Ultralearning: Master Hard Skills, Outsmart the Competition, and Accelerate Your Career - by Scott Young

Date read: 2019-09-14
How strongly I recommend it: 10/10
(See my list of 150+ books, for more.)

Go to the Amazon page for details and reviews.

The ultimate step-by-step guide to learn anything. A great book for anyone with a learning mindset who wants to see results quickly. Lessons learned from people that learned a language in 3 months or completed an MIT Computer Science MBA in 9 months. Even if you're not able to dedicate 100% of your time on learning something new, the tips and tactics outlined in this book will help anyone who is trying to develop themselves.

My Notes

Directness is the practice of learning by directly doing the thing you want to learn. Basically, it's improvement through active practice rather than through passive learning. The phrases learning something new and practicing something new may seem similar, but these two methods can produce profoundly different results. Passive learning creates knowledge. Active practice creates skill.

Ultralearning is defined as a strategy for acquiring skills and knowledge that is both self-directed and intense.

Ultralearning is a strategy. A strategy is not the only solution to a given problem, but it may be a good one. Strategies also tend to be well suited for certain situations and not others, so using them is a choice, not a commandment.

Ultralearning is self-directed. It's about how you make decisions about what to learn and why. It's possible to be a completely self-directed learner and still decide that attending a particular school is the best way to learn something. Similarly, you could "teach yourself" something on your own by mindlessly following the steps outlined in a textbook. Self-direction is about who is in the driver's seat for the project, not about where it takes place.

Ultralearning is intense. All of the ultralearners I met took unusual steps to maximize their effectiveness in learning.

Your deepest moments of happiness don't come from doing easy things; they come from realizing your potential and overcoming your own limiting beliefs about yourself. Ultralearning offers a path to master those things that will bring you deep satisfaction and self-confidence.

The best ultralearners are those who blend the practical reasons for learning a skill with an inspiration that comes from something that excites them.

When it comes to pursuing your own ultralearning projects, the core of the ultralearning strategy is intensity and a willingness to prioritize effectiveness.

PRINCIPLE #1 - METALEARNING
Metalearning means learning about learning.

I find it useful to break down metalearning research that you do for a specific project into three questions: "Why?","What?", and "How?"

Answering "Why?"

Instrumental learning projects are those you're learning with the purpose of achieving a different, nonlearning result.

She wasn't learning because of her deep love of statistics and data visualization but because she believed that doing so would benefit her career.

Intrinsic projects are those that you're pursuing for their own sake. For example, if you've always wanted to speak French, even though you're not sure how you'll use it yet, that's an intrinsic project.

If you're pursuing a project for mostly instrumental reasons, it's often a good idea to do an additional step of research: determining whether learning the skill or topic in question will actually help you achieve your goal.

The main way you can do research of this kind is to talk to people who have already achieved what you want to achieve.

Answering "What?"

A good way to do this is to write down on a sheet of paper three columns with the headings "Concepts," "Facts," and "Procedures."

Concepts are ideas that you need to understand in flexible ways in order for them to be useful. If something needs to be understood, not just memorized, I put it into this column instead of the second column for facts.

Facts - In the second column, write down anything that needs to be memorized.

Procedures - In the third column, write down anything that needs to be practiced.

Once you've finished your brainstorm, underline the concepts, facts, and procedures that are going to be most challenging and start you searching for methods and resources to overcome those difficulties.

It requires a lot of memorization, so you may invest in a system such as spaced-repetition software.

You might look at some of the particular features of the concepts, facts, and procedures you're trying to learn to find methods to master them more effectively.

Answering "How?"

Benchmarking - The way to start any learning project is by finding the common ways in which people learn the skill or subject.

The way to start any learning project is by finding the common ways in which people learn the skill or subject. This can help you design a default strategy as a starting point.

This could be the syllabus from a single class or, as in the case of my MIT Challenge, the course list for an entire degree.

An hour spent searching online for almost any skill should turn up courses, articles, and recommendations for how to learn it.

The Emphasize/Exclude Method

Once you've found a default curriculum, you can consider making modifications to it.

Finding areas of study that align with the goals you identified in the first part of your research.

If you're learning programming solely to make your own app, I'd focus on the inner workings of app development more than theories of computation. The second part of the Emphasize/Exclude Method is to omit or delay elements of your benchmarked curriculum that don't align with your goals. For example, one common recommendation for learning Mandarin Chinese, advocated by people such as the renowned linguist and Sinologist Victor Mair, is to focus on learning to speak before you try to read characters.

