Scott H. Young

En un mundo en constante evolución, es imprescindible adquirir sin cesar nuevos conocimientos y habilidades en el trabajo y en cualquier aspecto de nuestra vida. Ultralearning te descubrirá cómo aprender de una forma rápida y efectiva. ¿Quieres cambiar de trabajo o impulsar tu carrera? Ultralearning te ofrece la estrategia para dominar las habilidades que te permitirán ampliar tus horizontes profesionales. ¿Qué cosas siempre has querido hacer pero el miedo te lo ha impedido? ¿Te imaginas que finalmente pudieras hablar inglés, tocar la guitarra, dibujar, hablar en público o programar? Con la estrategia correcta, puedes aprender rápidamente cualquier cosa y adquirir una mayor confianza en ti mismo. Con Ultralearning, podrás: 1. Aprender nuevas habilidades para reinventar tu carrera profesional. 2. Mejorar tu manera de estudiar actual. 3. Identificar loque te ha funcionado en el pasado para poder aplicarlo en el futuro. 4. Adquirir confianza para vencer las dudas. 5. Aprender un nuevo idioma, a tocar un instrumento o cualquier habilidad que te abra nuevos caminos personales o posibilidades profesionales. Reseñas: «¿Cómo puede dominarse un tema difícil sin tener que asistir a clase durante años? Lee Ultralearning y descubrirás cómo adquirir nuevas habilidades en un tiempo récord.» Robert Pozen, profesor de MIT Sloan School of Management «Ultralearning es una lectura fascinante e inspiradora, una mina de oro de estrategias que te permiten aprender cualquier cosa muy deprisa.» James Clear, autor de Hábitos atómicos

Aprende más y más rápido, alcanza tus objetivos y reinventa tu carrera profesional

Ultralearning

Terry Benzie

The author defines "ultralearning" as a 'strategy for acquiring skills and knowledge that is both self-directed and intense' and this book attempts to be a sweeping overview to teach the skill. I'd previously encountered Young's writing when his blog was just beginning and it wasn't very well-developed. However, since that time, he's completed a challenge of completing a good portion of the undergraduate computer curriculum from MIT in a year as well as a project of speaking no English for a 12-month period, instead traveling to four different countries and speaking only the primary language in each country for the three months he lived there. In this period, his writing has increased a good deal and this book is the result. 

I purchased this book three years ago but never got into it. However, thinking that I want to embark on a bit of a language learning project myself, I pulled this out, hoping it would offer some advice. Though I folded over a good number of pages, when I went back to pull out main ideas, I was left lacking. I don't know that many people will be able to use this book as a guidebook to learn any particular skill, but it does offer a wide variety of ideas that could be implemented in any program of learning to trim a bit of fat and speed up the process. 

It basically has three main parts. 

1 - a general introduction to the idea of ultralearning and discussion of the author's personal projects 
2 - the nine principles of ultralearning 
3 - a stab at trying to outline what an ultralearning program would look like if a person wanted to do such a thing 

The book has a few good ideas and excels when Young is discussing his own learning. However, by the end his analogies (each chapter is structured in precisely the same manner that begins with an introduction of a successful learner) are strained and go from the author himself to people he talked with to people he read about to people who have never done interviews but he is guessing they used the same methods he did. A lot of this could have been trimmed down into a nicely composed blog post. 

Who should read this? I'm really not sure. If you are new to the genre, this isn't it. Instead, read something like "Fluent in 3 Months" written by Benny Lewis who is frequently cited in this book. 

If you have read much on accelerated learning, you've heard it before. That isn't to say this is a bad book, but it doesn't do what it promises to do.

Heiki Riesenkampf

** spoiler alert **
           Not too much new information for someone who is previously obsessed about learning. However, found the topic of metalearning interesting and worth a re-read.

