Ultraînvățarea (rezumat)
Renunță la modul vechi de învățare. Aplică cele 9 principii pentru a accelera cunoașterea în orice domeniu.
Principii :
Metaînvățarea - Creează mai întâi o hartă
Concentrarea - Ascute cuțitul
Directness (practica în condiții reale) - Mergi direct către obiectiv
Exersează - Atacă punctul tău cel mai slab
Reamintirea - Testează pentru a învăța
Feedback în condiții reale - Nu evita loviturile
Retenție - Nu umple o găleată găurită
Intuiție - Sapă adânc înainte să construiești
Experimentare - Explorează
Principiul 1—Metaînvățarea: Mai întâi creează o hartă
I started by examining other popular bloggers and authors. Their methods helped me to create a map for what I needed to do to become a successful writer.
Metalearning: First Draw a Map. Start by learning how to learn the subject or skill you want to tackle. Discover how to do good research and how to draw on your past competencies to learn new skills more easily.
Metaînvățarea înseamnă să înveți despre învățare.
If you’re learning Chinese characters, you will learn that 火 means “fire.” That’s regular learning You may also learn that Chinese characters are often organized by something called radicals, which indicate what kind of thing the character describes. The character 灶, for example which means “stove,” has a 火 on the left-hand side to indicate that it has some relationship to fire. Learning this property of Chinese characters is metalearning—not learning about the object of your inquiry itself.
Metalearning thus forms the map, showing you how to get to your destination without getting lost.
I find it useful to break down metalearning research that you do for a specific project into three questions: “Why?,” “What?,” and “How?” “Why?” refers to understanding your motivation to learn. If you know exactly why you want to learn a skill or subject, you can save a lot of time by focusing your project on exactly what matters most to you. What?” refers to the knowledge and abilities you’ll need to acquire in order to be successful.
Împarte lucrurile pe care le ai de învățat în concepte, fapte, și proceduri. Acestea îți vor permite să creezi o hartă cu ce obstacole vei întâlni pe drum și cum le poți depăși.
Practically speaking, the projects you take on are going to have one of two broad motivations: instrumental and intrinsic. Instrumental learning projects are those you’re learning with the purpose of achieving a different, nonlearning result. Intrinsic projects are those that you’re pursuing for their own sake.
Once you’ve gotten a handle on why you’re learning, you can start looking at how the knowledge in your subject is structured. A good way to do this is to
write down on a sheet of paper three columns with the headings “Concepts,” “Facts,” and “Procedures” :
It doesn’t matter if the list is perfectly complete or accurate at this stage. You can always revise it later.
In the first column, write down anything that needs to be understood. In general, if something needs to be understood, not just memorized, I put it into this column instead of the second column for facts.
In the second column, write down anything that needs to be memorized. Facts are anything that suffices if you can remember them at all. You don’t need to understand them too deeply, so long as you can recall them in the right situations.
In the third column, write down anything that needs to be practiced. Procedures are actions that need to be performed and may not involve much conscious thinking at all.
You might recognize that learning medicine requires a lot of memorization, so you may invest in a system such as spaced-repetition software.
I suggest following two methods to answer how you’ll learn something: Benchmarking and the Emphasize/Exclude Method.
You should invest approximately 10 percent of your total expected learning time into research prior to starting. If you expect to spend six months learning, roughly four hours per week, that would be equal to roughly one hundred hours, which suggests that you should spend about ten hours, or two weeks, doing your research.
A good idea is to be aware of the common methods of learning, popular resources, and tools along with their strengths and weaknesses before starting. The best research, resources, and strategies are useless unless you follow up with concentrated efforts to learn.
Principiul 2— Concentrează-te: Ascute cuțitul
Focus: Sharpen Your Knife.
Cultivează-ți capacitatea de a te concentra.
Carve out chunks of time when you can focus on learning, and make it easy to just do it.
The first step to overcoming procrastination: recognize when you are procrastinating. If you actually start working or ignore a potent distractor, it usually only takes a couple minutes until the worry starts to dissolve, even for fairly unpleasant tasks.
Telling yourself that you need to spend only five minutes on the task before you can stop and do something else is often enough to get you started.
The first source of distraction is your environment;
The second source is the task you’re trying to learn. Whenever you have a choice between using different tools for learning, you may want to consider which is easier to focus on when making that decision;
The third source is your mind itself.
