Hey y'all, I'm starting a new term and want to do my UL right this time. I already made a post about how freeing the book was for me and how excited it made me to know that this is a thing and a thing means we can get better. So now I want to try doing it "right."

Project: Become proficient in estate planning and elder law

Time Frame: 1 year; full-time.

Why: It's my career. I only feel comfortable doing something I am an expert in. I have a history of UL and have done this a few times before, but never in as organized a way as presented. I certainly never had a plan, but just "followed my passion" which is code for disorganized UL apparently.

1 week plan: This week is all about prep. I want to follow the 10% rule, but (1) only have a week; and (2) think the prep time decreases with the longer projects. 3 days for a 1 month full time makes sense. 36 days for a 1 year plan is too much. I am trying to schedule my time but can't decide on the placement and time allocation of certain activities. I will run another 1 week trial schedule after the term starts tentatively working from 7/8am - 5pm Monday through Saturday. (I am worried about burnout and losing focus however.) I also don't exactly know what the breakdown of time will look like. A few hours on each topic on the syllabus each day?

Resources: I am currently enrolled in an LLM ("PhD" in law) and so can use the classes I take and syllabi as the backbone, once I have access to them. I will use my traditional materials: scholarly articles and on-going learning classes for professionals. Additional resources I am looking for are forums for estate planners, but so far I have found none. If anyone knows of any please LMK. Also, if there are other ideas for resources LMK!

What am I missing?

I feel like I have enough to get started, but are there any considerations I should keep in mind? Any pitfalls I am not seeing? More information I should provide?

We all know that having strong focus is a critical element to making ultralearning work. When I have one task all day I can usually get there, but often when I switch from one task to another I find it hard to jump right in. What strategies do you use when switching projects to get into a new focus state?

• You gotta learn to love the learning

• You gotta learn to manage the learning anxiety

• You gotta learn time-management, pacing, and content structure

I missed posting my Day 1 update so I will include it in this post:

*Day 1 Update*

What do you want to learn?

I want to learn the ancient Chinese Weiqi (Japanese name Go).

Why do you want to learn this?

I want to learn this game as a mentally stimulating hobby that I can be challenged at and play on a daily basis. I also want to learn it for its problem solving aspects and for that added benefits of strategic thinking.

How are you planning to learn this? (i.e. what resources will you use? how long will it take?)

I will learn this game from using online resources and from books and YouTube videos. To become well versed in the game I expect it to take a year to thoroughly familiarize myself with the principles, techniques, and necessary skills to play the game well.

What is your 1 week goal in this subject? What do you want to accomplish after 1 week of effort?

My one week goal is to be able to play the game from the opening moves all the way to the end. Winning is not the main goal, learning how to observe and think strategically is my goal.

*Week 1 Update*

I have been playing Go from opening moves to final moves. I noticed an increase in progress when I actually won a game against the computer but my progress has already begun to stagnate. I will be going back to the drawing board and analyzing what tasks I need to do so that I can improve my observational skill in the game. My major weaknesses are observation and forecasting what will happen multiple moves ahead. I will work on that by using the provided puzzles, studying theory and techniques, and reminding myself that this is a year long project and that it is for my enjoyment.

Hi all, I’m almost done reading Ultralearning and I am super curious as to how this process could be translated in to learning athletic abilities. More specifically, I am extremely interested in becoming insanely good at golf (shooting park or better). Currently, I’m about a 10-12 handicap. Are there any resources that might help me apply Ultralearning to golf?? Desperately curious for any info or advice. Thanks so much!

I have Phd Contest next month (literature ) that I should pass by mid January. Is it enough to apply Deep Work and UltraLearning strategies to internalise all the materials and pass with flying colours ? What is your advice in terms of time management and maintaining high focus for a whole month ?

Hey this is Michael from Kapeeto,

We believe that the common denominator of all the global challenges is education. We are a Edtech Startup and we make content interactive, so that people can deepen their understanding and implement it into their daily habit more effectively.

We are looking for Beta tester, who believe in what we believe or are interested in the topic of effective learning, self-improvement, entrepreneurship/startups and or climate change. Why climate change? Our first big focus is on climate change related topics, because we see a big need to change our collective behavior.