Scott Young

Learn a new talent, stay relevant, reinvent yourself, and adapt to whatever the workplace throws your way. Ultralearning offers nine principles to master hard skills quickly. This is the essential guide to future-proof your career and maximize your competitive advantage through self-education. In these tumultuous times of economic and technological change, staying ahead depends on continual self-education—a lifelong mastery of fresh ideas, subjects, and skills. If you want to accomplish more and stand apart from everyone else, you need to become an ultralearner. The challenge of learning new skills is that you think you already know how best to learn, as you did as a student, so you rerun old routines and old ways of solving problems. To counter that, Ultralearning offers powerful strategies to break you out of those mental ruts and introduces new training methods to help you push through to higher levels of retention. Scott H. Young incorporates the latest research about the most effective learning methods and the stories of other ultralearners like himself—among them Benjamin Franklin, chess grandmaster Judit Polgár, and Nobel laureate physicist Richard Feynman, as well as a host of others, such as little-known modern polymath Nigel Richards, who won the French World Scrabble Championship—without knowing French. Young documents the methods he and others have used to acquire knowledge and shows that, far from being an obscure skill limited to aggressive autodidacts, ultralearning is a powerful tool anyone can use to improve their career, studies, and life. Ultralearning explores this fascinating subculture, shares a proven framework for a successful ultralearning project, and offers insights into how you can organize and exe - cute a plan to learn anything deeply and quickly, without teachers or budget-busting tuition costs. Whether the goal is to be fluent in a language (or ten languages), earn the equivalent of a college degree in a fraction of the time, or master multiple tools to build a product or business from the ground up, the principles in Ultralearning will guide you to success.

Master Hard Skills, Outsmart the Competition, and Accelerate Your Career

Zack Apira

Great book with a lot of useful tips and interesting anecdotes about how to learn effectively. A lot of these principles can be applied directly to your own learning goals. I'm quite inspired by it and planning to start my own ultralearning project soon using these techniques I learned from the book. A must-read for any lifelong learners.

Julien Sobczak

Indispensable resource for the hard learner inside of you.

I’ve read a lot of books about learning. This book is one of my favorites. 

Ultralearning is defined by the author as “a strategy for acquiring skills and knowledge that is both self-directed and intense.”

I’m not a huge fan of the term ultralearning as it doesn’t reflect accurately the content of this book. Ultralearning is not learning pushed to the extreme. Ultralearning is learning hard things quickly and effectively using rational principles. 

To illustrate these principles, the author reuses the stories of some of the most famous hard learners in recent history, as they are inspiring and memorable. But this should not dissuade you from applying the same principles. When it comes to learning, committing to the right approach is far more important than the time you devote to it. 

You will be able to use those lessons to learn a new language, play an instrument, start a new hobby project, or even a whole new career. The book provides a strategy, a map to move toward your goal without being stuck along the way. Ultralearning is the super skill to learn hard skills and feel the happiness that results from doing it.

In the end, I think this book is a great contribution. Lifelong learning is becoming more and more crucial in an economy that leaves less and less room for average knowledge. I found the principle of directness particularly eye-opening and the argumentation about the limits of far transfer very interesting. 

On his blog, the author declares “[f]or the last ten years I've been experimenting to find out how to learn and think better. I don't promise I have all the answers, just a place to start.” This book is a really great place to start!

Kyle S

Good book with a lot of great advice, especially for lifelong learners. I'd give a 4.5 but I opted for a 4 because like most books in this genre it gets a little too wordy at times

Sebastian Witowski

My problem with self-help books is that once you read a bunch of them, you realize that it's just a common sense and you get less and less value out of each new book. It's quite rare for me to read a new book and say "wow, I've learned so much!". So I try to appreciate books not only based on the knowledge I get from them, but also by how much I enjoyed reading them. And Ultralearning is a book that I really enjoyed reading (actually, listening to) because of the sheer number of stories and anecdotes. But I didn't learn much from it. So as the other reviews says, this book could be distilled to a much shorter version, but I honestly liked the narration and stories.

