obsessive review. His story illustrates that memory isn’t mythical—it’s mechanical, strengthened by technique and consistency.

Why We Forget

Drawing on a century of research since Hermann Ebbinghaus’s forgetting curve, Young identifies three causes: decay (memories fade with time), interference (similar memories overwrite each other), and missing cues (we can’t find the path to recall even if memory’s stored). Forgetting isn’t failure but the default; retention requires regular retrieval to keep connections alive.

Four Mechanisms for Retention

• Spacing: Instead of cramming, revisit material periodically (e.g., 1, 3, 7 days apart). This strengthens long-term retention. Programs like Anki automate spacing through algorithms that schedule review just before forgetting.
• Proceduralization: Turn knowledge into automatic habits. Typing fluency or language reflexes endure because they’re procedural, not declarative. Practice until recall becomes physical memory.
• Overlearning: Continue practicing past mastery. Like musicians rehearsing perfected passages, redundancy cements skill and builds confidence.
• Mnemonics: Use vivid imagery or unusual associations to encode difficult facts. “Keyword” techniques, like imagining a giant ear shaving to remember the French verb chavirer (to capsize), turn abstract symbols into unforgettable pictures.

Ultimately, retention isn’t about never forgetting—it’s about remembering what matters when you need it. Combine spacing, active recall, and application. The more meaningfully you use knowledge, the more your brain deems it valuable enough to store. As Young puts it, “Memory is the residue of thought.” Think deeply, recall routinely, and your learning will last far longer than the class or the project that produced it.

Intuition, the eighth principle, represents the highest form of learning—when you don’t just know an answer; you sense it. Richard Feynman, the Nobel-winning physicist, embodies this depth. Known as a “magician of science,” he could solve problems faster than peers because he didn’t manipulate equations blindly—he built concrete mental models to understand what they meant. His method underpins the Feynman Technique, a cornerstone of ultralearning.

Understanding vs. Memorizing

Feynman’s genius wasn’t raw IQ (his tested intelligence was only slightly above average) but his insistence on translating abstract ideas into simple, explainable language. When others parroted jargon, he’d pause and ask, “But what does that mean?” Ultralearners emulate this curiosity: real understanding arises when you can teach a concept clearly without hand-waving. This combats the “illusion of explanatory depth,” where we think we know something until asked to explain it.

The Feynman Technique

1. Write the concept or problem at the top of a page.
2. Explain it as if teaching a beginner or child; simplify vocabulary.
3. When you get stuck, review the material to fill gaps, then re-explain.
4. Refine the explanation using analogies and examples until it flows naturally.

This process forces you to expose and patch missing understanding. It’s retrieval, elaboration, and creativity combined. As Young notes, Einstein used similar “thought experiments” to understand relativity, proving that deep intuition grows from playing mentally with ideas, not memorizing procedures.

Cultivating Intuitive Thinking

Ultralearners build intuition through three habits: Persistence (Feynman’s relentless work on hard problems), Proof (deriving or re-creating results from scratch), and Concrete Examples (visualizing abstract principles). These turn rote facts into flexible understanding. The goal isn’t instant insight but layered comprehension that feels instinctive because it’s the product of deliberate struggle. As Feynman warned, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you’re the easiest person to fool.” Intuition, then, isn’t mysticism; it’s clarity earned through curiosity and effort.

Young’s ninth and final principle, Experimentation, completes the ultralearning loop. Once you’ve mapped, practiced, tested, and reflected, mastery demands creativity—testing boundaries to discover new methods and styles. Van Gogh exemplifies this spirit: starting art at twenty-six with little talent, he constantly experimented with materials, colors, and mentors. He painted obsessively, learning not from success but from thousands of stylistic trials. His eventual brilliance—The Starry Night—emerged from those relentless experiments.

Experimentation as the Path to Mastery

Early learning thrives on imitation; later progress requires innovation. Beginners benefit from structure and proven resources (e.g., drawing guides or language courses). But as you advance, rote execution yields diminishing returns. Growth now depends on breaking, blending, or reinventing methods. For experts, learning becomes unlearning—refining efficiency, discarding bad habits, and pushing into new creative territory.

Practical Ways to Experiment

• Copy, then create: Emulate masters to understand process, then adapt your version. Van Gogh copied Millet’s works before developing his signature style.
• Compare methods side by side: Test two approaches differing in one variable—like studying vocabulary with and without mnemonics—to see which works better.
• Add new constraints: Force creativity by limiting tools or time. Designers and writers know that boundaries spark innovation.
• Hybridize skills: Combine unrelated strengths to stand out—like Scott Adams blending engineering, business, and humor to create Dilbert.
• Explore extremes: Push one skill dimension beyond comfort. Van Gogh’s vibrant colors and thick brushstrokes were once radical, yet they birthed his genius.

The Experimental Mindset

True learners think like scientists: hypothesize, test, observe, refine. They also think like artists: play, risk, and embrace uncertainty. Carol Dweck’s “growth mindset” complements this—believing abilities can evolve transforms fear of failure into curiosity. Experimentation doesn’t mean chaos; it means controlled exploration guided by feedback and reflection. As Young concludes, experimentation ties all principles together: it’s how ultralearners transform effort into innovation, turning education itself into a lifelong art form.