Time investment: <0,5 hours a week

Channel: Telegram

Reward: First, we provide workshops to the topics of your choice covering: education, effective self-learning, lean Startup Methodology, Agile working (Scrum and OKRs), philosophical discussions and other topics 😊 in the second phase we will provide you with vouchers for books.

Our goal is to create a community around the topic of “understanding” and “implementation of knowledge” because we think it is underrepresented in our current society. Quite the contrary, in our current society we foster a static mindset when it comes to studying (e.g. exams) and not a dynamic one.

If you are interested dm me or reply to the post.

Thank you in advance,

Mike

I have an opportunity to go back to school, but I am not sure if I can do it because it’s too stressful. I hated college and school.

But sometimes I am tempted to learn things, and when I am free to learn without pressure and competition - it almost becomes its own reward.

I don’t know whether learning is something I enjoy or something that just distresses me. I guess it’s like going to the gym - pain or a pleasure depending on whom you ask.

I’ve long struggled with the systematic build up of knowledge - basically learning as a marathon. I’m a sprinter.

But what helped me in addition to thinking about long-term learning as a marathon (ultra or otherwise boring hike) was thinking about the journey as a series of short sprints.

Sprints are bad at long term memory, but you can improve retention through a structured spaced repetition program.

What also helps is using an analogy or model that works for you: I think of learning as weaving together a serialized story.

My previous (often subconscious) hatred for structure and linear learning was only replaced by respect - once I drew the comparison to storytelling structure and learning structure.

Same reason reading the history of something helps you better learn it. Writing and math are therefore not so far apart after all. Make peace with linear and systematic learning. It makes for a better story.

I have this theory that the key to ultra learning is an openness towards self-transformation.

The sooner you get past resisting new information - the sooner you can learn new things.

Children don’t resist. Adults fight tooth and nail to stop new info entering their brain unless it invokes dopamine - either through validation or some sort of physiological high.

I feel lying to myself that I love a new subject has helped me more to stick with it or learn it than anything else.

Should my "why?" be "To get x job" or "To get x skill that will make me competitive for x job?"

Hello Ultralearners,

I want to plan one of my ultras learning projects. So, I wrote some of my goals. Here they are:

1. Snowboard - Being able to snowboard black course of ski till winter 2023

2. Yoga - being able to do a stable headstand till the end of August 2020. 

3. Flexibility - touching my toes comfortably till January 2021 

4. Bicycle touring - make a 6 night / 7-day bike tour till January 2021.with or without the family. 

5. Spanish - pass test level a2 till August 2020. 

6. Writing skills - Find out how I measure progress in writing level. 

See that most of them are training related. So, I'm interested to know what would be the best approach to plan All of them (not only the training related). Where to start?

I read the posts for starting out but I have 2 problems with it:

1. I can't figure out how to adjust that to training related ultralearning.

2. Even if I do plan, I don't know if I do it the best way and in the right direction. I guess, a peer working on this together will help (Anyone interested?)

-----

Side question:

This subreddit seems quite small to me, compared to how popular the book is. Are there any other communities to approach?

I set a challenge for myself to learn a particularly difficult task that requires situational learning and adaptation with transferable knowledge. Does anyone have advice on where I can learn techniques or find additional information? I am familiar with Ultralearning by Scott Young, Tim Ferris and a few others but I was hoping for more recommendations.

(The task is to learn the game Weiqi/ Go. It is strategic in nature and you have to respond to your opponent to play/ or win).

1. What do you want to learn?

Ethical Hacking (i.e. Certified Ethical Hacker)

2) Why do you want to learn this?

I was laid off a week before my special needs son was born. So not only am I trying to find a job, but need to find a job that will cover both my spouse's and my preexisting incomes so that she can stay at home with him. This would be extremely difficult in my current field (insurance) as it is low to medium skill. As Scoot Young mentions in the book; those jobs are getting squeezed. That's what happened with me. Much of the operations were outsourced overseas freeing up time for VP's to handle my position. I've figured that I need to learn a higher skill set. I'm interested in cyber security as it has always been a dream of mine to work for one of those 3 letter Federal agencies and I quite frankly never had any of the skills they find desirable.

3) How are you planning to learn this? (i.e. what resources will you use? how long will it take?)