Ivaylo Durmonski

Learning new skills and acquiring volumes of knowledge is necessary if we want to stay relevant. Paradoxically, real education happens outside the traditional school system. The only person who can teach you new things is no other than yourself.

Ultralearning by Scott H. Young is the kind of book I wish existed when I graduated from school. Instead of going to college, and spending four years supposedly learning how to become what is now mentioned on my diploma, I could have challenged myself to learn currently adequate topics in months.

While the key message of the book is worthy of every self-respecting learner, this book is not for everyone. It’s will surely be rejected by know-it-all graduates who praise the education system or from people who long for fast results. It’s for life-long learners who are eager to immerse themselves in new fields they know nothing about. For committed people who strive to master both traditional and emerging fields.

The ultralearning framework mentioned in the book will allow you to single-handedly master topics you previously thought you’ll never learn.

The systematic approach provided by Scoot Young will allow you to create your own curriculum that will help you become a learning champion and upgrade your skill-set.

Key takeaway:

Aggressive self-education. Regular learning sessions. Practice what you’ve learned. These are a few of the things I’ll hold tight, pursue, and strive towards after reading the book.

Read more here:
https://durmonski.com/book-summaries/...

A’ishah Kamaludin

I learnt a lot from this book. Things that I wanna apply more in my daily self-learning are metalearning, directness and retrieval. 

The only comment I have is that this book has a lot of padding so don’t be troubled if you feel like you wanna skip pages and only read the subtopic points (I promise you, you won’t miss so much) but for leisure reading, you can read it cover to cover as you please.

This book makes me wanna dive into topics of deliberate practice vs flow.

Wojciech Waśniewski

Very useful resource

Really good book for anyone who wants to have an edge in their professional career, learn anything more quickly and effectively or is just into learning science. Book focuses on cognitive skills however the advice can also in many ways be applied to motor skills. I started planning my first ultralearning project while reading. Highly recommended!

Pedro Giménez

El autor es conocido por haber superado el pregrado de Computer Science del MIT en menos de un año —cuatro años de clases en menos de 12 meses. El autor emplea una estrategia que llama “Ultralearning”. Consiste en adquirir habilidades y conocimientos usando una serie de nueve de principios:

* Meta-aprendizaje
* Foco
* Práctica
* Ejercicio
* Recuperación
* Feedback
* Retención
* Intuición
* Experimentación

Principio de Meta-Aprendizaje. Consiste en aprender sobre aprender. Es decir, no aprender sobre el objeto de estudio sino aprender cómo está estructurado el conocimiento en la materia y aprender cómo adquirirlo. Por lo tanto, el meta-aprendizaje forma el mapa que utilizaremos para no perdernos en el estudio. Para formar el mapa debemos hacernos tres preguntas:

* ¿Por qué?: Nuestra motivación para aprender (Instrumental, Intrínseco)
* ¿Qué?: El conocimiento y las habilidades que deberemos aprender para tener éxito en nuestro proyecto de aprendizaje (Conceptos, Datos, Procedimientos)
* ¿Cómo?: Cómo vamos a aprender la materia (Benchmarking, Emphasize/Exclude Method)

¿Cuánto meta-aprendizaje debemos hacer? Una buena regla es dedicarle un 10% del total del tiempo que vamos a destinar al proyecto.

El meta-aprendizaje no es una fase al principio del proyecto, es importante que al recibir feedback en cada fase, ajustemos nuestro mapa de acuerdo al feedback. Sin embargo, siempre tenemos que tener en cuenta la ley de los rendimientos decrecientes.

Principio de Foco. Consiste en ser capaz de empezar un periodo de concentración, mantenerlo y optimizar su calidad.

Para empezar, no procrastines. Si te encuentras procrastinando, márcate el hábito de empezar el proyecto diez minutos antes de tomarte un descanso. Normalmente, con este tiempo basta para entrar en la zona de confort y dejar de procrastinar.

Para mantenerlo, divide el aprendizaje en bloques cortos —quince minutos a una hora, los estudios demuestran que es mejor—. Además, divide los bloques en diversas materias.

