Ultralearning

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.

Rather, it was his obsessive work ethic. His goal wasn’t to reach some predetermined extreme but to see how far he could go.

You might even want to ask yourself which feeling is more powerful in that moment—is the problem more that you have a strong urge to do a different activity (e.g., eat something, check your phone, take a nap) or that you have a strong urge to avoid the thing you should be doing because you imagine it will be uncomfortable, painful, or frustrating? This awareness is necessary for progress to be made, so if you feel as though procrastination is a weakness of yours, make building this awareness your first priority before you try to fix the problem.

This is the strategy behind doing drills. By identifying a rate-determining step in your learning reaction, you can isolate it and work on it specifically. Since it governs the overall competence you have with that skill, by improving at it you will improve faster than if you try to practice every aspect of the skill at once. That was Franklin’s insight that allowed him to rapidly improve his writing: by identifying components of the overall skill of writing, figuring out which mattered in his situation, and then coming up with clever ways to emphasize them in his practice, he could get better more quickly than if he had just spent a lot of time writing.

This may sound abstract, but I’d argue that this is quite common with programmers, and often the thing separating mediocre programmers from great ones isn’t the range of problems they can solve but that the latter often know dozens of ways to solve problems and can select the best one for each situation. This kind of breadth requires a certain amount of passive exposure, which in turn benefits from retrieval practice.

In nearly every biography of great geniuses and contemporary ultralearners I have encountered, some form of retrieval practice is mentioned. Benjamin Franklin practiced his writing by reconstructing essays from memory. Mary Somerville worked through problems mentally when no candle was available for night reading. Roger Craig practiced trivia questions without looking at the answers. Retrieval is not a sufficient tool to create genius, but it may be a necessary one.Trying to produce the answer rather than merely reviewing it is only half of a bigger cycle, however. To make retrieval really effective, it helps to know whether the answer you dredged up from your mind was correct.

Throughout this book, we’ve explored the trade-off that occurs between doing what’s effective for learning and what’s easy and enjoyable. Sometimes what’s the most fun isn’t very effective, and what’s effective isn’t easy. This trade-off may push you to opt for easier, more enjoyable forms of learning that sacrifice some effectiveness. However, in my own experience, I’ve noticed that enjoyment tends to come from being good at things. Once you feel competent in a skill, it starts to get a lot more fun. Therefore, although a tension between the two can exist in the short term, I think pursuing aggressive ultralearning projects is often the surer way to enjoy learning more, as you’re more likely to reach a level where learning automatically becomes fun.

However, it is important to keep in mind as László insisted that “play is not the opposite of work” and “a child does not need play separate from work, but meaningful action,” adding “learning presents them with more enjoyment than a sterile game.” Play and work combined in the Polgárs’ approach to learning, with no rigid boundary between them.

Finally, László was entirely against coercing learning. Self-discipline, motivation, and commitment, he felt, must come from the girls themselves. He explained, “One thing is certain: one can never achieve serious pedagogical results, especially at a high level, through coercion.”16 He also felt that “one of the most important educational tasks is to teach self-education.”17 This final step of his process was particularly important for his daughters, as they quickly outpaced their father’s ability. Had they not been encouraged to develop their own abilities to teach themselves and adjust their learning, they might have become decent chess players but certainly not grand masters.

Before I started my MIT Challenge, I imagined that covering an undergraduate degree’s worth of computer science concepts would be plenty. After I had finished, I could see how each topic I had learned could be multiplied into a doctorate’s worth of research or a lifetime spent coding to fully understand it. My experience in learning languages to a level where I could hold conversations made me realize how many more words, expressions, nuances of culture, and difficult communication situations were left to explore. Finishing a project, therefore, isn’t usually accompanied by a sense of finishing learning but by the creation of a feeling of possibility as one’s eyes are opened to all the things left to learn.

It’s this aspect of learning that I find most interesting. Many pursuits in life have a kind of saturation point, after which the longing for more of a thing eventually diminishes as you get more of it. A hungry person can eat only so much food. A lonely person can have only so much companionship. Curiosity doesn’t work this way. The more one learns, the greater the craving to learn more. The better one gets, the more one recognizes how much better one could become. If you finish reading this book and have been encouraged to try your own project, this would be my greatest hope—not that you’d be successful at your project but that your ending would be a beginning. That by opening a small crack in all the possibly knowable things there are in the world, you might peer through and find there is far, far more than you had ever imagined.

Curiosity doesn’t work this way. The more one learns, the greater the craving to learn more. The better one gets, the more one recognizes how much better one could become. If you finish reading this book and have been encouraged to try your own project, this would be my greatest hope—not that you’d be successful at your project but that your ending would be a beginning. That by opening a small crack in all the possibly knowable things there are in the world, you might peer through and find there is far, far more than you had ever imagined.