Here the solution is to acknowledge the feeling, be aware of it, and gently adjust your focus back to your task and allow the feeling to pass.
A problem is the one that has to do with the quality and direction of your attention. What’s the optimal degree of alertness to maximize your learning? Taking a break from the problem can widen the space of focus enough that possibilities that were not in your consciousness earlier can conjoin and you can make new discoveries.
Principiul 3—Directness: Mergi direct către obiectiv
The learning activities are always done with a connection to the context in which the skills learned will eventually be used. The easiest way to learn directly is to simply spend a lot of time doing the thing you want to become good at.
I learned writing by writing. I set a schedule for myself to write a new article every Monday and Thursday. Over the first two years, I produced more than 150 essays.
As we develop more knowledge and skill in an area, they become more flexible and easier to apply outside the narrow contexts in which they were learned.
When we learn new things, therefore, we should always strive to tie them directly to the contexts we want to use them in. Building knowledge outward from the kernel of a real situation is much better than the traditional strategy of learning something and hoping that we’ll be able to shift it into a real context at some undetermined future time.
Many of the ultralearners I encountered wanted, as their end goal, to understand a subject particularly well.
Immersion is the process of surrounding yourself with the target environment in which the skill is practiced.
The overkill approach is to put yourself into an environment where the demands are going to be extremely high, so you’re unlikely to miss any important lessons or feedback.
Deciding in advance that your work will be viewable publicly alters your approach to learning and will gear you toward performance in the desired domain, rather than just checking off boxes of facts learned.
Whenever you learn anything new,
un obicei bun este să te întrebi adesea unde și cum se va manifesta cunoașterea pe care ai dobândit-o.
If you can answer that, you can then ask whether you’re doing anything to tie what you’re learning to that context.
Principiul 4— Exersează: Atacă punctul tău cel mai slab
Drill—I systematically broke down each aspect of writing articles—the headline, the introductory sentence, the transitions, the storytelling, and more—and put together spreadsheets filled with examples of each segment.
When reading an English grammar book, he was exposed to the idea of the
metoda Socratică de a provoca ideile celuilalt folosind întrebări de investigare în detrimentul contrazicerii directe a acestora.
He then went to work, carefully avoiding “abrupt contradiction and positive argumentation,” instead focusing on being the “humble inquirer and doubter.”
In chemistry, there’s a useful concept known as the rate-determining step. The rate-determining step is the slowest part of this chain of reactions, forming a bottleneck that ultimately defines the amount of time needed for the entire reaction to occur. By identifying a rate-determining step in your learning reaction, you can isolate it and work on it specifically. Since it governs the overall competence you have with that skill, by improving at it you will improve faster than if you try to practice every aspect of the skill at once.
The reason is that when you are practicing a complex skill, your cognitive resources (attention, memory, effort, etc.) must be spread over many different aspects of the task.
If direct practice involves working on a whole skill nearest to the situation in which it will eventually be used, drills are a pull in the opposite direction. A drill takes the direct practice and cuts it apart, so that you are practicing only an isolated component.
The first step is to try to practice the skill directly;
The next step is to analyze the direct skill and try to isolate components that are either rate-determining steps in your performance or subskills you find difficult to improve because there are too many other things going on for you to focus on them;
The final step is to go back to direct practice and integrate what you’ve learned.
Tactics for Designing Drills. There are three major problems when applying this principle:
The first is figuring out when and what to drill. You should focus on what aspects of the skill might be the rate-determining steps in your performance. Which aspect of the skill, if you improved it, would cause the greatest improvement to your abilities overall for the least amount of effort? Your accounting skills might be limited by the fact that your Excel knowledge is superficial, which prevents you from applying all the things you know to practical situations. The key is to experiment. Make a hypothesis about what is holding you back, attack it with some drills, using the Direct-Then-Drill Approach, and you can quickly get feedback about whether you’re right;
The second difficulty with this principle is designing the drill to produce improvement. This is often hard because even if you recognize an aspect of your performance you’re weak on, it may be tricky to design a drill that trains that component without artificially removing what makes it difficult in actual application;
Finally, doing drills is hard and often uncomfortable. Teasing out the worst thing about your performance and practicing that in isolation takes guts.
