Ultralearning Page 3

  The MIT Challenge and Beyond

  Back in my cramped apartment, I was grading my calculus exam. It was tough, but it looked as though I had passed. I was relieved, but it wasn’t a time to relax. Next Monday, I would be starting all over again, with a new course, and I still had almost a year to go.

  As the calendar changed, so did my strategies. I switched from trying to do a single class in several days to spending a month doing three to four classes in parallel. I hoped that would spread the learning over a longer period of time and reduce some of the negative effects of cramming. As I made more progress, I also slowed down. My first few classes were done with aggressive haste so I could stay on schedule to meet my self-imposed deadline. After it seemed likely that I could finish, I was able to shift from studying sixty hours per week to studying thirty-five to forty. Finally, in September 2012, less than twelve months after I had begun, I finished the final class.

  Completing the project was eye-opening for me. For years, I had thought the only way to learn things deeply was to push through school. Finishing this project taught me not only that this assumption was false but that this alternate path could be more fun and exciting. In university, I had often felt stifled, trying to stay awake during boring lectures, grinding through busywork assignments, forcing myself to learn things I had no interest in just to get the grade. Because this project was my own vision and design, it rarely felt painful, even if it was often challenging. The subjects felt alive and exciting, rather than stale chores to be completed. For the first time ever, I felt I could learn anything I wanted to with the right plan and effort. The possibilities were endless, and my mind was already turning toward learning something new.

  Then I got a message from a friend: “You’re on the front page of Reddit, you know.” The internet had found my project, and it was generating quite a discussion. Some liked the idea but doubted its usefulness: “It’s sad that employers won’t really treat this in the same way as a degree, even if he has the same amount (or more) knowledge than a graduate does.” One user claiming to be the head of R&D for a software company disagreed: “This is the type of person I want. I really do not care if you have a degree or not.”7 The debate raged. Had I actually done it or not? Would I be able to get a job as a programmer after this? Why try to do this in a year? Was I crazy?

  The initial surge of attention led to other requests. An employee at Microsoft wanted to set me up for a job interview. A new startup asked me to join its team. A publishing house in China offered me a book deal to share some studying tips with beleaguered Chinese students. However, those weren’t the reasons I had done the project. I was already happy working as a writer online, which had supported me financially throughout my project and would continue to do so afterward. My goal for the project wasn’t to get a job but to see what was possible. After just a few months of finishing my first big project, ideas for new ones were already bubbling up inside my head.

  I thought of Benny Lewis, my first example in this strange world of intense self-education. Following his advice, I had eventually reached an intermediate level of French. It had been hard work, and I was proud that I had been able to push against my initial difficulty of being surrounded by a bubble of English speakers to learn enough French to get by. However, after finishing my MIT experience, I was injected with a new confidence I hadn’t had in France. What if I didn’t make the mistake I made last time? What if, instead of forming a group of English-speaking friends and struggling to pop out of that bubble once my French was good enough, I emulated Benny Lewis and dived straight into immersion from the very first day? How much better could I be, if as in my MIT Challenge, I held nothing back and optimized everything around learning a new language as intensely and effectively as possible?

  As luck would have it, around that time my roommate was planning on going back to grad school and wanted some time off to travel first. We’d both been saving, and if we pooled our resources and were frugal in how we planned our trip, we figured we might be able to do something exciting. I told him about my experiences in France, both of learning French and of secretly believing that much more was possible. I told him about the social bubble that had formed when I had arrived without speaking the language and how difficult it had been to break out of it later. What if, instead of just hoping you’d practice enough, you don’t give yourself an escape route? What if you commit to speaking only the language you’re trying to learn from the first moment you step off the plane? My friend was skeptical. He had seen me study MIT classes for a year from across our apartment. My sanity was still an open question, but he wasn’t as confident in his own ability. He wasn’t sure he could do it, although he was willing to give it a shot, as long as I didn’t have any expectations of him to succeed.

  That project, which my friend and I titled “The Year Without English,” was simple. We’d go to four countries, three months each. The plan in each country was straightforward: no speaking English, either with each other or with anyone we’d meet, from the first day. From there we’d see how much we could learn before our tourist visas ran out and we were pushed to a new destination.

