Learning a language in three months? Or completing a four-year long MIT program in a year? These are possible if you are persistent and stick to certain principles. Ultralearning: Master Hard Skills, Outsmart the Competition, and Accelerate Your Career by Scott Young is a nice book that explains nine principles to ramp up your learning skills. The author demonstrates each principles with real-life examples, as well as scientific studies. Following are the main concepts behind each principle.

Principle 1: Metalearning

First understand what you need to learn by creating a learning map. Use a subject curriculum. Review and modify the default curriculum constantly as you learn more.

Find and talk to a subject matter expert, if possible.

Concepts, facts, procedures table. Concepts are topics you need to understand at a deep level. Facts are terms you need to memorise. Procedures are skills you need to practice.

Principle 2: Focus

Recognise when you’re procrastinating.

Force yourself to start working on a task to overcome the first unpleasantness.

Use the Pomodoro technique to book distraction-free time slots.

Write down hard concepts if your mind wonders off when reading.

Clear your mind. Deal with external emotional problems before sitting to study.

Principle 3: Directness

Learn how a subject can be applied to solve real-world problems. Thus learn a subject in a specific real-life context. Practice a language by speaking it. Learn programming by writing software. Improve your writing by penning essays.

Learn by doing. Produce something to learn how to produce that something.

Immerse yourself to the environment the subject is practiced the most. Join communities, move somewhere, etc.

Aim for results above your required level.

Principle 4: Drill

Decompose the skill you’re learning and identify components you’re weak at. Address the weak components directly. Then integrate them back into the whole skill.

Don’t trick yourself by practicing the components you’ve mastered already.

Copy the components you don’t want/need to drill and focus on the ones you need.

Principle 5: Retrieval

Practice free recall, i.e. writing down everything you remember on a paper after reading a piece of a book or attending a lecture.

Understand and remember the concepts rather than just memorising facts. Facts could be looked up quickly.

Prevent yourself from consulting the source. This creates knowledge stored in your head.

Principle 6: Feedback

Good feedbacks guide your learning. Bad ones evaluate you as an individual — you being lazy or smart.

The best feedbacks are corrective feedbacks, which show what you’re doing wrong and ways to fix it. These feedbacks are available only through coaches, mentors or teachers.

Don’t overreact to feedbacks emotionally.

Principle 7: Retention

Studying at shorter bursts over a longer period is better, than cramming.

Coding for 30 minutes per week is better than not coding at all.

Practice spaced repetition system (SRS).

Principle 8: Intuition

Don’t give up on hard problems easily. Push yourself for another ten minutes before giving up.

Walk through a problem solution step-by-step to understand how the result was derived. Prove concepts.

Give concrete examples to abstract concepts.

Feynman Technique: explain an idea as if you’re teaching someone who never heard about it. Or if it’s a problem explain why the solution makes sense to you. If you get stuck, go back to reviewing the sources.

Principle 9: Experimentation

As you become better at something, it’s often not enough to follow the examples of others; you need to experiment and find your own path.

When copying someone’s work, deconstruct it to understand why it works.

Do additional projects that use your newly-acquired skill.