Ultralearning. Scott H. Young
hard skills can have a greater impact than years of mediocre striving on the job. Whether you want to change careers, take on new challenges, or accelerate your progress, ultralearning is a powerful tool.
The second reason is for your personal life. How many of us have dreams of playing an instrument, speaking a foreign language, becoming a chef, writer, or photographer? Your deepest moments of happiness don’t come from doing easy things; they come from realizing your potential and overcoming your own limiting beliefs about yourself. Ultralearning offers a path to master those things that will bring you deep satisfaction and self-confidence.
Although the motivation behind ultralearning is timeless, let’s start by looking at why investing in mastering the art of learning hard things quickly is going to become even more important to your future.
ECONOMICS: AVERAGE IS OVER
In the words of the economist Tyler Cowen, “Average is over.” In his book of the same title, Cowen argues that because of increased computerization, automation, outsourcing, and regionalization, we are increasingly living in a world in which the top performers do a lot better than the rest.
Driving this effect is what is known as “skill polarization.” It’s well known that income inequality has been increasing in the United States over the last several decades. However, this description ignores a more subtle picture. The MIT economist David Autor has shown that instead of inequality rising across the board, there are actually two different effects: inequality rising at the top and lowering at the bottom. This matches Cowen’s thesis of average being over, with the middle part of the income spectrum being compressed into the bottom and stretched out at the top. Autor identifies the role that technology has had in creating this effect. The advance of computerization and automation technologies has meant that many medium-skilled jobs—clerks, travel agents, bookkeepers, and factory workers—have been replaced with new technologies. New jobs have arisen in their place, but those jobs are often one of two types: either they are high-skilled jobs, such as engineers, programmers, managers, and designers, or they are lower-skilled jobs such as retail workers, cleaners, or customer service agents.
Exacerbating the trends caused by computers and robots are globalization and regionalization. As medium-skilled technical work is outsourced to workers in developing nations, many of those jobs are disappearing at home. Lower-skilled jobs, which often require face-to-face contact or social knowledge in the form of cultural or language abilities, are likely to remain. Higher-skilled work is also more resistant to shipping overseas because of the benefits of coordination with management and the market. Think of Apple’s tagline on all of its iPhones: “Designed in California. Made in China.” Design and management stay; manufacturing goes. Regionalization is a further extension of this effect, with certain high-performing companies and cities making outsized impacts on the economy. Superstar cities such as Hong Kong, New York, and San Francisco have dominating effects on the economy as firms and talent cluster together to take advantage of proximity.
This paints a picture that might either be bleak or hopeful, depending on your response to it. Bleak, because it means that many of the assumptions embedded in our culture about what is necessary to live a successful, middle-class lifestyle are quickly eroding. With the disappearance of medium-skilled jobs, it’s not enough to get a basic education and work hard every day in order to succeed. Instead, you need to move into the higher-skilled category, where learning is constant, or you’ll be pushed into the lower-skilled category at the bottom. Underneath this unsettling picture, however, there is also hope. Because if you can master the personal tools to learn new skills quickly and effectively, you can compete more successfully in this new environment. That the economic landscape is changing may not be a choice any of us has control over, but we can engineer our response to it by aggressively learning the hard skills we need to thrive.
EDUCATION: TUITION IS TOO HIGH
The accelerating demand for high-skilled work has increased the demand for college education. Except instead of expanding into education for all, college has become a crushing burden, with skyrocketing tuition costs making decades of debt a new normal for graduates. Tuition has increased far faster than the rate of inflation, which means that unless you are well poised to translate that education into a major salary increase, it may not be worth the expense.
Many of the best schools and institutions fail to teach many of the core vocational skills needed to succeed in the new high-skilled jobs. Although higher education has traditionally been a place where minds were shaped and characters developed, those lofty goals seem increasingly out of touch with the basic financial realities facing new graduates. Therefore, even for those who do go to college, there are very often skill gaps between what was learned in school and what is needed to succeed. Ultralearning can fill some of those gaps when going back to school isn’t an affordable option.
Rapidly changing fields also mean that professionals need to constantly learn new skills and abilities to stay relevant. While going back to school is an option for some, it’s out of reach for many. Who has the ability to put their life on hold for years as they wade through classes that may or may not end up covering the situations they actually need to deal with? Ultralearning, because it is directed by learners themselves, can fit into a wider variety of schedules and situations, targeting exactly what you need to learn without the waste.
Ultimately, it doesn’t matter if ultralearning is a suitable replacement for higher education. In many professions, having a degree isn’t just nice, it’s legally required. Doctors, lawyers, and engineers all require formal credentials to even start doing the job. However, those same professionals don’t stop learning when they leave school, and so the ability to teach oneself new subjects and skills remains essential.
TECHNOLOGY: NEW FRONTIERS IN LEARNING
Technology exaggerates both the vices and the virtues of humanity. Our vices are made worse because now they are downloadable, portable, and socially transmissible. The ability to distract or delude yourself has never been greater, and as a result we are facing crises of both privacy and politics. Though those dangers are real, there is also opportunity created in their wake. For those who know how to use technology wisely, it is the easiest time in history to teach yourself something new. An amount of information vaster than was held by the Library of Alexandria is freely accessible to anyone with a device and an internet connection. Top universities such as Harvard, MIT, and Yale are publishing their best courses for free online. Forums and discussion platforms mean that you can learn in groups without ever leaving your home.
Added to these new advantages is software that accelerates the act of learning itself. Consider learning a new language, such as Chinese. A half century ago, learners needed to consult cumbersome paper dictionaries, which made learning to read a nightmare. Today’s learner has spaced-repetition systems to memorize vocabulary, document readers that translate with the tap of a button, voluminous podcast libraries offering endless opportunities for practice, and translation apps that smooth the transition to immersion. This rapid change in technology means that many of the best ways of learning old subjects have yet to be invented or rigorously applied. The space of learning possibilities is immense, just waiting for ambitious autodidacts to come up with new ways to exploit it.
Ultralearning does not require new technology, though. As I will discuss in the chapters to come, the practice has a long history, and many of the most famous minds could be described as having applied some version of it. However, technology offers an incredible opportunity for innovation. There are still many ways to learn things that we have yet to fully explore. Perhaps certain learning tasks could be made far easier or even obsolete, with the right technical innovation. Aggressive and efficiency-minded ultralearners will be the first to master them.
ACCELERATE, TRANSITION, AND RESCUE YOUR CAREER WITH ULTRALEARNING
The trends toward skill polarization in the economy, skyrocketing tuition, and new technology are all global. But what does ultralearning actually look like for an individual? I believe there are three main cases in which this strategy for quickly acquiring hard skills can apply: accelerating the career you have, transitioning to a new career, and cultivating a hidden advantage in a competitive world.
To see how ultralearning can accelerate the career you already