Omit or delay elements of your benchmarked curriculum that don't align with your goals.

A good rule of thumb is that you should invest approximately 10 percent of your total expected learning time into research prior to starting.

Metalearning research isn't a onetime activity you do only before starting your project. You should continue to do research as you learn more.

One way to do this is to spend a few hours doing more researchóinterviewing more experts, searching online for more resources, searching for new possible techniquesóand then spend a few hours doing more learning along your chosen path. After spending some time on each, do a quick assessment of the relative value of the two activities. If you feel as though the metalearning research contributed more than the hours spent on learning itself, you are likely at a point where more research is still beneficial. If you felt that the extra research wasn't too helpful, you're probably better off sticking to the plan you had before.

PRINCIPLE #2 - FOCUS
Recognizing that you're procrastinating is the first step to avoiding it.

A good first crutch is to convince yourself to get over just the few minutes of maximal unpleasantness before you take a break. Telling yourself that you need to spend only five minutes on the task before you can stop and do something else is often enough to get you started.

The second problem people tend to encounter is an inability to sustain focus.

Skilled performers may enjoy and seek out flow experiences as part of their domain-related activities, but such experiences would not occur during deliberate practice.

Fifty minutes to an hour is a good length of time for many learning tasks.

If your schedule permits only more concentrated chunks of time, say once per week for several hours, you may want to take several minutes as a break at the end of each hour and split your time over different aspects of the subject you want to learn.

Be aware of what environment you work best in, and test it.

Multitasking may feel like fun, but it's unsuitable for ultralearning, which requires concentrating your full mind on the task at hand.

Whenever you have a choice between using different tools for learning, you may want to consider which is easier to focus on when making that decision.

If I have difficult reading to do, I will often make an effort to jot down notes that reexplain hard concepts for me. I do this mostly because, while I'm writing, I'm less likely to enter into the state of reading hypnosis where I'm pantomiming the act of reading while my mind is actually elsewhere.

Not working at all is unlikely to lead to creative genius, but taking a break may help breathe fresh perspective into a hard problem.

Complex tasks may benefit from lower arousal, so working in a quiet room at home might be the right idea for math problems. Simpler tasks might benefit from a noisier environment, say working at a coffee shop.

My advice is this: recognize where you are, and start small. If you're the kind of person who can't sit still for a minute, try sitting still for half a minute. Half a minute soon becomes one minute, then two. Over time, the frustrations you feel learning a particular subject may become transmuted into genuine interest.

PRINCIPLE #3 - DIRECTNESS
Directness is the idea of learning being tied closely to the situation or context you want to use it in.

In Jaiswal's case, when he wanted to get enough architectural skill that firms would hire him, he opted to build a portfolio using the software those firms used and design in the style those firms practiced.

We want to speak a language but try to learn mostly by playing on fun apps, rather than conversing with actual people. We want to work on collaborative, professional programs but mostly code scripts in isolation. We want to become great speakers, so we buy a book on communication, rather than practice presenting. In all these cases the problem is the same: directly learning the thing we want feels too uncomfortable, boring, or frustrating, so we settle for some book, lecture, or app, hoping it will eventually make us better at the real thing.

Though first covering the material is often essential to begin doing practice, the principle of directness asserts that it's actually while doing the thing you want to get good at when much of learning takes place.

The easiest way to learn directly is to simply spend a lot of time doing the thing you want to become good at. If you want to learn a language, speak it.. If you want to master making video games, then make them.

Transfer: Education's Dirty Secret - We'll be able to use something we study in one situation and apply it to a new situation.

Whenever you use an analogy, saying something is like something else, you're transferring knowledge. If you know how to ice skate and later learn to Rollerblade, you're transferring skills.

By learning in a real context, one also learns many of the hidden details and skills that are far more likely to transfer to a new real-life situation than from the artificial environment of a classroom. When we learn new things, therefore, we should always strive to tie them directly to the contexts we want to use them in.

Whenever possible, if you can spend a good portion of your learning time just doing the thing you want to get better at, the problem of directness will likely go away. If this isn't possible, you may need to create an artificial project or environment to test your skills.

That's why his goal to make a minicourse explaining the basics of machine learning fit so well. His learning was directly connected with where he wanted to apply the skill: communicating it to others.

