LITMIR.BIZ

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again, with a new course, and I still had almost a year to go.

      As the calendar changed, so did my strategies. I switched from trying to do a single class in several days to spending a month doing three to four classes in parallel. I hoped that would spread the learning over a longer period of time and reduce some of the negative effects of cramming. As I made more progress, I also slowed down. My first few classes were done with aggressive haste so I could stay on schedule to meet my self-imposed deadline. After it seemed likely that I could finish, I was able to shift from studying sixty hours per week to studying thirty-five to forty. Finally, in September 2012, less than twelve months after I had begun, I finished the final class.

      Completing the project was eye-opening for me. For years, I had thought the only way to learn things deeply was to push through school. Finishing this project taught me not only that this assumption was false but that this alternate path could be more fun and exciting. In university, I had often felt stifled, trying to stay awake during boring lectures, grinding through busywork assignments, forcing myself to learn things I had no interest in just to get the grade. Because this project was my own vision and design, it rarely felt painful, even if it was often challenging. The subjects felt alive and exciting, rather than stale chores to be completed. For the first time ever, I felt I could learn anything I wanted to with the right plan and effort. The possibilities were endless, and my mind was already turning toward learning something new.

      Then I got a message from a friend: “You’re on the front page of Reddit, you know.” The internet had found my project, and it was generating quite a discussion. Some liked the idea but doubted its usefulness: “It’s sad that employers won’t really treat this in the same way as a degree, even if he has the same amount (or more) knowledge than a graduate does.” One user claiming to be the head of R&D for a software company disagreed: “This is the type of person I want. I really do not care if you have a degree or not.” The debate raged. Had I actually done it or not? Would I be able to get a job as a programmer after this? Why try to do this in a year? Was I crazy?

      The initial surge of attention led to other requests. An employee at Microsoft wanted to set me up for a job interview. A new startup asked me to join its team. A publishing house in China offered me a book deal to share some studying tips with beleaguered Chinese students. However, those weren’t the reasons I had done the project. I was already happy working as a writer online, which had supported me financially throughout my project and would continue to do so afterward. My goal for the project wasn’t to get a job but to see what was possible. After just a few months of finishing my first big project, ideas for new ones were already bubbling up inside my head.

      I thought of Benny Lewis, my first example in this strange world of intense self-education. Following his advice, I had eventually reached an intermediate level of French. It had been hard work, and I was proud that I had been able to push against my initial difficulty of being surrounded by a bubble of English speakers to learn enough French to get by. However, after finishing my MIT experience, I was injected with a new confidence I hadn’t had in France. What if I didn’t make the mistake I made last time? What if, instead of forming a group of English-speaking friends and struggling to pop out of that bubble once my French was good enough, I emulated Benny Lewis and dived straight into immersion from the very first day? How much better could I be, if as in my MIT Challenge, I held nothing back and optimized everything around learning a new language as intensely and effectively as possible?

      As luck would have it, around that time my roommate was planning on going back to grad school and wanted some time off to travel first. We’d both been saving, and if we pooled our resources and were frugal in how we planned our trip, we figured we might be able to do something exciting. I told him about my experiences in France, both of learning French and of secretly believing that much more was possible. I told him about the social bubble that had formed when I had arrived without speaking the language and how difficult it had been to break out of it later. What if, instead of just hoping you’d practice enough, you don’t give yourself an escape route? What if you commit to speaking only the language you’re trying to learn from the first moment you step off the plane? My friend was skeptical. He had seen me study MIT classes for a year from across our apartment. My sanity was still an open question, but he wasn’t as confident in his own ability. He wasn’t sure he could do it, although he was willing to give it a shot, as long as I didn’t have any expectations of him to succeed.

      That project, which my friend and I titled “The Year Without English,” was simple. We’d go to four countries, three months each. The plan in each country was straightforward: no speaking English, either with each other or with anyone we’d meet, from the first day. From there we’d see how much we could learn before our tourist visas ran out and we were pushed to a new destination.

      Our first stop was Valencia, Spain. We had just landed in the airport when we encountered our first obstacle. Two attractive British girls came up to us, asking for directions. We looked at each other and awkwardly sputtered out the little Spanish we knew, pretending we didn’t speak any English. They didn’t understand us and asked us again, now in an exasperated tone. We stumbled over some more Spanish and, believing we couldn’t speak English, they walked away in frustration. Already, it seemed, not speaking English was having unintended consequences. Despite that inauspicious beginning, our Spanish ability grew even faster than I had anticipated. After two months in Spain, we were interacting in Spanish beyond what I had achieved in an entire year of partial immersion in France. We would go to our tutor in the morning, study a little at home, and spend the rest of the day hanging out with friends, chatting at restaurants, and soaking up the Spanish sun. My friend, despite his earlier doubts, was also a convert to this new approach to learning things. Although he didn’t care to study grammar and vocabulary as aggressively as I did, by the end of our stay, he too was integrating seamlessly into life in Spain. The method worked far better than we had hoped, and we were now believers.

      We continued the trip, going to Brazil to learn Portuguese, China to learn Mandarin, and South Korea to learn Korean. Asia proved a far harder task than Spain or Brazil. In our preparation, we had assumed those languages would be only a little more difficult than the European ones, although it turned out that they were much harder. As a result, our no-English rule was starting to crack, although we still applied it as much as we could. Even if our Mandarin and Korean didn’t reach the same level of ability after a short stay, it was still enough to make friends, travel, and converse with people on a variety of topics. At the end of our year, we could confidently say we spoke four new languages.

      Having seen the same approach work for academic computer science and language-learning adventures, I was slowly becoming convinced that it could be applied to much more. I had enjoyed drawing as a kid, but like most people’s attempts, any faces I drew looked awkward and artificial. I had always admired people who could quickly sketch a likeness, whether it be street-side caricaturists to professional portrait painters. I wondered if the same approach to learning MIT classes and languages could also apply to art.

      I decided to spend a month improving my ability to draw faces. My main difficulty, I realized, was in placing the facial features properly. A common mistake when drawing faces, for instance, is putting the eyes too far up the head. Most people think they sit in the top two-thirds of the head. In truth, they’re more typically halfway between the top of the head and the chin. To overcome these and other biases, I did sketches based on pictures. Then I would take a photo of the sketch with my phone and overlay the original image on top of my drawing. Making the photo semitransparent allowed me to see immediately whether the head was too narrow or wide, the lips too low or too high or whether I had put the eyes in the right spot. I did this hundreds of times, employing the same rapid feedback strategies that had served me well with MIT classes. Applying this and other strategies, I was able to get a lot better at drawing portraits in a short period of time (see below).

      courtesy of the author

      UNCOVERING THE ULTRALEARNERS

      On

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