Ultra-learning the principled methods to learn faster. P1. Metalearning
The new book by Scott Young, who is a blogger and trainer, teaches how to learn any new skill faster.
The 9 principles to become ultra-learner
Principle 1 Meta-learning : First draw a map
This first principles talks about creating an arena before learning any new skill. Not only a mere visualisation technique but knowing the three basic question Why? What? and How?. In short finding the purpose.
Lets look in the three questions in more details what answers shall we expect from each questions.
Answering Why?
Is your passion Instrumental or Intrinsic?
Instrumental is a skill which is required to earn your daily bread but intrinsic is something which is something hobby.
Answering What?
Once you answered the why, the next important question is to be answered in what? It means what tools set you need acquire that skill set.
The author has suggested to write down a three column with heading “Concepts”, “Facts”, “Procedures”. Concept is something which needs to be understood but not to be memorised, for example, the concepts of physics and maths. The Facts are something which needs to be memorised, for example vocabulary or grammatical structure of any language. The Procedures are something which needs to performed such as learning to drive a car. So make a list of “Concepts”, “Facts” and “Procedures” which are required to gain the skills that you wish.
Answering How?
It means how are you going to learn it? The two methods have been suggested by the author the first one is bench-marking and the second one is The emphasis/exclude method. Bench-marking technique is finding the most common way, this can be done by looking the school curriculum if that skill is related to academic, if it is non-academic then finding the people online who have acquired it. The emphasis/exclude method can be generalised as learning by doing method such as if you want to be computer programmer then actually building app rather more digging into theories.
How much planning you should do?
It has been suggested to devote around 5 to 10% of the total time for planning. Too much research in order to make perfect plan may lead to procrastination.
So this is the overview of the first principle of ultralearning that is metalearning. If you want to read more about this technique you can buy a book from amazon.
The blog post on next principle will be published in coming few days.
