Summary

Learn a new talent, stay relevant, reinvent yourself, and adapt to whatever the workplace throws your way. Ultralearning offers nine principles to master hard skills quickly. This is the essential guide to future-proof your career and maximize your competitive advantage through self-education.

Review

This book is motivating on the possibilities opened by pursuing self-directed accelerated learning projects and instructive on clear methods for completing those projects in the best possible way.

Notes

Both thorough and deep, Ultralearning: Master Hard Skills, Outsmart the Competition, and Accelerate Your Career contains principles, tactics, and stories to level up your learning methods.

This book is motivating on the possibilities opened by pursuing self-directed accelerated learning projects and instructive on clear methods for completing those projects in the best possible way.

The basic structure and *some* key points:
-Spend 10% of the project on researching what, how and why (metalearning)
-Learn by doing (directness)
-Devise exercises to improve at your weakest points (drill)
-Work without distraction, plan when you will work in advance (focus)(aka Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World)
-Seek useful criticism and adapt as necessary (feedback)
-Active recall versus passive review, if you can't do it without the cheat sheet in hand you don't know if you know the material (retrieval)
-Improve retention by 'overlearning' (learning beyond what is necessary), adding meaning to knowledge, making knowledge automatic through procedures and engaging the physical (aka why we remember how to ride a bike) (retention)
-Intuition comes from years of play in the subject, working countless examples, and learning by proving things for yourself rather than following the work of others (intuition)
-growth mindset + tweak variables such as resources, techniques, constraints, styles (experimentation)

The writing is engaging and easy to follow. The anecdotes and examples are extremely well suited to the principles.

Highly encourage anybody to read this. It contains an unreasonable amount of value packed into a short book, as is the case with most of Scott's content.

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The link directing you to view this book on Amazon is an affiliate link. That means I could get a small commission if you buy the book through my link. That does not come at any extra cost to you.