Many ultralearners opt for projects rather than classes to learn the skills they need.

Immersion is the process of surrounding yourself with the target environment in which the skill is practiced. Learning a language is the canonical example of where immersion works.

Joining communities of people who are actively engaged in learning can have a similar impact, since it encourages constant exposure to new ideas and challenges. For example, novice programmers might join open-source projects to expose themselves to new coding challenges.

The overkill approach is to put yourself into an environment where the demands are going to be extremely high, so you're unlikely to miss any important lessons or feedback.

PRINCIPLE #4 - DRILL
This is the strategy behind doing drills. By identifying a rate-determining step in your learning reaction, you can isolate it and work on it specifically. Since it governs the overall competence you have with that skill, by improving at it you will improve faster than if you try to practice every aspect of the skill at once. That was Franklin's insight that allowed him to rapidly improve his writing: by identifying components of the overall skill of writing, figuring out which mattered in his situation, and then coming up with clever ways to emphasize them in his practice, he could get better more quickly than if he had just spent a lot of time writing.

Direct-Then-Drill Approach:

Try to practice the skill directly. This means figuring out where and how the skill will be used and then trying to match that situation as close as is feasible when practicing. Practice a language by actually speaking it.

Analyze the direct skill and try to isolate components that are either rate-determining steps in your performance or subskills you find difficult to improve because there are too many other things going on for you to focus on them. From here you can develop drills and practice those components separately until you get better at them.

Go back to direct practice and integrate what you've learned.

The earlier you are in the learning process, the faster this cycle should be. Cycling between direct practice and drills, even within the same learning session, is a good idea when you're just starting out. Later, as you get better at what you are trying to do and a lot more effort is required to noticeably improve your overall performance, it's more acceptable to take longer detours into drills.

Which aspect of the skill, if you improved it, would cause the greatest improvement to your abilities overall for the least amount of effort?

The key is to experiment. Make a hypothesis about what is holding you back, attack it with some drills, using the Direct-Then-Drill Approach, and you can quickly get feedback about whether you're right:

Drill 1: Time Slicing - The easiest way to create a drill is to isolate a slice in time of a longer sequence of actions. Musicians often do this kind of training when they identify the hardest parts of a piece of music and practice each one until it's perfect before integrating it back into the context of the entire song or symphony. In the early phase of learning a new language, I often obsessively repeat a few key phrases, so they quickly get embedded into my long-term memory.

Drill 2: Cognitive Components - Find a way to drill only one component when, in practice, others would be applied at the same time. When learning Mandarin Chinese, I would do tone drills that involved pronouncing pairs of words with different tones and recording myself speaking. That allowed me to practice producing different tones quickly, without the distraction of needing to remember what the words meant or how to form grammatically correct sentences.

Drill 3: The Copycat - By copying the parts of the skill you don't want to drill (either from someone else or your past work), you can focus exclusively on the component you want to practice.

Drill 4: The Magnifying Glass Method - Spend more time on one component of the skill than you would otherwise. This may reduce your overall performance or increase your input time, but it will allow you to spend a much higher proportion of your time and cognitive resources on the subskill you want to master.

Drill 5: Prerequisite Chaining - Start with a skill that they don't have all the prerequisites for. Then, when they inevitably do poorly, they go back a step, learn one of the foundational topics, and repeat the exercise.

PRINCIPLE #5 - RETRIEVAL
Testing yourself; trying to retrieve information without looking at the textóclearly outperformed all other conditions.

Delaying the first test of a newly learned fact has some benefits over testing immediately. However, if you delay the test too long, the information may be forgotten entirely. The idea, therefore, is to find the right midpoint: far enough away to make whatever is retrieved remembered deeply, not so far away that you've forgotten everything.

If you're learning a language and need to recall a word, you'll practice it. If you never need a word, you won't memorize it. The advantage of this strategy is that it automatically leads you to learn the things with the highest frequency.

Being able to look things up is certainly an advantage, but without a certain amount of knowledge inside your head, it doesn't help you solve hard problems.

Below are some useful methods that can be used to apply retrieval to almost any subject.

Tactic 1: Flash Cards - The major drawback of flash cards is that they work really well for a specific type of retrievalówhen there's a pairing between a specific cue and a particular response. For some forms of knowledge, for example memorizing foreign-language vocabulary, this works perfectly. However, when the situation in which you need to remember the information is highly variable, this kind of practice can have drawbacks. Programmers can memorize syntax via flash cards, but concepts that need to be applied in real programs often don't fit the cue-response framework that flash cards demand.

