Ultralearning

Accelerate Your Career, Master Hard Skills and Outsmart the Competition

By: Scott H. Young

Narrated by: Scott Young

Length: 7 hrs and 46 mins

Publisher's summary

Future-proof your career and maximise your competitive advantage by learning the skill necessary to stay relevant, reinvent yourself and adapt to whatever the workplace throws your way in this essential guide.

Faced with tumultuous economic times and rapid technological change, staying ahead in your career depends on continual learning - a lifelong mastery of new ideas, subjects and skills. If you want to accomplish more and stand apart from everyone else, you need to become an ultralearner.

Scott Young incorporates the latest research about the most effective learning methods and the stories of other ultralearners like himself - among them Ben Franklin, Judit Polgar and Richard Feynman, as well as a host of others, such as little-known modern polymaths like Nigel Richards, who won the World Championship of French Scrabble - without knowing French.

Young documents the methods he and others have used and shows that, far from being an obscure skill limited to aggressive autodidacts, ultralearning is a powerful tool anyone can use to improve their career, studies, and life. Ultralearning explores this fascinating subculture, shares the nine principles behind every successful ultralearning project, and offers insights into how you can organise and execute a plan to learn anything deeply and quickly, without teachers or budget-busting tuition costs.

Whether the goal is to be fluent in a language (or 10 languages), earn the equivalent of a college degree in a fraction of the time or master multiple skills to build a product or business from the ground up, the principles in Ultralearning will guide you to success.

©2019 Scott H. Young (P)2019 HarperCollins Publishers Limited

Critic reviews

"Ultralearning is like a superpower in our competitive economy. Read this book! It will change your life." (Cal Newport, author of Digital Minimalism and Deep Work)

"How do you master a difficult subject more quickly than by sitting through years of classes? Read Ultralearning for specific directions on structuring and absorbing complex topics in record time. This short book provides you with a step-by-step guide to becoming an ultra fast learner." (Robert Pozen, author of Extreme Productivity and Senior Lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management)

"Ultralearning is the best book on learning I’ve ever read. It’s a beautifully written, brilliantly researched and immediately useful masterpiece. If you are looking for the magic match to help light your learning, Ultralearning is it. If you want to learn anything, do yourself a favor and read this book. Now.” (Barbara Oakley, author of A Mind for Numbers and co-author and co-instructor of Learning How to Learn)

Really good book, laid out in a good way

This is a really good book, laid out in a good way. It has some overlap to other similar books such as Cal Newport's "So good that they can't ignore you" and Barbara Oakley's "A mind for numbers", but it takes a much more comprehensive approach to covering all the relevant aspects important in self-directed hyper-intensive learning, and so was very well worth the listen.

I like how it both outlines general principles (listing 9 principles common among many ultralearners), and how it also goes into a lot of concrete practical information on how proven ultralearners have actually succeeded.

I did consume this book as an audiobook, as I find I have easier to find spare time to use in listening mode than reading mode. This was an interesting experiment, and probably helped me finish the book much faster than otherwise. The slight drawback I noted was that it wasn't as easy to interrupt my listening to take notes, something I wish I had done. Thus, I might re-read it as a normal book for taking more detailed notes. Should be well spent time nonetheless.

Absolutely brilliant book

Found it immediately useful in my currently ongoing effort to learn the art of designing some specialized electronic equipment, as well as teaching my son the basics of electronics and programming.

The book provides many powerful insights useful for students, parents and pretty much anyone actually: how to decide if you need it, how to plan your study to avoid spreading yourself thin, how to maximize the pace, how to learn deeper and retain more of it, how to find the time, the motivation, you name it. I love this book!

Great

This book is very very great. I'll apply the strategies in my profetional Carrier.

Brilliant book for all things learning

Highly recommend book for anyone wanting to learn new anything in life.

Combine with Atomic Habits by James Clear for a winning combination of positive changes.

Great introduction

Lovely beginning

Anyone looking to start they journey on improving their learning process ,should read this book

Not for me

This book could be fully and adequately summarized as “learn by doing and keep at it.”
It holds no profound ideas ... I don’t know why I thought it would.

Now I of my top 3 books

Now I of my top 3 books.
And the audio rendering was beautiful, even at 2X speed.
I know I paid for this book but still, thank you!

Great resource for learning

Great resource with concrete examples on how to apply ultra learning. I can’t wait to get started on my own projects

Impressive!

This was an easy read.
It was engaging, practical and a decent length (9 main chapters @30 mins on average for the core material).

I'm a later bloomer, always read and learning new things but mostly through books.
I have aspirations to taken on some larger projects and this book just gave me the ultra - charge I needed.

I like the fact the author is a practitioner of Ultralearning and I was inspired by the numerous examples of people who went the extra mile to achieve their learning goals.

I will have to relisten to note the key points.

Thoroughly enjoyed it and thoroughly impressed.
If you are looking to learn anything, you will do well to pick this up first.
It's worth many times more than the cost of the book!

Poor advice from a charlatan

If I'd followed the advice in this book, I'd still be learning my second language (English) instead of my seventh.

The author doesn't seem to understand that languages are a lot more than a mere list of words. He also ignores the fact that the fastest way to learn is with a good course that exposes you to all aspects of the language in a structured way. There are plenty of good courses available at affordable prices, so why waste your time creating your own course, as he suggests over and over?

Also, the author hasn't grasped the importance of having a good teacher, tutor or mentor. Why does he have a grudge against formal education? Most of the best teachers I've had are university lecturers.

Like all bad teachers, the author focuses on the exceptions. People who obsessively dedicate their lives to a task are of little interest to most of us. There's a big difference between studying for four hours a day and studying for twelve.

Finally, if the author thinks that he can maintain his level in a language by revising for one hour a month, he lives in cloud-cuckoo-land.

Usual old nonsense and too long

I found this as dull as dishwater and way longer than necessary. Nothing that you haven't heard before from a narrator that comes across as excruciatingly smug and annoying. Like most of these things it could have been captured in 10 minutes. Mental note, don't buy another self help book.

Interesting and full of practical methodology

I found this book interesting and stimulating to hear about the various ultra learning experiments and examples. The actual methods used along with the reasons for those methods are described, making it a very useful guide if you want to try it yourself or apply methods from it to learning generally.
It doesn’t go into a lot of depth, and sometimes ends with some speculations rather than researching the reality, but is a great overview and introduction.

Must read for everyone

The sooner you read it the better. It chacges the way you learn and it impacts all future life

Interesting concept, average delivery

Not going to deny, Ultralearning is an interesting concept, but unfortunately there's nothing too special or groundbreaking about it. Here's the full book condensed into one sentence. PUT LOTS OF TIME AND HARD WORK INTO SOMETHING AND YOU WILL BECOME GOOD AT IT.

long read

long read, struggled to finish. but captured scope and passed his message. I think a summary version will do better for me.

well read with lots of good advice

Well read with lots of good advice and actionable takeaways. I'm looking forward to going through it again.

Great book and good to the last drop.

Great book and good to the last drop. Didn't fizzle out towards the end as most book often do. I'll followed Scott's writing for almost a decade, he's always been a huge influence and inspiration. highly recommended.

Don't read waste of time

He wanted to sound smarter, such a waste of 7hours, had he just dived into how he did it - this books should be of only 1 - chapters, instead this snob wanted to sound smarter, he's nothing but another scam cog in the machine of self help books of 21st century, I want to use "very unpleasant" words for this bogus writer.