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Ultralearning. Scott H. Young
Читать онлайн.Название Ultralearning
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780008305727
Автор произведения Scott H. Young
Издательство HarperCollins
His relentless drive pushed de Montebello into unusual places. He took improv classes to work on his spontaneous delivery. There he learned to trust whatever was in his head and deliver it without hesitation. That kept him from stammering over his words or fearing freezing up onstage. He talked to a friend who works as a Hollywood director to give feedback on his delivery. The director taught de Montebello to give his speech dozens of times in different styles—angry, monotone, screaming, even as a rap—then go back and see what was different from his normal voice. According to de Montebello, that helped break him of the “uncanny valley” that happened when his normal speaking delivery felt slightly unnatural.
Another friend with a background in theater gave him tips on stage presence. He took de Montebello through his speech and showed how each word and sentence indicated movement that could be translated to where he moved on the stage. Instead of standing constricted under the spotlight, de Montebello could now move gracefully and use his body to communicate his message on top of his words. He even gave his speech at a middle school, knowing that seventh graders would give the most ruthless feedback of all. After bombing terribly outside the comfort of Toastmasters, he learned to talk to his audience before going onstage: learn their language and emotions and connect with them. That way, applying all he had learned so far, he could change his speech on the fly, so it would be sure to connect with a new audience. Above all, Gendler pushed him relentlessly. “Make me care,” Gendler told him after listening to one of de Montebello’s speeches. “I understand why this is important to you, but the audience doesn’t care about you. You have to make me care.” Diverse advice and voluminous practice would soak those lessons in deeply, allowing de Montebello to quickly surpass his early awkwardness on the stage.
After a month, de Montebello won his area competition, beating out a competitor with two decades of experience in Toastmasters. He won his district and division competitions, too. Finally, less than seven months after he first tried his hand at public speaking, he was going to compete in the World Championships. “There are about thirty thousand people who compete every year,” he noted, adding “I’m pretty confident I’m the fastest competitor in history to make it this far, since if I had started ten days later, I couldn’t have competed.” He made it into the top ten.
FROM SEMIFINALIST TO CAREER CHANGE
“I knew this project was going to be big for me when I started it,” de Montebello told me months after his top ten placement in the international competition. “But it was literally life changing. I didn’t expect it to actually change my life.” Reaching the final competition in the World Championship had been quite a journey, but it was only afterward that he began to realize how much he had learned. “I was learning for this very narrow world of public speaking. It was only after that I realized the depth of all these skills I had worked so much on: storytelling, confidence, communicating.”
Friends who heard of de Montebello’s success started asking if he could help them work on their own speeches. He and Gendler saw an opportunity to help others improve their public speaking skills. The demand was intense. Authors who command five-figure speaking fees started to approach the duo to see if they could be taught to improve their public speaking the ultralearning way. Soon they had landed their first client, to the tune of twenty thousand dollars. Gendler and de Montebello weren’t mercenary; they wanted to focus only on speakers whose message they really believed in. But the fact that they had attracted such high-status clients certainly helped persuade them to make the switch into coaching public speaking full-time. Gendler and de Montebello even decided to name their consultancy UltraSpeaking, as a nod to the strategy that made it all possible.
De Montebello’s story ended up being much more dramatic than either of us had initially expected. His initial hope had been that he could practice intensely for a few months, deliver a great speech somewhere, and have it recorded—a nice memento and a new skill—but not that he would reach the status of an international competitor and eventually experience a complete career change. Of the other dozen or so people I spent some time coaching into ultralearning, none offered so dramatic an example. Some dropped out. Life got in the way (or perhaps revealed that they weren’t actually as committed as they had initially appeared to be). Others had respectable successes, making significant improvements in learning medicine, statistics, comic book drawing, military history, and yoga, even if they didn’t reach de Montebello’s degree of success.
What differentiated de Montebello wasn’t that he thought he could go from near-zero experience to the finalist for the World Championship in six months. Rather, it was his obsessive work ethic. His goal wasn’t to reach some predetermined extreme but to see how far he could go. Sometimes you’ll get lucky and embark on a path that will take you quite far. But even the failure mode of ultralearning is usually that you will learn a skill fairly well. Even those who didn’t have such dramatic results among the small group I spent time coaching, those who stuck with their project still ended up learning a new skill they cared about. You may not compete in world championships or completely switch careers, but as long as you stick with the process, you’re bound to learn something new. What de Montebello’s example encapsulated for me was not only that you can become an ultralearner but that such successes are far from being the inevitable consequences of having a particular kind of genius or talent. Had de Montebello focused on piano instead, his experience with giving speeches would probably have remained that one awkward example from his days in Paris.
PRINCIPLES OF BECOMING AN ULTRALEARNER
De Montebello’s story illustrates that it’s possible to decide to become an ultralearner. But ultralearning isn’t a cookie-cutter method. Every project is unique, and so are the methods needed to master it. The uniqueness of ultralearning projects is one of the elements that ties them all together. If ultralearning could be bottled or standardized, it would simply be an intense form of structured education. What makes ultralearning interesting is also what makes it hard to boil down into step-by-step formulas.
This is a difficult challenge, but I’m going to try to sidestep it by focusing on principles first. Principles allow you to solve problems, even those you may have never encountered before, in a way that a recipe or mechanical procedure cannot. If you really understand the principles of physics, for instance, you can solve a new problem simply by working backward. Principles make sense of the world, and even if they don’t always articulate exactly how you should solve a particular challenge, they can provide immense guidance. Ultralearning, in my view, works best when you see it through a simple set of principles, rather than trying to copy and paste exact steps or protocols.
The principles of ultralearning are going to be the focus of the second part of this book. In each chapter, I’ll introduce a new principle, plus some evidence to back it up both from ultralearning examples and from scientific research. Finally, I’ll share possible ways that the principle can manifest itself as specific tactics. These tactics are only a small sample. But they should provide a starting point for you to think creatively about your own ultralearning challenges.
There are nine universal principles that underlie the ultralearning projects described so far. Each embodies a particular aspect of successful learning, and I describe how ultralearners maximize the effectiveness of the principle through the choices they make in their projects. They are:
1 Metalearning: First Draw a Map. Start by learning how to learn the subject or skill you want to tackle. Discover how to do good research and how to draw on your past competencies to learn new skills more easily.
2 Focus: Sharpen Your Knife. Cultivate the ability to concentrate. Carve out chunks of time when you can focus on learning, and make it easy to just do it.
3 Directness: Go Straight Ahead. Learn by doing the thing you want to become good at. Don’t trade it off for other tasks, just because those are more convenient or comfortable.
4 Drill: Attack Your Weakest Point. Be ruthless in improving your weakest points. Break down complex skills into small parts; then master those parts and build them back together again.
5 Retrieval: Test to Learn. Testing isn’t simply a way of assessing knowledge but a way of creating