A la hora de optimizar la calidad es importante tener en cuenta el tipo de foco. Dos variables: nivel de alerta y complejidad de la tarea. Las tareas poco complejas, se benefician de un nivel de alerta alto, las tareas más complejas se benefician de un nivel de alerta bajo. El ruido de fondo incrementa el nivel de alerta. Corolario, trabaja desde un café o con música cuando la tarea no sea compleja.

Principio de Práctica (Prefiero llamarlo como al modelo, El mapa no es el territorio). Para la práctica debemos tener en cuenta que el mapa no es el territorio —aprender en Duolingo no es lo mismo que viajar a Paris y forzarnos a hablar francés durante un año—, por lo tanto, debemos intentar aprender lo más cercanos al contexto en el que usaremos nuestro aprendizaje. La práctica es la marca distintiva de cualquier proyecto bajo la estrategia ultralearning. Podemos emplear cuatro tácticas para aprender sobre el contexto del territorio final —o al menos algo cercano—:

* Emprender un proyecto similar al proyecto final: Si organizas tu aprendizaje sobre producir algo, al menos lo terminarás sabiendo producir esa cosa
* Aprendizaje inmersivo: ajusta tu entorno al entorno final. Te expone al rango de situaciones reales en las que aplica la habilidad
* El método del simulador de vuelo: cuando la inmersión no es posible —no podemos practicar pilotaje sobre un avión real—, podemos utilizar un entorno que la simule
* El approach del exceso (overkill): incrementa la complejidad del proyecto para que la habilidad que quieras aprender esté contenida en él

Principio de Ejercicio. Consiste en separar los elementos de nuestro proyecto de aprendizaje y practicarlos individualmente. El concepto químico del Paso limitante de la velocidad nos sirve como referencia. Divide el proyecto, busca el bottleneck y práctica ese elemento individualmente. Este principio entra en conflicto con el principio de la práctica porque el primero nos pide aislar elementos y el último nos pide practicar sobre el territorio como un todo. Tenemos que ver esto como un ciclo que se va alternando y ajustar en base al feedback.

Principio de Recuperación. Pruébate a ti mismo tratando de recuperar información sin abrir la fuente —libro, charla, whatever—. Está probado que este método es mucho más eficaz en la recuperación de información a largo plazo. Intenta probarte incluso antes de comenzar el aprendizaje, así sabrás que contenidos son más relevantes. Para la recuperación puedes emplear:

* Flash cards
* Prueba de recuperación después de la lectura
* El libro de preguntas (Question-book)
* Pruebas a medida: si estás aprendiendo una habilidad compleja —como programar— es mejor que te hagas pruebas a medida para forzarte a recuperar el conocimiento.
* Recuperación sin la fuente.

Principio de Feedback. Ten en cuenta las variables: inmediatez, precisión, intensidad. Búscalo agresivamente pero ajusta las variables para no recibir feedback erróneo o molesto. (Outcome feedback, Informational feedback, Corrective feedback).

Principio de Retención. Perder el acceso al conocimiento ya adquirido es un problema muy estudiado por educadores, estudiantes y psicólogos. Ebbinghaus y la curva del olvido: olvidamos lo que acabamos de aprender, decrecimiento exponencial en el conocimiento. Evítalo con mecanismos de memoria:

* Repasa espaciadamente.
* Mecaniza el conocimiento.
* Práctica más allá de la perfección (overkill).
* Emplea reglas mnemotécnicas —no tienen mucha utilidad en situaciones reales que requiere reacción rápida—.

Principio de Intuición: Entiende las cosas. Emplea la técnica de Feynman.

Principio de Experimentación: Experimenta con todas las fases del proyecto para adaptarlo a tus necesidades, emplea el feedback recibido para mejorar la calidad de tu aprendizaje. Prueba diferentes recursos —vídeo, libros, clases—, diferentes técnicas, diferentes estilos, diferentes horarios, diferentes entornos. Compara los resultados side-by-side.

