Ultralearning by Scott H. Young
From the Forward written by James Clear--
Approaching learning with an intensity and commitment to action is a hallmark of Scott’s process. This speaks to me.
Passive learning creates knowledge. Active practice creates skill.
Deep learning provides a sense of purpose in life. Developing skills is meaningful. It feels good to get good at something.
Focus
Skilled performers may enjoy and seek out flow experiences as part of their domain-related activities but such experiences would not occur during deliberate practice
Your goal is to enhance your learning, and this often involves pushing through some sessions that are more frustrating than what could be considered ideal for flow
Investments made in pushing through learning now will make skillful practice a much more enjoyable activity down the road
*Tip*
If I have difficulty reading to do, I will often make an effort to jot down notes that reexplain hard concepts for me. I do this mostly because, while I’m writing, I’m less likely to enter into the state of reading hypnosis where I’m pantomiming the act of reading while my mind is actually elsewhere.
Arousal is the overall feeling of energy and alertness. Arousal influences attention.
Taking a break from the problem could widen the space of focus enough that possibilities that were not in your consciousness earlier can conjoin and make new discoveries
By confronting a problem you don’t yet know how to answer, your mind automatically adjusts its attentional resources to spot information that looks like a solution when you learn it later.
Only be developing enough experience with problem solving can you build up a deep mental model of how other problems work. Intuition sounds magical but the reality may be more banal-- the product of a large volume of organized experience dealing with the problem.
How Van Gogh Learned to Paint
Starry Night, Irises, and Vase with Fifteen Sunflowers have all become icons. How does someone who starts late, with no obvious talent and many handicaps nonetheless, become one of the world’s greatest artists, of the most recognizable and distinctive styles?
Answer: Experimentation.
Van Gogh would identify a learning resource, method, or style and pursue it with incredible vigor, creasing dozens if not hundreds of works in that direction.
After the burst of intensity, aware of his still-existing deficiencies, he would apply himself to a new resource, method, or style and start again.
Making him unforgettably unique.
*Tip* Find your superpower in the hybrid of unrelated skills
Path is to combine two skills that don’t necessarily have overlap to bring about a distinct advantage that those who specialize in only one of those skills do not have.
Ex: Illustrator or Dilbert, Scott Adams -- MBA and cartoonist
Push your skills to the extreme
Learning a complex subject = trying to find an optimal point in region of higher dimensional space
What this means is that the more complicated a domain of a skill is, the more space will be taken up by applications of that skills that are extreme across at least one of those dimensions.
For many skills, the best option is going to be extreme in some way, since so many more of the possibilities are themselves extreme.