Ultra Learning By Scott H. Young

Key Concepts: The 9 Pillars of Mastery
Young distills the methods of history's greatest polymaths into nine actionable principles:

• Metalearning: Start by learning how to learn your chosen subject. Create a map of the concepts, facts, and procedures involved before you dive in.
• Focus: Carve out "deep work" blocks. Learn to manage your mental energy and use "struggle timers" to push through difficult cognitive hurdles.
• Directness: Stop "studying" and start "doing." If you want to learn to speak a language, speak it. If you want to build an app, build it. Avoid the trap of passive learning.
• Drill: Identify the specific sub-skills that are holding you back—your "bottlenecks"—and attack them ruthlessly until they become strengths.
• Retrieval: Stop re-reading notes. Use active testing and "free recall" to pull information out of your brain; this effortful recall is what actually builds memory.
• Feedback: Seek out "aggressive" feedback. Don't look for praise; look for the specific mistakes you are making so you can correct them in real-time.
• Retention: Understand that forgetting is the default. Use spaced repetition systems and "overlearning" to ensure your hard-won knowledge doesn't evaporate.
• Intuition: Don't just memorize formulas; understand the "first principles." Use the Feynman Technique—explaining a concept to a child—to find the gaps in your understanding.
• Experimentation: Once you have mastered the basics, explore outside the lines. Try new styles and methods to move from being a practitioner to being an innovator.

Ultralearning is a manual for the self-taught elite, proving that with the right framework, you can learn anything—faster and more deeply than you ever thought possible.