Tactic 2: Free Recall - A simple tactic for applying retrieval is, after reading a section from a book or sitting through a lecture, to try to write down everything you can remember on a blank piece of paper.

Tactic 3: The Question-Book Method - Another strategy for taking notes is to rephrase what you've recorded as questions to be answered later. One rule I've found helpful for this is to restrict myself to one question per section of a text, thus forcing myself to acknowledge and rephrase the main point rather than zoom in on a detail that will be largely irrelevant later.

Tactic 4: Self-Generated Challenges - You may encounter a new technique and then write a note to demonstrate that technique in an actual example.

Tactic 5: Closed-Book Learning - By preventing yourself from consulting the source, the information becomes knowledge stored inside your head instead of inside a reference manual.

PRINCIPLE #6 - FEEDBACK
The ability to gain immediate feedback on one's performance is an essential ingredient in reaching expert levels of performance.

If feedback tells you what you're doing wrong or how to fix it, it can be a potent tool. But feedback often backfires when it is aimed at a person's ego. Praise, a common type of feedback that teachers often use (and students enjoy), is usually harmful to further learning.

Ultralearners need to be sensitive to what feedback is actually useful and tune out the rest.

Sometimes the best action is just to dive straight into the hardest environment, since even if the feedback is very negative initially, it can reduce your fears of getting started on a project and allow you to adjust later if it proves too harsh to be helpful.

Ultralearners acquire skills quickly because they seek aggressive feedback when others opt for practice that includes weaker forms of feedback or no feedback at all.

Outcome Feedback: Are You Doing It Wrong?

This tells you something about how well you're doing overall but offers no ideas as to what you're doing better or worse.

This kind of feedback can come in the form of a gradeópass/fail, A, B, or C.

The applause Tristan de Montebello received (or the crickets he heard) after a speech is an example of outcome feedback.

Outcome feedback can improve how you learn through a few different mechanisms. One is by providing you with a motivational benchmark against your goal.

It can show you the relative merits of different methods you're trying. When you are progressing rapidly, you can stick to those learning methods and approaches. When progress stalls, you can see what you might be able to change in your current approach.

Informational Feedback: What Are You Doing Wrong? This feedback tells you what you're doing wrong, but it doesn't necessarily tell you how to fix it.

Corrective Feedback: How Can You Fix What You're Doing Wrong?

The best kind of feedback to get is corrective feedback. This is the feedback that shows you not only what you're doing wrong but how to fix it.

This kind of feedback is often available only through a coach, mentor, or teacher.

Flash cards and other forms of active recall provide corrective feedback by showing you the answer to a question after you make your guess.

Concrete tactics you can apply to get better feedback:

Tactic 1: Noise Cancellation - Look for proxy signals. These don't exactly equal success, but they tend to eliminate some of the noisy data. For blog writing, one way to do so would be to use tracking code to figure out what percentage of people read your articles all the way to the end. This doesn't prove your writing is good, but it's a lot less noisy than raw traffic data.

Tactic 2: Hitting the Difficulty Sweet Spot - Ultralearners carefully adjust their environment so that they're not able to predict whether they'll succeed or fail. If they fail too often, they simplify the problem so they can start noticing when they're doing things right. If they fail too little, they'll make the task harder or their standards stricter so that they can distinguish the success of different approaches. Basically, you should try to avoid situations that always make you feel good (or bad) about your performance.

Tactic 3: Metafeedback - One important type of metafeedback is your learning rate. This gives you information about how fast you're learning, or at least how fast you're improving in one aspect of your skill.

If your learning rate is slowing to a trickle, that might mean you're hitting diminishing returns with your current approach and could benefit from different kinds of drills, difficulties, or environments.

A second way you can apply metafeedback is by comparing two different study methods to see which works better.

Tactic 4: High-Intensity, Rapid Feedback

PRINCIPLE #7 - RETENTION
If you care about long-term retention, don't cram.

Memory Mechanism 1 - Spacing: Repeat to Remember

Spreading learning sessions over more intervals over longer periods of time tends to cause somewhat lower performance in the short run (because there is a chance for forgetting between intervals) but much better performance in the long run.

