Book Review of Ultralearning by Scott Young
tl:dr; In Ultralearning, Scott Young lays out the fundamentals of helping you quickly learn and retain new skills and concepts. I recommend this book for folks interested in providing practical structure and guidance to independent learning, whether they be for work or leisure. For Ph.D students and academics, this book is useful for explaining how to more effectively DIY learning with proven techniques for learning and retention.
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When one of my favorite bloggers, Scott Young, announced he was writing a book about self-directed learning projects, I scooped it up on release day. As an academic, I traditionally think of learning as classrooms and lectures and assignments guided by a teacher. But this isn’t the only way that learning happens, as we also know that learning and skills are built outside of the classroom through self-directed learning efforts. I was attracted to this book given my interest in these skills just finishing my doctorate and now as a postdoc, where I have to learn and pick up skills quickly to support my research and teaching
In Ultralearning, Young lays out a structured approach for designing quick and rapid learning projects, with an eye towards developing valuable and transferable skills that stick around. While the title implies herculean effort is necessary (the “ultra” in ultralearning conjures images of running marathons or hackathons), the principles in the book are applicable to creating self-driven projects across skill areas. These include picking up new languages, a new academic subject, or hobbies like playing an instrument.
Each chapter focuses on one of nine principles of the ultralearning process. Chapters cover topics like advice on planning and launching projects; strategies of learning, memorization, and developing intuition; and retention. Young backs up his explanations of each skill with examples of other ultralearners, practical knowledge from his own experiences, and modern psychological evidence (the Ph.D in me loves that he cites peer-reviewed work). My favorite chapters were about Metalearning and advanced planning of projects. Young even discusses when to stop planning, which was helpful for me, who’s a slightly thorough/sometimes neurotic planner. I also enjoyed that the chapters are modular — if you have a project that requires less focus on rote memorization, you can leave out the chapter on repetition/drills.
For those worried about ultralearning also being a skill of savants, Young addresses this directly through his careful choice of example ultralearners and their projects. For example, Young demystifies some of Richard Feynman’s legendary math abilities by pointing to how years and years of engagement and play with numbers likely facilitated Feynman’s skills. I was thrilled that Young brought in examples of women ultralearners and people from outside the US. In a genre that is often dominated by stories of famous men, it was refreshing to bring in the stories of chess champion Polgár sisters (Judit being the most famous)and mathematician Srivivasa Ramanujan, as well as less extraordinary examples. For seasoned self-help book veterans, Young’s examples in this book are fresh takes on the common and sometimes overused heroes of the genre.
If there is one criticism I could offer, it would be that Ultralearning is almost too broad of a banner for Young’s approach proposed in the book. I would like to have seen a chapter on picking a good project, and a little more clarity about what may NOT be a good ultralearning project. Are there skills that don’t translate well to this template? I would have loved to see reflection or personal experience on Young’s failed projects. Related to this, I also would have liked to see more diversity in the discussed ultralearning projects — most references in the book were often to skills like language learning or rapidly acquiring skills for a job. I would have loved to see more discussion of a drawing project Young mentioned or developing this kind of skill around physical craft, like woodworking or knitting.
For academics and researchers, I think this work is good for pointing out ways to improve our own self-directed learning efforts. I’ve adopted several of these principles already in direct my own learning efforts in recently wrapping my head around graph theory and a deeper understanding of time series analysis. Thinking more broadly, I’ve also used his approaches in self-regulating my fitness goals and planning processes and applying them to other hobbies. As a short aside, I can’t help but recommend a book that pitches a surprisingly similar technique to the Notebook Technique that I blogged about before (page 191–193).
Do I recommend this book? Yes! This is a practical guide to learning on your own, and Young makes it really easy to understand his principles. If you already read Scott’s blog, there is lots of new information, examples, and stories in here that make it a fresh read rather than being a paperback copy of his blog posts. Overall, this book a great resource of modular ideas to jumpstart a DIY learning adventure and keep it on track.
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