Once a month, I like to give a nonfiction review of a book, and if you click on the “Book Thoughts” tag below (if you’re new), you can see all the previous posts I’ve done in this vein.
This month, I finished a book that I started last fall called “Ultralearning” by Scott Young. This is the young man who decided to try to pass MIT’s computer science finals (four years of hard classes) in just one year, on his own, and then didn’t speak English for a year because he was learning four languages (each by immersion).
If I had to summarize the idea of “ultra learning”, it would be “immersion,” in fact. And by an interesting twist, I did not “ultra learn” ultra learning. 😊 Likely because I have high Learner and I intuitively want to do a program similar to this, in order to learn what I want to learn. I tend to throw myself hard into the thing I want to learn, and self-direct my learning, also.
One of the interesting this about this book, though, for Learners, is that if you really want competency, you have to pass what Seth Godin calls “The Dip,” which is the hard part of assimilation. It’s the part where you’re learning the ropes and not yet competent, not yet excellent. So the rewards are lower.
Imagine you are in “the dip” for four different skills. It can make the process of talent assimilation or habit assimilation frustrating. You hit the “hard part” of all these skills, and there are no rewards in the short term, so it becomes hard to get through. But when you practice Ultralearning, you throw yourself into the assimilation of the one skill or the one talent or the one habit, and you make everything in your life revolve around the competent assimilation of that thing.
I feel like this is a really great idea–and of course, I encourage this, post-WBF and post-SFW, because I have seen the reward of focused learning with my coaching clients–so of course, I was on board for this book.
Of course, if you think of it like Scott Young did (something like learning the entire MIT computer science curriculum in one year), it seems like “overkill”, not just “ultra learning.” But it’s hard to replicate. Not all of us can completely leave our lives for an entire year to learn a language. But, we can definitely assimilate some of these suggestions in our own lives.
1) Focus. When something is worth doing, it’s worth doing well. Like we say in WBF, or like is often said in books like “The One Thing,” focus is key. If you try to change too much at once, your system will rebel. But if you really want to assimilate a process, focus on that one process. And in the Ultralearning method, you would focus every part of your life (that you can change) to support that focused learning. You might replace all of your nonfiction reading or all of your classes with one thing. You might say no to buying new classes. You might join a specific mastermind group. You might set a goal of doing this one skill every single day, multiple times a day. But putting on the blinders is important. High Focus (Strength) people might do this easily, but we are all capable of encouraging focus in our lives. And if we really want to assimilate talents, that focus can be super important.
2) Courage. Tackling something hard is definitely hard. Right? (Duh, Becca.) But it’s also extremely rewarding and it teaches us to develop our resilience and our courage. Having courage in setting our eyes on something big and important means that we’re going to feel that much prouder of ourselves when we succeed. That is a huge part of this method. Tackling something that’s just on the edge of your capacity will get you to stretch yourself. That stretching is an important part of growth.
3) Experimentation. There are nine steps to the ultra learning process, and the final one (the true test of mastery) is experimentation. It’s so important, once we assimilate something well, to push ourselves to experiment with our new talents, so we can learn trust in our own abilities. Sometimes, we can even forget to do this experimentation with our highest capacities that we’ve already assimilated. Experimenting with your levels of mastery is extremely important.
I definitely enjoyed this book, overall. If you’re interested in learning the process described in this book, I highly recommend picking it up. I hope that you enjoy it if you do. And if not, hopefully this article gives you another reminder to not change all the things.
I love you all, but… don’t change all the things. 😊
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