If you have ten hours to learn something, therefore, it makes more sense to spend ten days studying one hour each than to spend ten hours studying in one burst. This has led many ultralearners to apply what are known as spaced-repetition systems (SRS) as a tool for trying to retain the most knowledge with the least effort.

Spacing does not require complex software, however. As Richards's story clearly demonstrates, simply printing lists of words, reading them over, and then rehearsing them mentally without having them in front of you is an incredibly powerful technique.
Memory Mechanism 2 - Proceduralization: Automatic Will Endure

Instead of learning a large volume of knowledge or skills evenly, you may emphasize a core set of information much more frequently, so that it becomes procedural and is stored far longer.

Being forced to speak a language constantly meant that a core set of phrases and patterns was repeated so often that neither of us will ever forget them.

Ensure that a certain amount of knowledge is completely proceduralized before practice concludes.

Spend extra effort to proceduralize some skills, which will serve as cues or access points for other knowledge.
Memory Mechanism 3 - Overlearning: Practice Beyond Perfect

There seem to be two main methods I've encountered for applying overlearning. The first is core practice, continually practicing and refining the core elements of a skill.

The second strategy is advanced practice, going one level above a certain set of skills so that core parts of the lower-level skills are overlearned as one applies them in a more difficult domain.
Memory Mechanism 4 - Mnemonics: A Picture Retains a Thousand Words

They tend to be hyperspecificóthat is, they are designed to remember very specific patterns of information. Second, they usually involve translating abstract or arbitrary information into vivid pictures or spatial maps.

One common, and useful, mnemonic is known as the keyword method. The method works by first taking a foreign-language word and converting it into something it sounds like in your native language. If I were doing this with French, for example, I might take the word chavirer (to capsize) and convert it into "shave an ear," to which it is close enough in sound for the latter to serve as an effective cue for recalling the original word.

Next I create a mental image that combines the sounds-like version of the foreign word and an image of its translation in a fantastical and vivid setting that is bizarre and hard to forget.

PRINCIPLE #8 - INTUITION
Rule 1: Don't Give Up on Hard Problems Easily - One way you can introduce this into your own efforts is to give yourself a "struggle timer" as you work on problems. When you feel like giving up and that you can't possibly figure out the solution to a difficult problem, try setting a timer for another ten minutes to push yourself a bit further.

Rule 2: Prove Things to Understand Them - What this approach indicates is that both men had a tendency to dig much deeper before they considered something to be "understood."

Here's a perfect thought experiment to help you understand the problem. Get out a piece of paper, and try, briefly, to sketch how a bicycle looks. It doesn't need to be a work of art; just try to place the seat, handles, tires, pedals, and bike chain in the right place. Can you do it?

Rule 3: Always Start with a Concrete Example - This technique also enables some feedback, because when it's not possible to imagine an appropriate example, that's evidence that you don't understand something well enough and would benefit from going back a few steps and learning the material better before continuing.

Rule 4: Don't Fool Yourself - The Dunning-Kruger effect occurs when someone with inadequate understanding of a subject nonetheless believes he or she possesses more knowledge about the subject than the people who actually do.

One way to avoid this problem of fooling yourself is simply to ask lots of questions. Explaining things clearly and asking "dumb" questions can keep you from fooling yourself into thinking you know something you don't.

The Feynman Technique - It can be used when you don't understand an idea at all or simply when you understand something a little but really want to turn it into a deep intuition.

Write down the concept or problem you want to understand at the top of a piece of paper. In the space below, explain the idea as if you had to teach it to someone else. If it's a concept, ask yourself how you would convey the idea to someone who has never heard of it before. If it's a problem, explain how to solve it andócruciallyówhy that solution procedure makes sense to you. When you get stuck, meaning your understanding fails to provide a clear answer, go back to your book, notes, teacher, or reference material to find the answer.

Instead of focusing on explaining every detail or going along with the source material, you should try to focus on generating illustrative examples, analogies, or visualizations that would make the idea comprehensible to someone who has learned far less than you have. Imagine that instead of trying to teach the idea, you are being paid to write a magazine article explaining the idea. What visual intuitions would you use to pin down the abstractions? Which examples would flesh out a general principle? How could you make something confusing feel obvious?

PRINCIPLE #9 - EXPERIMENTATION
Here are a few tactics that can help you integrate experimentation into your ultralearning projects:

Tactic 1: Copy, Then Create - In attempting to emulate or copy an example you appreciate, you must deconstruct it to understand why it works. This can often highlight things that the other person does exceptionally well that weren't obvious from the beginning.