  Our first stop was Valencia, Spain. We had just landed in the airport when we encountered our first obstacle. Two attractive British girls came up to us, asking for directions. We looked at each other and awkwardly sputtered out the little Spanish we knew, pretending we didn’t speak any English. They didn’t understand us and asked us again, now in an exasperated tone. We stumbled over some more Spanish and, believing we couldn’t speak English, they walked away in frustration. Already, it seemed, not speaking English was having unintended consequences. Despite that inauspicious beginning, our Spanish ability grew even faster than I had anticipated. After two months in Spain, we were interacting in Spanish beyond what I had achieved in an entire year of partial immersion in France. We would go to our tutor in the morning, study a little at home, and spend the rest of the day hanging out with friends, chatting at restaurants, and soaking up the Spanish sun. My friend, despite his earlier doubts, was also a convert to this new approach to learning things. Although he didn’t care to study grammar and vocabulary as aggressively as I did, by the end of our stay, he too was integrating seamlessly into life in Spain. The method worked far better than we had hoped, and we were now believers.

  We continued the trip, going to Brazil to learn Portuguese, China to learn Mandarin, and South Korea to learn Korean. Asia proved a far harder task than Spain or Brazil. In our preparation, we had assumed those languages would be only a little more difficult than the European ones, although it turned out that they were much harder. As a result, our no-English rule was starting to crack, although we still applied it as much as we could. Even if our Mandarin and Korean didn’t reach the same level of ability after a short stay, it was still enough to make friends, travel, and converse with people on a variety of topics. At the end of our year, we could confidently say we spoke four new languages.

  Having seen the same approach work for academic computer science and language-learning adventures, I was slowly becoming convinced that it could be applied to much more. I had enjoyed drawing as a kid, but like most people’s attempts, any faces I drew looked awkward and artificial. I had always admired people who could quickly sketch a likeness, whether it be street-side caricaturists to professional portrait painters. I wondered if the same approach to learning MIT classes and languages could also apply to art.

  I decided to spend a month improving my ability to draw faces. My main difficulty, I realized, was in placing the facial features properly. A common mistake when drawing faces, for instance, is putting the eyes too far up the head. Most people think they sit in the top two-thirds of the head. In truth, they’re more typically halfway between the top of the head and the chin. To overcome these and other biases, I did sketches based on pictures. Then I would take a photo of the sketch with my phone and overlay the original image on top of my drawing. Making the photo semitransparent allowed me to see i
mmediately whether the head was too narrow or wide, the lips too low or too high or whether I had put the eyes in the right spot. I did this hundreds of times, employing the same rapid feedback strategies that had served me well with MIT classes. Applying this and other strategies, I was able to get a lot better at drawing portraits in a short period of time (see below).

  Uncovering the Ultralearners

  On the surface, projects such as Benny Lewis’s linguistic adventures, Roger Craig’s trivia mastery, and Eric Barone’s game development odyssey are quite different. However, they represent instances of a more general phenomenon I call ultralearning.* As I dug deeper, I found more stories. Although they differed in the specifics of what had been learned and why, they shared a common thread of pursuing extreme, self-directed learning projects and employed similar tactics to complete them successfully.

  Steve Pavlina is an ultralearner. By optimizing his university schedule, he took a triple course load and completed a computer science degree in three semesters. Pavlina’s challenge long predated my own experiment with MIT courses and was one of the first inspirations that showed me compressing learning time might be possible. Done without the benefit of free online classes, however, Pavlina attended California State University, Northridge, and graduated with actual degrees in computer science and mathematics.8

  Diana Jaunzeikare embarked on an ultralearning project to replicate a PhD in computational linguistics.9 Benchmarking Carnegie Mellon University’s doctoral program, she wanted to not only take classes but also conduct original research. Her project had started because going back to academia to get a real doctorate would have meant leaving the job she loved at Google. Like many other ultralearners before her, Jaunzeikare’s project was an attempt to fill a gap in education when formal alternatives didn’t fit with her lifestyle.

  Facilitated by online communities, many ultralearners operate anonymously, their efforts observable only by unverifiable forum postings. One such poster at Chinese-forums.com, who goes only by the username Tamu, extensively documented his process of studying Chinese from scratch. Devoting “70–80+ hours each week” over four months, he challenged himself to pass the HSK 5, China’s second highest Mandarin proficiency exam.10

  Other ultralearners shed the conventional structures of exams and degrees altogether. Trent Fowler, starting in early 2016, embarked on a yearlong effort to become proficient in engineering and mathematics.11 He titled it the STEMpunk Project, a play on the STEM fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics he wanted to cover and the retrofuturistic steampunk aesthetic. Fowler split his project into modules. Each module covered a particular topic, including computation, robotics, artificial intelligence, and engineering, but was driven by hands-on projects instead of copying formal classes.

