Ultralearning. Scott H. Young

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ that may or may not end up covering the situations they actually need to deal with? Ultralearning, because it is directed by learners themselves, can fit into a wider variety of schedules and situations, targeting exactly what you need to learn without the waste.

      Ultimately, it doesn’t matter if ultralearning is a suitable replacement for higher education. In many professions, having a degree isn’t just nice, it’s legally required. Doctors, lawyers, and engineers all require formal credentials to even start doing the job. However, those same professionals don’t stop learning when they leave school, and so the ability to teach oneself new subjects and skills remains essential.

      TECHNOLOGY: NEW FRONTIERS IN LEARNING

      Technology exaggerates both the vices and the virtues of humanity. Our vices are made worse because now they are downloadable, portable, and socially transmissible. The ability to distract or delude yourself has never been greater, and as a result we are facing crises of both privacy and politics. Though those dangers are real, there is also opportunity created in their wake. For those who know how to use technology wisely, it is the easiest time in history to teach yourself something new. An amount of information vaster than was held by the Library of Alexandria is freely accessible to anyone with a device and an internet connection. Top universities such as Harvard, MIT, and Yale are publishing their best courses for free online. Forums and discussion platforms mean that you can learn in groups without ever leaving your home.

      Added to these new advantages is software that accelerates the act of learning itself. Consider learning a new language, such as Chinese. A half century ago, learners needed to consult cumbersome paper dictionaries, which made learning to read a nightmare. Today’s learner has spaced-repetition systems to memorize vocabulary, document readers that translate with the tap of a button, voluminous podcast libraries offering endless opportunities for practice, and translation apps that smooth the transition to immersion. This rapid change in technology means that many of the best ways of learning old subjects have yet to be invented or rigorously applied. The space of learning possibilities is immense, just waiting for ambitious autodidacts to come up with new ways to exploit it.

      Ultralearning does not require new technology, though. As I will discuss in the chapters to come, the practice has a long history, and many of the most famous minds could be described as having applied some version of it. However, technology offers an incredible opportunity for innovation. There are still many ways to learn things that we have yet to fully explore. Perhaps certain learning tasks could be made far easier or even obsolete, with the right technical innovation. Aggressive and efficiency-minded ultralearners will be the first to master them.

      ACCELERATE, TRANSITION, AND RESCUE YOUR CAREER WITH ULTRALEARNING

      The trends toward skill polarization in the economy, skyrocketing tuition, and new technology are all global. But what does ultralearning actually look like for an individual? I believe there are three main cases in which this strategy for quickly acquiring hard skills can apply: accelerating the career you have, transitioning to a new career, and cultivating a hidden advantage in a competitive world.

      To see how ultralearning can accelerate the career you already have, consider Colby Durant. After graduating from college, she started work at a web development firm but wanted to make faster progress. She took on an ultralearning project to learn copywriting. After taking the initiative and showing her boss what she could do, she was able to get a promotion. By choosing a valuable skill and focusing on quickly developing proficiency, you can accelerate your normal career progression.

      Learning is often the major obstacle to transitioning to the career you want to have. Vishal Maini, for instance, was comfortable in his marketing role in the tech world. But he dreamed of being more closely involved with artificial intelligence research. Unfortunately, that was a deep technical skill set that he hadn’t acquired. Through a careful six-month ultralearning project, however, he was able to develop strong enough skills that he could switch fields and get a job working in the field he wanted.

      Finally, an ultralearning project can augment the other skills and assets you’ve cultivated in your work. Diana Fehsenfeld worked as a librarian for years in her native New Zealand. Facing government cutbacks and rapid technologization of her field, she was worried that her professional experience might not be enough to keep up. As a result, she undertook two ultralearning projects, one to learn statistics and the programming language R and another on data visualization. Those skills were in demand in her industry, and adding them to her background as a librarian gave her the tools to go from bleak prospects to being indispensable.

      BEYOND BUSINESS: THE CALL TO ULTRALEARNING

      Ultralearning is a potent skill for dealing with a changing world. The ability to learn hard things quickly is going to become increasingly valuable, and thus it is worth developing to whatever extent you can, even if it requires some investment first.

      Professional success, however, was rarely the thing that motivated the ultralearners I met—including those who ended up making the most money from their new skills. Instead it was a compelling vision of what they wanted to do, a deep curiosity, or even the challenge itself that drove them forward. Eric Barone didn’t pursue his passion in solitude for five years to become a millionaire but because he wanted the satisfaction of creating something that perfectly matched his vision. Roger Craig didn’t want to go on Jeopardy! to win prize money but to push himself to compete on the show he had loved since he was a child. Benny Lewis didn’t learn languages to become a technical translator, or later a popular blogger, but because he loved traveling and interacting with the people he met along the way. The best ultra learners are those who blend the practical reasons for learning a skill with an inspiration that comes from something that excites them.

      There’s an added benefit to ultralearning that transcends even the skills one learns with it. Doing hard things, particularly things that involve learning something new, stretches your self-conception. It gives you confidence that you might be able to do things that you couldn’t do before. My feeling after my MIT Challenge wasn’t just a deepened interest in math and computer science but an expansion in possibility: If I could do this, what else could I do that I was hesitant to try before? Learning, at its core, is a broadening of horizons, of seeing things that were previously invisible and of recognizing capabilities within yourself that you didn’t know existed. I see no higher justification for pursuing the intense and devoted efforts of the ultralearners I’ve described than this expansion of what is possible. What could you learn if you took the right approach to make it successful? Who could you become?

      WHAT ABOUT TALENT? THE TERENCE TAO PROBLEM

      Terence Tao is smart. By age two, he had taught himself to read. At age seven, he was taking high school math classes. By seventeen, he had finished his master’s thesis. It was titled “Convolution Operators Generated by Right-Monogenic and Harmonic Kernels.” After that, he got a PhD from Princeton, won the coveted Fields Medal (called by some the “Nobel Prize for mathematics”), and is considered to be one of the best mathematical minds alive today. Though many mathematicians are extreme specialists—rare orchids adapted to thrive only on a particular branch of the mathematical tree—Tao is phenomenally diverse. He regularly collaborates with mathematicians and makes important contributions to distant fields. This virtuosity caused one colleague to liken his ability to “a leading English-language novelist suddenly producing the definitive Russian novel.”

      What’s more, there doesn’t seem to be an obvious explanation for his feats. He was precocious, certainly, but his success in mathematics didn’t come from aggressively overbearing parents pushing him to study. His childhood was filled playing with his two younger brothers, inventing games with the family’s Scrabble board and mah-jongg tiles, and drawing imaginary maps of fantasy terrain. Normal kid stuff. Nor does he seem to have a particularly innovative studying method. As noted in his profile in the New York Times, he coasted on his intelligence СКАЧАТЬ