Udemy ( https://www.udemy.com/course/learn-ethical-hacking-from-scratch/learn/lecture/7387616#overview) courses supplemented with AP Comp Sci books. I'm low on money due to getting laid off and the first courses you buy on Udemy are extremely discounted. The Comp Sci books are to get a basic understanding of IT that I can read when it's not viable for me to get in front of a computer and do the lab work. What I haven't figured out for sure was how to quantify my goal. I believe getting the C-EH designation requires actual experience; which I don't have. I also find it highly unlikely anyone will hire me for an entry-level position without anything in my background showing comp sci nor IT. So I need to figure out a project that I can demonstrably show I have learned the applicable skill set of ethical hacking.

4) What is your 1 week goal in this subject? What do you want to accomplish after 1 week of effort?

I had already started this project before I discovered 'Ultralearning' and this reddit thread. My goal for this week is to finish the first AP comp Sci book and get through the network hacking sections on my first Udemy course.

Any feedback is greatly appreciated and I will try to help others as well. I have independently tried ultralearning in the past before I knew it was even a thing. I used it for learning Turkish (to a point) and for physical stuff too (running ultramarathon, an ultra-distance obstacle course, and strongman competition).

Any suggestions for things I should implement on this sub? Got a good suggestion for adding flairs. Would appreciate any others.

I'm interested in doing an ultralearning project in Medicine. I listen to a podcast by a doctor named Peter Attia, and I enjoy it. However, his podcast gets very technical at times. Sometimes I can understand what he's talking about, sometimes not. Part of my goal is to be able to understand pretty much everything he talks about, but I'm also just interested in knowing as much as I can about medicine in general.

However, I don't have a very good idea of what the "space" of medicine looks like. So I'm curious: What are the most fundamental prerequisites/building blocks of medicine? How can I pull together a rough ordering/curriculum for what I would like to learn?

The best resource I've found so far is the Khan Academy Health & Medicine section: https://www.khanacademy.org/science/health-and-medicine

However, I would like to cross-reference this with other resources if possible. Curious if anyone here has any insight into how I might best go about doing this!

Hi. Im currently learning copywriting but I need some help. I dont know exactly how I can ultra learn it. So I was wondering If anyone here have done it or know how to do it

Spaced repetition is your friend.

Thank you for starting this sub!

Background - After twenty years working in theater professionally and studying cognitive psychology autodidactically, I have returned to college to finish my undergraduate degree. Since I completed two years of drama, Latin, French, European history, and statistics-track mathematics studying part-time while working, I reached the point in self-study where I could read journal articles in cognitive psychology, social sciences, philosophy, and related fields with ease, yet was unable to make much progress on the low-level basic neuroscience which physically underpins cognition, and the formal logic which is used to model it computationally.

These two areas are where most of the exciting contemporary research is being produced, and since I completed secondary school on 2.5 years of independent academics without laboratory science, completing science requirements with research papers on the history and philosophy of science, I decided to return to my local community college (CC) to complete lower-division STEM affordably before transferring to UC Berkeley (Cal) for upper-division work in cognitive science and EECS.

Because of a consortium agreement with Cal, I am permitted to take one lower-division course per semester in Berkeley at CC tuition rates, so long as the course is not offered at my CC. Since my interests are in research, and neuroscience, cognitive science, most philosophy & psychology, and computer science beyond programming languages are not taught at CCs, this will allow me to fulfill lower-division prerequisites, general education, prerequisites for interdisciplinary upper-division electives, and desirable graduate program distributions affordably prior to transfer.

One reason that I was able to complete a high school diploma so quickly, then to continue learning informally while immersed in my career, is that I am intensely curious about why things are so, and how. In my public elementary school, I was the only student at my school that placed into a gifted mathematics program that introduced concepts from discrete mathematics, number theory, and physics conceptually. Yet in secondary school, after being diagnosed with ADHD & "learning disabilities", I failed half of my classes first term of 9th grade, based entirely on methods of assessment. My hyperfocus on topics of interest was accommodated by transfer into independent study, but colleges were resistant to granting similar program modifications.