  Every ultralearner I encountered was unique. Some, like Tamu, preferred punishing, full-time schedules to meet harsh, self-imposed deadlines. Others, like Jaunzeikare, managed their projects on the side while maintaining full-time jobs and work obligations. Some aimed at the recognizable benchmarks of standardized exams, formal curricula, and winning competitions. Others designed projects that defied comparison. Some specialized, focusing exclusively on languages or programming. Others desired to be true polymaths, picking up a highly varied set of skills.

  Despite their idiosyncrasies, the ultralearners had a lot of shared traits. They usually worked alone, often toiling for months and years without much more than a blog entry to announce their efforts. Their interests tended toward obsession. They were aggressive about optimizing their strategies, fiercely debating the merits of esoteric concepts such as interleaving practice, leech thresholds, or keyword mnemonics. Above all, they cared about learning. Their motivation to learn pushed them to tackle intense projects, even if it often came at the sacrifice of credentials or conformity.

  The ultralearners I met were often unaware of one another. In writing this book, I wanted to bring together the common principles I observed in their unique projects and in my own. I wanted to strip away all the superficial differences and strange idiosyncrasies and see what learning advice remains. I also wanted to generalize from their extreme examples something an ordinary student or professional can find useful. Even if you’re not ready to tackle something as extreme as the projects I’ve described, there are still places where you can adjust your approach based on the experience of ultralearners and backed by the research from cognitive science.

  Although the ultralearners are an extreme group of people, this approach to things holds potential for normal professionals and students. What if you could create a project to quickly learn the skills to transition to a new role, project, or even profession? What if you could master an important skill for your work, as Eric Barone did? What if you could be knowledgeable about a wide variety of topics, like Roger Craig? What if you could learn a new language, simulate a university degree program, or become good at something that seems impossible to you right now?

  Ultralearning isn’t easy. It’s hard and frustrating and requires stretching outside the limits of where you feel comfortable. However, the things you can accomplish make it worth the effort. Let’s spend a moment trying to see what exactly ultralearning is and how it differs from the most common approaches to learning and education. Then we can examine what the principles are that underlie all learning, to see how ultralearners exploit them to learn faster.

  Chapter II

  Why Ultralearning Matters

  What exactly is ultralearning? While my introduction to the eclectic group of intense autodidacts started with seeing examples of unusual learning feats, to go forward we need something more concise. Here’s an imperfect definition:

  Ultralearning: A strategy for acquiring skills and knowledge that is both self-directed and intense.

  First, ultralearning is a strategy. A strategy is not the only solution to a given problem, but it may be a good one. Strategies also tend to be well suited for certain situations and not others, so using them is a choice, not a commandment.

  Second, ultralearning is self-directed. It’s about how you make decisions about what to learn and why. It’s possible to be a completely self-directed learner and still decide that attending a particular school is the best way to learn something. Similarly, you could “teach yourself” something on your own by mindlessly following the steps outlined in a textbook. Self-direction is about who is in the driver’s seat for the project, not about where it takes place.

  Finally, ultralearning is intense. All of the ultralearners I met took unusual steps to maximize their effectiveness in learning. Fearlessly attempting to speak a new language you’ve just started to practice, systematically drilling tens of thousands of trivia questions, and iterating through art again and again until it is perfect is hard mental work. It can feel as though your mind is at its limit. The opposite of this is learning optimized for fun or convenience: choosing a language-learning app because it’s entertaining, passively watching trivia show reruns on television so you don’t feel stupid, or dabbling instead of serious practice. An intense method might also produce a pleasurable state of flow, in which the experience of challenge absorbs your focus and you lose track of time. However, with ultralearning, deeply and effectively learning things is always the main priority.

  This definition covers the examples I’ve discussed so far, but in some ways it is unsatisfyingly broad. The ultralearners I’ve met have a lot more overlapping qualities than this minimal definition implies. This is why in the second part of the book I’ll discuss deeper principles that are common in ultralearning and how they can enable some impressive achievements. Before that, however, I want to explain why I think ultralearning matters—because although the examples of ultralearning may seem eccentric, the benefits of this approach to learning are deep and practical.

  The Case for Ultralearning

  It’s obvious that ultralearning isn’t easy. You’ll have to set aside time from your busy schedule in order to pursue somethi
ng that will strain you mentally, emotionally, and possibly even physically. You’ll be forced to face down frustrations directly without retreating into more comfortable options. Given this difficulty, I think it’s important to articulate clearly why ultralearning is something you should seriously consider.

  The first reason is for your work. You already expend much of your energy working to earn a living. In comparison, ultralearning is a small investment, even if you went so far as to temporarily make it a full-time commitment. However, rapidly learning 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.”1 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.