The key ideas

Ultralearning: Master Hard Skills, Outsmart the Competition, and Accelerate Your Career

Scott H. Young, 2019

Scott Young completed MIT’s computer science curriculum in a year using open materials, then learned to speak four languages in another year. From his projects and other people’s stories, he assembled nine principles of learning. This book explores why years of study sometimes barely advance a skill and what you can change about how you learn.

Who it is for

For anyone who has spent years learning a language or skill and feels stuck, and for anyone who wants to learn independently.

For the first time in my life, I felt I could learn anything I wanted: I just needed the right plan and the effort.

What the book is about

A familiar picture: you have studied English for several years, with an app and a textbook, but talking to a real person still feels frightening. Time passes, yet the skill seems to stand still.

Canadian Scott Young once decided to test how far he could go by learning differently. In a year, he independently completed a curriculum that MIT students normally spend four years on. Then he learned to speak four new languages in a year.

In Ultralearning, he examines what he did and what others with similar stories did. This produced nine principles. It is the author’s system, assembled from personal experience, other people’s stories, and the research he cites. It is not a rigorous scientific theory, and the people featured are striking exceptions whose results are hard to consider typical.

Idea 1. The MIT curriculum in twelve months

In 2011, Young noticed MIT’s open materials: lectures, assignments, and exams were freely available online. He set a goal of using them to complete the computer science curriculum, around thirty courses, in less than a year.

He watched lectures, solved problems, and took the published exams, then checked his work against the published answers. This did not earn him a degree. But he says it was the first time he felt he could learn anything with the right plan and enough effort.

Young calls this approach ultralearning: learning you organize yourself and pursue with high intensity.

Someone wants to move into data analytics and, instead of getting a second degree, takes free courses while immediately producing reports for their job.

The familiar format in which we study sometimes places strong limits on learning. Making your own plan may reveal that you can move faster.

Read in Livria

About the author

Scott Young is a Canadian writer and learning blogger. He is known for self-education projects: the MIT Challenge, in which he completed MIT’s computer science curriculum in a year using open materials, and a year without English, during which he and a friend learned four languages.

All books by this author: Scott H. Young

Ultralearning: Master Hard Skills, Outsmart the Competition, and Accelerate Your Career Quiz

Terms from the book

  • Spaced repetition
  • Ultralearning: The author’s term for self-organized, highly intensive learning. An author’s framework rather than a scientific category.
  • Metalearning: For Young, studying how a subject works and how best to learn it before beginning the main learning project.
  • Directness: The book’s principle of learning as close as possible to the situation in which the skill will be needed.
  • Prerequisite chaining: A technique from the book: begin practicing a skill immediately and return to the fundamentals when you encounter a specific difficulty.
  • Retrieval: An attempt to recall material without prompts. Studies the author cites associate it with more durable learning than rereading.

All terms

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