Ultralearning

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

By: Scott H. Young

Narrated by: Scott H. Young

Length: 7 hrs and 46 mins

Publisher's summary

Future-proof your career and maximize 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 that goes beyond the insights of popular works such as Extreme Productivity, Deep Work, Peak, and Make It Stick.

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 seven principles behind every successful ultralearning project, and offers insights into how you can organize 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 Young (P)2019 HarperAudio

Everybody should have access to this book!

On Planet Michelle, this will be compulsory reading in high school. And I’d push for a young readers edition to be written too. I’m frustrated at how slow we are to move away from traditional, arguably habitual, education methodologies.

The entire public education system needs to be flipped on it ass. Embracing ultra-learning methods would give the powers at be, to be less concerned about forcing kids 5-8 into the standardized teaching and testing model, and letting them self pace their play and learning. Understanding that catching up is not a problem later on when they’re ready.

My now 25-year-old daughter, missed approximately two years of school between approximately 9 and 12 years old. During which time, we traveled extensively around the globe. When we returned she had to be assessed before being placed back into school. Fair enough, she did test 18 months behind her peers. However, without any encouragement from us or any specific extra curriculum activities to catch her up she naturally caught up in less than six months. Seemingly to just assimilate the missed knowledge to do so.

I wish my son, who’s six years old and struggling with language and numbers (likely dyslexic) could focus on his other strengths instead, snd in the same breath, in combination with working out alternative ways in which to learn. (I suspect Montessori materials that can be physically picked up, examined and manipulated by students would greatly benefit the dyslexic.)

Anyway, fabulous book.

Great Learning and Fun Stories

Scott has plenty of stories to tell and does a decent job of connecting dots across topics. His principles are numerous but easy to remember- like Meta learning, directness, and feedback. oh, and drill. But there are many hypothetical and extensions of his own research and experience that he makes which exposes his limited experience in not just learning fast or deeply, but also broadly. His story is excellent, he is the real deal, but doesnt know how he differs and how great research is done - because his life appears to be isolated project after isolated project. So, while his content is good, it lacks some awareness - but you'll forgive him for that and his Canadian accent as he captivates with awesome anecdotes and some good concepts, facts, and procedures to boot (you'll know quickly what I'm referring to here after you dive in). Don't wait - this is a story and subject worth learning from.

Should Have Hired A Narrator

The content of this book is great. If you are looking into this book, then the odds are that the content inside is going to satisfy you. It's detailed, and has a lot of good information. It's also a lot of information that is directly usable in the normal world.

Some of the information is a little "hipster", however. There aren't a lot of "normal" people that are going to be able to take a year off to travel the world learning languages right out of college before they start their "real life". As such, some of the stories in this book are told from an extremely privileged frame of mind. This is definitely not the first, or last, book that has an author telling stories about how to do things while not even beginning to acknowledge that 90% of his readership have no way at all to take that same kind of path, so I am not docking from the score due to this.

What I AM docking the score for, is the terrible decision for him to narrate his own book. He could be the most unlikable narrator I've ever listened to. Everything about his reading of this book screams haughty, self-important and pompous. From his pronunciation of the word "process" (seriously, he uses that word repeatedly throughout the entire book, and the way he pronounces it is distracting), That is not the only pronunciation issue. He does the same thing to many different words. His cadence is weird, and he places emphasis on weird syllables in his phrases. All of those things combine to make him come off of as full of himself. It really does distract from the content of the book. I've listened to this book all the way through twice, and I'm on my third time through now. Again, the content is great. The reading is awful. He should have spent the extra money to pay a real narrator to do the job.

great guide to learning

I appreciate that Scott dives into the deep process of truly learning. mnemonics are great, but they have limited application in the real world. Scott's process is one that anyone with the right level of motivation can follow along and meet with success.

Amazing Learning Breakthrough

Gave me a new sense of how I can learn faster, more efficiently and remember those things along the way in order to keep my new skills alive.

This book does not disappoint

This book delves into what makes intense self directed learning projects achievable.

I’ve read a few great books on learning - make it stick, moon walking with Einstein and many books on language learning. This book can be counted among these titles and perhaps surpasses them in some respects as the book is exceptionally well organized.

This book takes the cake as it’s almost ZERO fluff. I took diligent notes as I listened through to the audio book on long walks. I struggled to keep up due to the pure gold being spun. My walks became drawn out to 2 hours to get in as much listening as possible before setting it down for the evening.

Everything is explained in a straight forward step by step process that draws on the habits of geniuses and extensive research on the process of learning by the author.

Read it. You’ll like it.

Excellent book

I have several new techniques that I’m going to try.
The book is well laid out and an enjoyable listen.

A Great Resource to Refresh your learning skills

An amazing audiobook bundled with eye-opening facts and techniques to improve your learning ability. This can be a life-changing book if the principles are used deliberately to get better at whatever you are working on.

Definitely learned a lot

Great detail on learning processes and how to apply them for yourself. Listened twice already.

A new way to learn

Useful info and good high-level view of the strategy Could have been helpful to provide sample ultra learning plan templates to help get started in applying.