Tactic 2: Compare Methods Side-by-Side - By applying two different approaches side by side, you can often quickly get information not only about what works best but about which methods are better suited to your personal style.

I applied this to learning French vocabulary. I wasn't sure how effective mnemonics would be so, for a month, I would find a list of fifty new words every day, put together from my regular reading or random encounters with the language, and for half I would simply look them over with their translations I got from the dictionary. With the other half, I made an effort to use a visual mnemonic to link the two meanings. Then I compared how many of the words I remembered from each list on a later test, with words picked randomly from each side. The result is something you would probably expect after reading the chapters on retrieval and retention: I remembered the words I used mnemonics for at almost twice the rate of those I didn't. That showed that even if creating the mnemonics took a bit more time, they were worth it.

Tactic 3: Introduce New Constraints - Give a designer unlimited freedom, and the solution is usually a mess. On the other hand, creating specific constraints in how you can proceed encourages you to explore options that are less familiar to you and sharpens your underlying skills. How can you add limitations to force yourself to develop new capacities?

Tactic 4: Find Your Superpower in the Hybrid of Unrelated Skills - Combine two skills that don't necessarily overlap to bring about a distinct advantage that those who specialize in only one of those skills do not have.

After I completed my MIT Challenge, I could apply the programming knowledge I had obtained to write scripts to automatically generate flash cards for learning Chinese.

Tactic 5: Explore the Extremes - Pushing out to an extreme in some aspect of the skill you're cultivating, even if you eventually decide to pull it back to something more moderate, is often a good exploration strategy. This allows you to search the space of possibilities more effectively, while also giving you a broader range of experience.

YOUR FIRST ULTRALEARNING PROJECT
Step 1: Do Your Research - Research is a bit like packing a suitcase for a long voyage. You may not bring the right items, or you may forget something and need to buy it on the road. However, thinking ahead and packing your bags correctly will prevent a lot of fumbling later.

Your ultralearning "packing" checklist should include, at a minimum:

What topic you're going to learn and its approximate scope. Suggest starting with rather a narrow scope, which can expand as you proceed. "Learning enough Mandarin Chinese to hold a fifteen-minute conversation on simple topics" is a lot more constrained than "Learn Chinese," which may include reading, writing, studying history, and more.

The primary resources you're going to use. This includes books, videos, classes, tutorials, guides, and even people who will serve as mentors, coaches, and peers.

A benchmark for how others have successfully learned this skill or subject. Almost any popular skill has online forums where those who have learned the skill previously can share their approaches.

Direct practice activities. Thinking about how you might use the skill can enable you to start finding opportunities to practice it as early as possible.

Backup materials and drills. Backup materials are often good if you recognize that a certain tool or set of materials might be useful but you don't want to be overwhelmed in the beginning.

Step 2: Schedule Your Time - Whatever time you can commit, decide on it in advance.

I recommend setting a consistent schedule that is the same every week, rather than trying to fit in learning when you can.

If you find it takes a long time to warm up, opt for longer spaces in your schedule. If you find you can get to work within a few minutes of starting, shorter chunks of time spread out will be helpful for long-term retention.

An intensive project that lasts a month has fewer potential interruptions from life or from your motivation changing and waning. If you have a big goal you want to accomplish that can't be done in a short time frame, I suggest breaking it up into multiple smaller ones of a few months each.

Finally, take all this information and put it into your calendar. Test your schedule for one week before you commit to it. This will give you firsthand knowledge of how difficult it will be and prevents overconfidence.

Step 3: Execute Your Plan

Step 4: Review Your Results - What went right? What went wrong? What should you do next time to avoid making those same mistakes?

Step 5: Choose to Maintain or Master What You've Learned

Option 1: Maintenance - I made an effort to continue practice after the trip finished, spending thirty minutes a week on each language in the first year and thirty minutes a month on each language in the year after that. Try to integrate the skill into your life.

Option 2: Relearning - You may have learned more than you actually need, so if some of that knowledge selectively decays due to disuse, it is automatically going to be the less important knowledge that you acquired.

Option 3: Mastery - The normal protocol for assigning a project is to find the best person for the job and give them the task. A learning-driven approach would suggest instead that people who are not yet capable of doing the task might be assigned to the project.

Contents:

My Notes