Given this natural tendency, let’s look at some good ways to do drills so you can start applying them yourself :
The easiest way to create a drill is to isolate a slice in time of a longer sequence of actions. Musicians often do this kind of training when they identify the hardest parts of a piece of music and practice each one until it’s perfect before integrating it back into the context of the entire song or symphony.
By copying the parts of the skill you don’t want to drill (either from someone else or your past work), you can focus exclusively on the component you want to practice. When practicing drawing, I started by drawing not just from photos but from drawings other people had done. That helped me focus on the skill of accurately rendering the picture, simplifying the decision about how to frame the scene and which details to include.
Drills require the learner not only to think deeply about what is being learned but also figure out what is most difficult and attack that weakness directly rather than focus on what is the most fun or what has already been mastered.
Principiul 5—Reamintirea: Testează cu scopul de a învăța
It pays better to wait and recollect by an effort from within, than to look at the book again.
Retrieval practice—trying to recall facts and concepts from memory—is so much better for learning
Another explanation for why students opt for low-efficiency review instead of retrieval is that they don’t feel they know the material well enough to test themselves on it.
Whether you are ready or not, retrieval practice works better. Especially if you combine retrieval with the ability to look up the answers, retrieval practice is a much better form of studying than the ones most students apply.
Free recall tests, in which students need to recall as much as they can remember without prompting, tend to result in better retention than cued recall tests, in which students are given hints about what they need to remember.
The idea of desirable difficulties in retrieval makes a potent case for the ultralearning strategy. Low-intensity learning strategies typically involve either less or easier retrieval. Pushing difficulty higher and opting for testing oneself well before you are “ready” is more efficient.
The advantage of this strategy is that it automatically leads you to learn the things with the highest frequency.
Tactic 1: Flash Cards
an amazingly simple, yet effective, way to learn paired associations between questions and answers. Similarly, maps, anatomical diagrams, definitions, and equations can often be memorized via flash cards.
Tactic 2: Free Recall
A simple tactic for applying retrieval is, after reading a section from a book or sitting through a lecture, to try to write down everything you can remember on a blank piece of paper.
Free recall like this is often very difficult, and there will be many things missed, even if you just finished reading the text in question. However, this difficulty is also a good reason why this practice is helpful. By forcing yourself to recall the main points and arguments, you’ll be able to remember them better later.
Tactic 3: The Question-Book Method
another strategy for taking notes is to rephrase what you’ve recorded as questions to be answered later.
What’s harder and more useful is to restate the big idea of a chapter or section as a question. Since this is often implicit, it requires some deeper thinking and not just adding a question mark to some notes
One rule I’ve found helpful for this is to restrict myself to one question per section of a text, thus forcing myself to acknowledge and rephrase the main point rather than zoom in on a detail that will be largely irrelevant later
Tactic 4: Self-Generated Challenges
If you’re trying to practice a skill, not merely remember information, they might not be enough.
As you go through your passive material, you can create challenges for yourself to solve later. Creating a list of such challenges can serve as a prompt for mastering that information later in practice
Tactic 5: Closed-Book Learning
Nearly any learning activity can become an opportunity for retrieval if you cut off the ability to search for hints. By preventing yourself from consulting the source, the information becomes knowledge stored inside your head instead of inside a reference manual.
Principiul 6—Feedback - Nu evita loviturile
Ericsson has found that
Capacitatea de primi feedback imediat asupra performanței individuale este un ingredient esențial în a atinge niveluri înalte de performanță.
Feedback is uncomfortable. It can be harsh and discouraging, and it doesn’t always feel nice.
Concrete tactics you can apply to get better feedback:
Tactic 1: Noise Cancellation
Anytime you receive feedback, there are going to be both a signal—the useful information you want to process—and noise.
Tactic 2: Hitting the Difficulty Sweet Spot
The main way this impacts your learning is through the difficulty you’re facing. Many people intuitively avoid constant failure, because the feedback it offers isn’t always helpful.
you should try to avoid situations that always make you feel good (or bad) about your performance.
Though carefully controlling the feedback environment so it is maximally encouraging may be a tantalizing option, real life rarely affords such an opportunity. Instead,
it’s better to get in and take the punches early so that they don’t put you down for the count.
