Hi, I’m George and over the next 50 weeks I am going to share with you my findings on rapid skill acquisition. The rules are simple. Every day I’m going to share with you what I’ve learned and at the end of week do a full write-up on my progress in acquiring a particular skill.
Because my objective is to acquire skills as efficiently as possible, I’m going to spend the next 5 weeks studying the following books and sharing my findings.
-Ultralearning
-How To Become A Straight-A Student
-Peak
-Make It Stick
-The Science Of Rapid Skill Acquisition
After that my preliminary goals are to rapidly acquire skills in marketing, chess, language, piano, drawing, writing, guitar, gymnastics, and other diverse areas of interest. I’ve chosen these solely because they interest me.
The plan is to share a daily recap like the one you’ve just read and then notes on the skill I’m acquiring.
Notes
I’ve began reading Ultralearning by Scott Young and I love the book so far. If you don’t know he reached a level of fame awhile back for completing every MIT computer science undergrad final exam in less than a year even though he never attended MIT. I “listened” to the book a few years ago whilst playing video games and I wanted to go back and really dive deep into it. So far it’s been a goldmine.
The first lesson is that you have to learn by modeling experts. How did they acquire this skill? What do they do? What things do they seem to have in common? Pick a few idols or, if you’re into data, sample a large amount of high-performers and see what they consistently do.
The second lesson is focus. I’ve spent most of my life learning in a haphazard way. I watch YouTube essays, I have conversations with friends, I share my opinions, I get a lot of surface level knowledge about many things. But now I’d like to dive deep and the only way to do that is longer more intentional study sessions with an express goal. The express goal for this book is to be able to teach the principles of Ultralearning to such a degree that I can embody them.
The third is directness. You have to learn by doing and you have to have a bias towards action. Want to study chess? Play a lot of long games and do a lot of analysis. Study a lot of grandmasters. Don’t just watch YouTube videos on chess for entertainment (shoutout ChessBrah), take notes and apply the principles you’ve learned as soon as you can.
The fourth lesson is to drill yourself hard on the little details, the details you can turn into repeatable skills. If you can break a skill down into a lot of mini-skills with clear objectives, you can practice them over and over again. Art you might say has “no rules” but it would be helpful if you could draw a perfect line, square, circle, or triangle. If you want to write, write hundreds of headlines, introductory paragraphs, outlines. This coincides with directness or “having a bias towards action”.
Fifth, get feedback. You have to find ways to get valuable feedback on what you’re doing. This may mean doing something scary, like publishing something before it’s ready. This may mean asking people for advice. People can often tell you if something is bad, but not usually how to fix it.
The biggest lesson though is to do what’s scares you the most, which is almost always to start doing from Day 1. In this case I’m starting from Day 0. I’m going to dedicate 3 hours of time to my journey every day in 6 pomodoro sessions (25-minute studying, 5-minute break). I look forward to seeing you tomorrow.