Over the past few weeks, I’ve read the book ultra learning and watched a bunch of YouTube videos about learning from learning experts. A list of all the videos I watched will be at the end of this post. I took notes on a few videos, but decided to …

Explore Outside Your Comfort Zone Results? Why, I have gotten lots of results ! I know several thousand things that won’t work. — Thomas Edison The author discusses the artist Van Gogh’s story. He started late, but still became one of the most famous painters of all time. He wasn …

Dig Deep Before Building Up “Do not ask whether a statement is true until you know what it means.” — Errett Bishop, mathematician The chapter starts off by talking about Richard Feynman, an eccentric professor and Nobel Prize-winning physicist. Many considered him a genius. Feynman could take problems others had worked …

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 …