—

En definitiva ha sido una lectura muy buena. Recomiendo el libro a cualquiera que tenga la misma pasión que yo por ser más eficiente en una de las habilidades más importantes para el nuevo paradigma: aprender.

Durante los últimos 10 años he comenzado cientos de proyectos de aprendizaje que no he finalizado por una mala preparación. Durante los próximos meses pondré en práctica estos principios en un nuevo proyecto de aprendizaje para confirmar mis expectativas. ¡Ya os contaré!

An Vu

Ethan Ding

Howard Greller

Future-proof your career and maximize your competitive advantage by learning the skill necessary to stay relevant, reinvent yourself, and adapt to whatever the workplace throws your way in this essential guide. Faced with tumultuous economic times and rapid technological change, staying ahead in your career depends on continual learning--a lifelong mastery of new ideas, subjects, and skills. If you want to accomplish more and stand apart from everyone else, you need to become an ultralearner. Scott Young incorporates the latest research about the most effective learning methods and the stories of other ultralearners like himself--among them Ben Franklin, Judit Polgar, and Richard Feynman, as well as a host of others, such as little-known modern polymaths like Nigel Richards who won the World Championship of French Scrabble--without knowing French. Young documents the methods he and others have used and shows that, far from being an obscure skill limited to aggressive autodidacts, ultralearning is a powerful tool anyone can use to improve their career, studies, and life. Ultralearning explores this fascinating subculture, shares the nine principles behind every successful ultralearning project, and offers insights into how you can organize and execute a plan to learn anything deeply and quickly, without teachers or budget-busting tuition costs. Whether the goal is to be fluent in a language (or ten languages), earn the equivalent of a college degree in a fraction of the time, or master multiple skills to build a product or business from the ground up, the principles in Ultralearning will guide you to success. ited to aggressive autodidacts, ultralearning is a powerful tool anyone can use to improve their career, studies, and life. Ultralearning explores this fascinating subculture, shares the nine principles behind every successful ultralearning project, and offers insights into how you can organize and execute a plan to learn anything deeply and quickly, without teachers or budget-busting tuition costs. Whether the goal is to be fluent in a language (or ten languages), earn the equivalent of a college degree in a fraction of the time, or master multiple skills to build a product or business from the ground up, the principles in Ultralearning will guide you to success.

Seven Strategies for Mastering Hard Skills and Getting Ahead

Vijayasarathy Muthu

Gerbert-Jan

Future-proof your career and maximize your competitive advantage by learning the skill necessary to stay relevant, reinvent yourself, and adapt to whatever the workplace throws your way in this essential guide that goes beyond the insights of popular works such as Extreme Productivity, Deep Work, Peak, and Make It Stick. Faced with tumultuous economic times and rapid technological change, staying ahead in your career depends on continual learning—a lifelong mastery of new ideas, subjects, and skills. If you want to accomplish more and stand apart from everyone else, you need to become an ultralearner. In this essential book, Scott Young incorporates the latest research about the most effective learning methods and the stories of other ultralearners like himself—among them Ben Franklin and Richard Feynman, as well as a host of others, such as little-known modern polymaths like Alexander Arguelles, who speaks more than forty languages. Young documents the methods he and others have used and shows that, far from being an obscure skill limited to aggressive autodidacts, ultralearning is a powerful tool anyone can use to improve their career, studies, and life. Ultralearning explores this fascinating subculture, shares the seven principles behind every successful ultralearning project, and offers insights into how you can organize and execute a plan to learn anything deeply and quickly, without teachers or budget-busting tuition costs. Whether the goal is to be fluent in a language (or ten languages), earn the equivalent of a college degree in a fraction of the time, or master multiple skills to build a product or business from the ground up, the principles in Ultralearning will guide you to success.

Ultralearning Aprende más y más rápido, alcanza tus objetivos y reinventa tu carrera profesional

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