Don’t Fill a Leaky Bucket Nigel Richards, is a multiple-time world champion in the game of Scrabble. This game requires a voluminous memory of words in a language. He doesn’t speak French but he won the French world Scrabble competition. What is Nigel Richards’s Secret? Richards loved …

Don’t Dodge the Punches The Power of Information Feedback is one of the most consistent aspects of the strategy ultra learners use. Feedback features prominently in the research on deliberate practice. In his studies, Ericsson has found that the ability to gain immediate feedback on one’s performance is …

Test to Learn We are given some background about the legendary mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan. The Testing Effect Testing yourself — trying to retrieve the information without looking at the text — clearly outperformed all other conditions. The act of trying to summon up knowledge from memory is a powerful learning tool on …

Attack Your Weakest Point Benjamin Franklin is a great writer. He started from feedback that he needed to improve his writing, and so he drilled in on his weakness and it became his ultimate strength. The Chemistry of Learning Learning has certain aspects of the learning problem forming a bottleneck …

Go straight ahead. The Importance of being Direct Jaiswal’s story perfectly illustrates the third principle of ultra learning: directness. By seeing how architecture was actually being done and learning a set of skills that was closely related to the job position he wanted to perform, he was able to …

This chapter covers everything focus-related, from how long focus sessions should be, to flow state, to distractions, to procrastination, to the pomodoro technique, to the right environment, to the right kind of focus. The gist of this chapter is to minimize distractions and maximize focus, but also take breaks. I …

First Draw a Map Scott illustrates a language learning technique. A man named Everett is learning a new language by using a stick and pointing it to objects, picking up objects, performing actions, listening to a woman’s translation responses, and recording the results on a blackboard. In 30 minutes …

The author decided to run an experiment and gathered about a dozen people who were interested in giving ultra learning a shot. The one example he writes about out of the dozen is Tristan de Montebello. Becoming an Ultra Learner This guy, de Montebello, was a musician. But he had …

The author starts by giving some background as to why he started the MIT challenge. Next, he talks about language learning, and how someone he met was able to learn a new language in 3 months. The key strategy was that instead of formal study, he started diving into conversations …

What exactly is ultra learning? Here is an imperfect definition: A strategy for acquiring skills and knowledge that is both self-directed and intense. Strategy does not mean the only solution to a given problem, but it may be a good one. Self-directed: it’s about who is in the driver …