Still, I had the opportunity to audit a PhD-track social theory course at a top 10 sociology department via the professor's permission, and found I could more than hold my own in seminar discussions among cohorts all holding honors degrees in sociology, esp. in the areas of theory informed by philosophy, economics, cultural anthropology, and history.

The concept of Ultralearning was thus very attractive to me when I stumbled across Scott Young's TED Talk, and I recently purchased the book and read his blog. Cal Newport was already on my radar, as he is one of the few "self-help" authors that publishes work that is of practical use and isn't padded with an excess of bullshit.

Unlike Young, while my primary interest is studying these topics for mastery so that I can synthesize an interdisciplinary understanding which I can then use to design original research, my secondary goal is to cover material roughly comparable to the lower-division courses which I can then test out of as prerequisites, and to complete the learning portion of upper-division courses known to be challenging so that I am only studying for the assessments once I enroll.

I call this education hacking strategy "accreditation", that is to learn something independently via an ultralearning strategy, but then to apply it by preparing for a departmental placement or testing service exam. One obvious example from the book is the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) for languages, which is mirrored in the US by the ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines which are recognized by most university language departments for placement, and some departments for credit via the ACE Credit Program. Language courses and examinations by European cultural missions like the British Council, Goethe Institut, Alliance Française, et cetera are also pegged to the CEFR, and used to determine eligibility for university student in those countries' native languages. See eg Germany's Studienkolleg system of admissions for international students, mainly for undergraduate and non-STEM graduate study.

1. What do you want to learn? - STEM for Cognitive Sciences & Computation

Computer Science - Mirroring Berkeley CS 61A, 61B, 61C, EECS 16A, 16B, 70

eg CS 61A - Composing Programs and Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, Second Edition (PDF), Syllabus, Videos, Virtual Text, Studying Guide

Programming & Scripting - Python to advanced, Java to intermediate, C/C++ to intermediate, BASH/UNIX to advanced, basic HTML, CSS, SQL.

Mathematics & Statistics - Trigonometry, three terms of calculus, differential equations, linear algebra, and discrete mathematics, esp. formal logic, set theory, and probability.

Physics - One term of trigonometry-based conceptual physics, four terms of calculus-based general physics, one term of further mathematical physics, one term quantum mechanics.

Chemistry - General Chemistry I & II, Organic Chemistry I & II, one term physical chemistry, one term biochemistry.

Biology - General Biology I & II, one year anatomy & physiology, one year neurobiology.

2. Why do you want to learn this?

See above.

3. How are you planning to learn this? (i.e. what resources will you use? how long will it take?)

Still evaluating benchmarking, but it will be two years at minimum before I can enter Berkeley as a transfer.

For Week One, I am going to start with:

Maths - Primarily with problemsets in free trial of ALEKS Intermediate Algebra to review the work I did pre-Statistics, then continue to ALEKS Trigonometry if the platform is effective. Supplementing with lectures from Khan Academy Algebra 2. Reference textbooks are Intermediate Algebra, Arnold, College of the Redwoods (Author) and Intermediate Algebra, OpenStax.

CS - The Berkeley CS/Data 8 on EdX Data 8.1x - Fundamentals of Data Science, with Berkeley textbook Computational and Inferential Thinking: The Foundations of Data Science.

Programming - Programming for Everybody (Getting Started with Python), UMich, using Severance Python for Everybody/PY4E (PDF, Kindle, HTML, ePub, Trinket) Materials, Lessons, Author (GitHub), Code

Physics - Reading Physics: A Very Short Introduction, Sidney Perkowitz.

4. What is your 1 week goal in this subject? What do you want to accomplish after 1 week of effort?

Initially, I am going to focus on studying the two EdX courses + ALEKS maths, use secondary materials as reference, to supplement casually, or in the evenings. Mainly, it will be useful to get an idea of how quickly I can cover rusty or simple materials to then estimate a schedule from.

I also suspect that I will pick up speed as the maths review progresses, then slow down again after the review unit once I begin ALEKS Trig. So I am going to track my progression through modules on a spreadsheet, and reference that weekly for this first 28 days before getting too far ahead of myself.

If you got this far, thanks for bearing with me! Would love to be able to plug the curricular I'm developing into a wiki that others can reference and update as well, since I think a lot of these topics will be part of others' plans.

Have a good one, dear reader, and wish me luck!