Principles of Ultra-learning, the thriving business of sleep and fancy a coffee-barista@work?
Last week I spent time learning about how to learn faster. This piece summarises briefly what I took away as techniques, along with a commentary on how the business of sleep is becoming big. Enjoy!
Learning new things and doing so quickly is a superpower that will gain even more prominence as the world around becomes more complex. But will the unconventional ways of learning — via schools and university — remain the only channels? Don’t think so, for self-learning will become key. And that brings up to the question: how to learn new things/fields by yourself and do so fast? While searching for the answer, I came across Scott Young’s book Ultralearning (I couldn’t find the physical copy in Europe so had to call for it from the US). Ultralearning breaks down the process of how we learn piece-by-piece and suggests improvements for each step. The critical element that I took away was the first step that Scott calls ‘Meta-learning’, which is essentially spending approximately 10% of the time just doing the research to understand what all sources are available to learn about the subject, and how to attack it in the most efficient way. That 10% investment upfront saves several hours later. A few other things that I learnt from the book:
While starting on a new topic, first answer the big ‘Why, What and How’ questions on that topic. Answering them helps build motivation and chalk out clear routes to how will you approach the topic and what success will look like.
Prioritise learning, even though for as little as 20 mins at a time. Do so by allocating time in the calendar accordingly, instead of waiting for the calendar to free up, or being ad-hoc in approach.
While there are several other principles that Scott lists in his book, the one that I found quite useful is that of ‘Directness’. Simply put, it means understanding upfront how the real world application of the subject that you are learning about would look like. For instance, if you are preparing for a test, then sample the questions that are usually asked (by reviewing past years’ papers) right in the beginning. This saves effort and makes the preparation more effective.
Overall, the book elaborates the nine principles of ultra-learning but the underlying theme is that of going intense on specific topics for a short period of time than being unstructured in approach and goals. I recommend the book for anyone who is keen to learn new topics but is searching for effective ways to do so.
The business of sleeping is becoming big. Ariana Huffington is creating awareness about it via her Thrive Global platform, and Matt Walker has written a fantastic, eye-popping book on the topic that went a long way in persuading me to prioritise eight hours of sleep (so much so that I decided to change my job to reduce commute time). What does this newly minted awareness about importance of sleep means for businesses? Well, we know Google was ahead of the game when they placed sleeping pods in their campuses. Now, the companies that operate within the domain of sleep accessories are preparing to cash-in on the peripherals that have suddenly become important. For instance, this piece on Casper (makers of sleep mattresses) came out last week and summarises how Casper aims to become the ‘Nike of sleep’ and is accordingly expanding into adjacent areas such as nighttime lighting. I was however positively taken by Casper’s effort to organise sleep workshops and educate its 500 employees on the importance of sleeping well and in full. Given the trends, no surprises if we see a new breed of start-ups mushrooming in this segment in the next couple of years.
Finally, this piece on how fancy coffee is becoming one of the few ways to attract and retain employees came out last week. This finding is not surprising, for office leasing space start-up WeWork’s value proposition is also centred around offering such perks. But the idea of having a dedicated barista to create speciality coffee sounds lavish and ludicrous at the same time.
A line that I came across last week and found interesting:
- Alexander slept before fighting Darius. He insisted on resting before engaging the enemy (from the book ‘The Silk Roads’)