Feedback and the information it provides, however, is useful only if you remember the lessons it teaches. Forgetting is human nature, so it is not enough to learn; you also need to make the information stick.
Principiul 7- Retenția: Nu umple o găleată găurită
Spaced-repetition systems (SRS) as a tool for trying to retain the most knowledge with the least effort.
Most students who had taken an algebra class and were retested years later had forgotten huge amounts of what they had learned. Moving up a level to a more advanced skill enabled the earlier skill to be overlearned, thus preventing some forgetting.
One common, and useful,
mnemonic is known as the keyword method. The method works by first taking a foreign-language word and converting it into something it sounds like in your native language.
If I were doing this with French, for example, I might take the word chavirer (to capsize) and convert it into “shave an ear,” to which it is close enough in sound for the latter to serve as an effective cue for recalling the original word. Next I create a mental image that combines the sounds-like version of the foreign word and an image of its translation in a fantastical and vivid setting that is bizarre and hard to forget.
Principiul 8 - Intuiția: Sapă adânc înainte să construiești
Don’t Give Up on Hard Problems Easily
One way you can introduce this into your own efforts is to give yourself a “struggle timer” as you work on problems. When you feel like giving up and that you can’t possibly figure out the solution to a difficult problem, try setting a timer for another ten minutes to push yourself a bit further. The first advantage of this struggle period is that very often you can solve the problem you are faced with if you simply apply enough thinking to it. The second advantage is that even if you fail, you’ll be much more likely to remember the way to arrive at the solution when you encounter it.
The levels-of-processing effect, suggests that it isn’t simply how much time you spend paying attention to information that determines what you retain but, crucially, how you think about that information while you pay attention to it.
The Feynman Technique
Write down the concept or problem you want to understand at the top of a piece of paper.
In the space below, explain the idea as if you had to teach it to someone else.
a. If it’s a concept, ask yourself how you would convey the idea to someone who has never heard of it before.
b. If it’s a problem, explain how to solve it and—crucially—why that solution procedure makes sense to you.
When you get stuck, meaning your understanding fails to provide a clear answer, go back to your book, notes, teacher, or reference material to find the answer.
Since many of our understandings are never articulated, it’s easy to think you understand something you don’t. The Feynman Technique bypasses this problem by forcing you to articulate the idea you want to understand in detail.
Problems You Can’t Seem to Solve
it’s very important to go through the problem step by step alongside the explanation you generate, rather than simply summarizing it. Summarizing may end up skipping over the core difficulties of the problem.
Instead of focusing on explaining every detail or going along with the source material, you should try to focus on generating illustrative examples, analogies, or visualizations that would make the idea comprehensible to someone who has learned far less than you have.
When people hear about geniuses, especially the iconoclastic ones such as Feynman, there’s a tendency to focus on their gifts and not their efforts.
Principiul 9 - Experimentează: Explorează dincolo de zona ta de confort
There are two important things to note about van Gogh’s experiments in art:
The first is the variety of methods, ideas, and resources he applied.
The second important thing to note is his intensity.
He pursued his art relentlessly, sometimes producing as much as a new painting every day.
Experimentation Is the Key to Mastery. When starting to learn a new skill, often it’s sufficient simply to follow the example of someone who is further along than you.
In discussing the principles of ultralearning, metalearning comes first. Understanding how a subject breaks down into different elements and seeing how others have learned it previously, thus providing an advantageous starting point. However, as your skill develops, it’s often no longer enough to simply follow the examples of others; you need to experiment and find your own path.
Not only must you learn to solve problems you couldn’t before, you must unlearn stale and ineffective approaches for solving those problems. The difference between a novice programmer and a master isn’t usually that the novice cannot solve certain problems. Rather, it’s that the master knows the best way to solve a problem
Three Types of Experimentation:
Experimenting with Learning Resources.The first place to experiment is with the methods, materials, and resources you use to learn. A good strategy to take is to pick a resource (maybe a book, class, or method of learning) and apply it rigorously for a predetermined period of time;
Experimenting with Technique. Once again, experimentation plays a pivotal role. Pick some subtopic within the skill you’re trying to cultivate, spend some time learning it aggressively, and then evaluate your progress. There’s no “right” answer here, but there are answers that will be more useful to the specific skill you’re trying to master.
