It’s a beautiful afternoon, and adding to its grace is a book I just finished reading. The book is called Ultralearning by Scott H Young.
In my decade long pursuit of reading books, I just discovered the ultralearner in me.
I’m more bent on the metalearning (beyond learning) part – it’s one of the principles mentioned in the book.
Somehow, I have always been amazed at the transcendent aspects of learning. Always fine-tuning my cognitive features, so I could learn fast, wide and deep – yes, that’s sounds quite a deluge, but its effortless when you find your reading flow.
Amongst the other principles were, focus, directness, retention, experimentation.
As Scott Young profoundly puts it in his blog: Ultra-learning is centered around intense, self-directed learning projects. It implores us to go deep into the problem that we strive to learn than just looking at the surface-level mundane features that don’t retain in our mind.
We all love learning at our own pace, in our own rhythm and at composure.
If you want to learn a new language, or master chess, or thrive in an environment where a combination of leaning resources, tools and lessons teach you something, you are already an ultra learner!
So, now you wonder, how can you start learning something deeply in a competitive environment?
The key distillation of the principles that etched in my mind was: be consistent in learning, in chunks digestible to your coping mind, for the long-term so that you can retain things and build not just a factual understanding but also conceptual thinking.
This is when the tenacious practice and play merge to give you a solid understanding of what you learn.
In our deepest implicit understanding, we all are ultra learners. It’s just that sometimes we are conditioned to learn or falsely apprenticed to create a learning environment that is not conducive to bring our the genius in us.
This book makes us the learning rebels (in an effective way), so we can evolve ourselves and outsmart our competition naturally.
Photo by Kimberly Farmer on Unsplash
