Ultralearning. Scott H. Young
amounts of time into the project. Spending fifty hours a week on a project will accomplish more than spending five hours a week on it, even if the efficiency is the same, and thus the most captivating stories usually involve heroic schedules. Though this makes for good storytelling, it’s actually unnecessary when it comes to pursuing your own ultralearning projects. The core of the ultralearning strategy is intensity and a willingness to prioritize effectiveness. Whether this happens on a full-time schedule or just a couple hours per week is completely up to you. As I’ll discuss in chapter 10, a spread-out schedule may even be more efficient in terms of long-term memory. Whenever you read about an intensive schedule in this book, feel free to adapt it to your own situation, taking a more leisurely pace while employing the same ruthlessly efficient tactics.
The second way is by pursuing ultralearning during gaps in work and school. Many of the people I interviewed did their projects during temporary unemployment, career transitions, semesters off, or sabbaticals. Although these aren’t as reliable to plan for, a burst of learning may be perfect for you if you know you’re about to have this kind of time off. That was one of my motivations for pursuing my MIT Challenge when I did: I had just graduated, so extending my existing student life another year was easier than pushing it out for four. If I had to do the same project today, I might have done it over a longer period of time, over some evenings and weekends, since my work is less flexible today than it was in that moment of transition from school to working life.
The third way is to integrate ultralearning principles into the time and energy you already devote to learning. Think about the last business book you read or the time you tried to pick up Spanish, pottery, or programming. What about that new software you needed to learn for work? Those professional development hours you need to log to maintain your certification? Ultralearning doesn’t have to be an additional activity; it can inform the time you already spend learning. How can you align the learning and studies you already need to do with the principles for maximizing effectiveness?
As in the section on talent, don’t let the extreme examples dissuade you from applying the same principles. Everything I will share with you can be customized or integrated into what already exists. What matters is the intensity, initiative, and commitment to effective learning, not the particulars of your timetable.
THE VALUE OF ULTRALEARNING
The ability to acquire hard skills effectively and efficiently is immensely valuable. Not only that, but the current trends in economics, education, and technology are going to exacerbate the difference between those with this skill and those without it. In this discussion, however, I’ve ignored perhaps the most important question: Ultralearning may be valuable, but is it learnable? Is ultralearning just a description of people with unusual personalities, or does it represent something that someone who wasn’t an ultralearner before could actually become?
“I’d love to be a guinea pig.” It was an email from Tristan de Montebello. I had first met the charming, half-French, half-American musician and entrepreneur seven years earlier, at almost exactly the same time as my fateful encounter with Benny Lewis. With tousled blond hair and a close-cropped beard, he looked like he belonged on a surfboard on some stretch of California coastline. De Montebello was the kind of guy you liked immediately: confident, yet down to earth, with only the vaguest hints of a French accent in his otherwise perfect English. Over the years, we had kept in touch: me with my strange learning experiments; him hopping around the world, going from working with a Parisian startup that made bespoke cashmere sweaters to guitarist, vagabond, and eventually web consultant in Los Angeles, much closer to the beaches that suited him so well. Now he had heard I was writing a book about learning, and he was interested.
The context of his email was that although I had met and documented dozens of people accomplishing strange and intriguing learning feats, the meetings had been largely after the fact. They were people I had met or heard about after their successes, not before; observations of successes, not experiments that generated them. As a result, it was hard to tell exactly how accessible this ultralearning thing was. If you filter through enough pebbles, you’re sure to find a few flecks of gold. Was I doing the same thing, scouring for unusual learning projects? Sift through enough people, and you’re bound to find some that seem incredible. But if ultralearning had the potential that I imagined it did, it would be nice to find someone before he or she tried a project and watch the results. To test this, I put together a small group of about a dozen people (mostly readers of my blog) who were interested in giving this ultralearning thing a shot. Among them was de Montebello.
BECOMING AN ULTRALEARNER
“Maybe piano?” de Montebello suggested. Although he was interested in the concept of ultralearning, he had no idea which skill he’d like to learn. He had played guitar and been the lead singer for a band. With his musical background, learning to play piano seemed like a relatively safe choice. He had even made a course teaching guitar lessons online, so learning another musical instrument could potentially expand his business. Selfishly, I encouraged him to try learning something farther outside his comfort zone. A musician picking up another instrument didn’t seem like the ideal case to study for seeing whether ultralearning could be applied broadly. We threw more ideas around. A week or two later, he decided on public speaking. His background as a musician had given him experience being onstage, but otherwise he had little experience giving speeches. Public speaking is a useful skill, too, he argued, so it would be worth getting better at even if nothing noteworthy came from the effort.
De Montebello had a private motivation for wanting to become good at public speaking. He had given only a handful of speeches in his life, and most of those had been in college. He related to me one example, from when he had gone to give a talk to a dozen people at a web design firm in Paris: “I cringe every time I think back to that.” He explained, “I could just tell I wasn’t connecting. There were many pieces where I was boring them. There were jokes where I would laugh, because I thought it was funny, but nobody else would.” Being a musician, he was surprised “how little of it translated” to public speaking. Still, it was something in which he saw potential value, if he could get good at it. “Public speaking is a metaskill,” he feels. It’s the kind of skill that assists with other skills: “confidence, storytelling, writing, creativity, interviewing skills, selling skills. It touches on so many different things.” With that in mind, he set to work.
FIRST STEPS OF A FLEDGLING ULTRALEARNER
De Montebello had picked his topic, but he wasn’t sure exactly how he should learn it. He decided to attend a meeting of Toastmasters International, the organization for learning public speaking. At that point, his story had two doses of luck. The first was that in attendance at the very first meeting for his public speaking project was Michael Gendler. Gendler was a longtime Toastmaster, and de Montebello’s combination of charm and obsessive intensity to become good at public speaking convinced him to help coach de Montebello through his project. The second dose of luck was something that de Montebello didn’t fully appreciate at the time: he had showed up just ten days before the deadline to be eligible to compete in the World Championship of Public Speaking.
The World Championship of Public Speaking is a competition put on annually by Toastmasters in which members compete, elimination style, starting in individual clubs and going on to larger and larger units of the organization, until a select few make it to the final stage. De Montebello had little more than a week to prepare. Still, the competition provided a potential structure for his ultralearning project, so he went for it, cranking out the six mandatory qualifying speeches in the coming week, finishing the last in the nick of time.
De Montebello practiced obsessively, sometimes speaking twice in one day. He recorded a video of every speech and analyzed it obsessively for flaws. He asked for feedback every time he gave a speech, and he got plenty of it. His coach, Gendler, pushed him far outside of his comfort zone.