Experimenting with Style. Once you master the basics, there is no longer one “right” way to do everything but many different possibilities, all of which have different strengths and weaknesses. This affords another opportunity for experimentation. The key to experimenting with different styles is to be aware of all the different styles that exist.
Once again van Gogh provides a good model, as he spent an enormous amount of time studying and discussing the works of other artists. That gave him a large library of possible styles and ideas he could adapt to his own work. Similarly, you might want to identify masters in your own line of study and dissect what makes their styles successful to see what you can emulate or integrate into your own approach.In each level of experimentation, the choices broaden and the possible options to explore go up exponentially. There’s a tension, therefore, between spending time trying out different resources, techniques, and styles, and concentrating your efforts on a single approach long enough to become proficient at it. This tension often resolves itself as you cycle through exploring a new avenue in learning and then buckling down to learn it deeply before moving on to something else. Whatever else his failings, it was this pattern of trying out an idea and working on it aggressively that van Gogh applied brilliantly.
Experimenting is based on the belief that improvements are possible in how you approach your work. I see the experimental mindset as an extension of the growth mindset: whereas the growth mindset encourages you to see opportunities and potential for improvement, experimentation enacts a plan to reach those improvements.
The experimental mindset doesn’t just assume that growth is possible but creates an active strategy for exploring all the possible ways to reach it. To get into the right mental space for experimenting, you need not only to see your abilities as something you can improve but understand that there is a huge number of potential avenues to do this.
Exploration, not dogmatism, is the key to realizing that potential.
Cum să experimentezi
Tactic 1: Copy, Then Create
Though van Gogh is best known for his original pieces, he also spent a lot of time copying drawings and paintings he liked by other artist. Copying simplifies the problem of experimentation somewhat because it gives you a starting point for making decisions.
Tactic 2: Compare Methods Side-by-Side
You can apply this same process to your experiments in learning by trying two different approaches and varying only a single condition to see what the impact is. By applying two different approaches side by side, you can often quickly get information not only about what works best but about which methods are better suited to your personal style.
Forcing yourself to try different approaches encourages experimentation outside your comfort zone.
Tactic 3: Introduce New Constraints
The challenge of learning in the beginning is that you don’t know what to do. The challenge of learning in the end is that you think you already know what to do. It’s this latter difficulty that causes us to rerun old routines and old ways of solving problems that are encouraged through habit, not always because the old way is actually best.
Tactic 4: Find Your Superpower in the Hybrid of Unrelated Skills
The traditional path to mastery is to take a well-defined skill and practice it relentlessly until you have become insanely good at it.
Tactic 5: Explore the Extremes
What this means is that the more complicated a domain of skill is (i.e., the more dimensions it contains), the more space will be taken up by applications of that skill that are extreme across at least one of those dimensions. This suggests that for many skills, the best option is going to be extreme in some way, since so many more of the possibilities are themselves extreme.
Experimentation and Uncertainty. Learning is a process of experimenting in two ways:
First, the act of learning itself is a kind of trial and error. Practicing directly, getting feedback, and trying to summon up the right answers to problems are all ways of adjusting the knowledge and skills you have in your head to the real world;
Second, the act of experimenting also lies in the process of trying out your learning methods.
Primul tău proiect de Ultraînvățare
Pasul 1: Fă cercetare
Ultralearning “packing” checklist should include, at a minimum:
What topic you’re going to learn and its approximate scope.I suggest starting with rather a narrow scope, which can expand as you proceed.
The primary resources you’re going to use. This includes books, videos, classes, tutorials, guides, and even people who will serve as mentors, coaches, and peers. A benchmark for how others have successfully learned this skill or subject;
Direct practice activities. Thinking about how you might use the skill can enable you to start finding opportunities to practice it as early as possible;
Backup materials and drills. Backup materials are often good if you recognize that a certain tool or set of materials might be useful but you don’t want to be overwhelmed in the beginning.
Pasul 2 : Programează-ți timp
Decide on how much time you are willing to devote to learning in advance than simply hope that you’ll find the time. later. This way you subconsciously prioritize your project by setting it down on your calendar ahead of other things. The second is that learning is often frustrating and it is almost always easier to click over to Facebook, Twitter, or Netflix.
The first decision you should make is how much time you’re going to commit
The second decision you need to make is when you are going to learn. Shorter, spaced time chunks are better for memory than crammed chunks are.
The third decision you need to make is the length of time for your project. If you have a big goal you want to accomplish that can’t be done in a short time frame, I suggest breaking it up into multiple smaller ones of a few months each.
Take all this information and put it into your calendar. Scheduling all the hours of work on the project in advance has important logistical and psychological benefits. Logistically, this will help you spot potential conflicts in your schedule due to vacations, work, or family events.
Psychologically, it will help you remember and act on your initial plan better than if it were written on a piece of paper tucked into a desk drawer. What’s more, the act of scheduling demonstrates your seriousness about doing the project.
Pasul 3 : Execută conform planului
Indiferent cu ce plan ai pornit, ACUM este momentul să începi. Niciun plan nu este perfect
and you may realize that what you’re doing for learning departs from the ideal, as established by the ultralearning principles.
Here are some questions to ask yourself to determine whether you’re slipping from the ideal:
Metalearning. Have I done research into what are the typical ways of learning this subject or skill?
Focus. Am I focused when I spend time learning, or am I multitasking and distracted?
Am I skipping learning sessions or procrastinating?
When I start a session, how long does it take before I’m in a good flow?
How long can I sustain that focus before my mind starts to wander?
How sharp is my attention?
Should it be more concentrated for intensity or more diffuse for creativity?
Directness. Am I learning the skill in the way I’ll eventually be using it? If not, what mental processes are missing from my practice that exist in the real environment? How can I practice transferring the knowledge I learn from my book/class/video to real life?
Drill. Am I spending time focusing on the weakest points of my performance? What is the rate-limiting step that is holding me back? Does it feel as though my learning is slowing down and that there’s too many components of the skill to master? If so, how can I split apart a complex skill to work on smaller, more manageable components of it?
Retrieval. Am I spending most of my time reading and reviewing, or am I solving problems and recalling things from memory without looking at my notes? Do I have some way of testing myself, or do I just assume I’ll remember? Can I successfully explain what I learned yesterday, last week, a year ago? How do I know if I can?
Feedback. Am I getting honest feedback about my performance early on, or am I trying to dodge the punches and avoid criticism? Do I know what I’m learning well and what I’m not? Am I using feedback correctly, or am I overreacting to noisy data?
Retention. Do I have a plan in place to remember what I’m learning long term? Am I spacing my exposure to information so it will stick longer? Am I turning factual knowledge into procedures that I’ll retain? Am I overlearning the most critical aspects of the skill? Intuition. Do I deeply understand the things I’m learning, or am I just memorizing? Could I teach the ideas and procedures I’m studying to someone else? Is it clear to me why what I’m learning is true, or does it all seem arbitrary and unrelated?
Experimentation. Am I getting stuck with my current resources and techniques? Do I need to branch out and try new approaches to reach my goal? How can I go beyond mastering the basics and create a unique style to solve problems creatively and do things others haven’t explored before?
Together these principles serve as directions, not destinations. In each case, look at how you’re currently progressing through your materials,
Pasul 4 : Verifică rezultatele
you should spend a little time analyzing it. What went right? What went wrong?
Not all of your projects will be successful. I’ve had ultralearning projects that I felt good about. I’ve had others that didn’t work out as well as I had hoped.
Pasul 5 : Alege să menții sau să îmbunătățești ceea ce ai învățat
What do you want to do with the skill? With no plan in place, most knowledge eventually decays.
Option 1: Maintenance
The first option is to invest enough practice to sustain the skill but without any concrete goal of getting it to a new level. This can often be accomplished by setting up a habit of regular practice, even if it is a minimal one.
Discovered by Hermann Ebbinghaus more than a hundred years ago, falls off with an exponentially decaying curve. That means that memories that are retained for longer are less and less likely to be forgotten when you follow up at a later date.
Option 2: Relearning
Relearning is generally easier than first-time learning. Doing a refresher course or practice series can be enough to reactivate most of it in a fraction of the time it took to learn it initially.
Option 3: Mastery
O educație neconvențională
Studying the biographies of hundreds of great intellectuals, I found the same thing : They all started at a young age and studied intensively.
Crezi că acest rezumat îi poate fi de folos și altcuiva ? Atunci dă-l mai departe.