book created a skill-challenging project for myself. I’ll leave it to you, the
reader, to judge whether I was successful.
The metaproject of ultralearning to write a book about ultralearning also
illustrates some important ideas. For one, although I’ve made enormous
improvements in my writing ability and knowledge of cognitive science and
stories of famous learning exploits, there is still far more to learn. Digging
into the science, for instance, one can quickly develop a sense of vertigo
standing atop the mountain of papers, theories, ideas, and experiments, all
loosely connected to the topic of learning. Similarly, for every biography I
read, there were hundreds I could not. For every ultralearning story I
encountered, there were likely dozens more my searches didn’t reveal. It is a
profound error to claim that learning is about replacing ignorance with
understanding. Knowledge expands, but so does ignorance, as with a greater
understanding of a subject also comes a greater appreciation for all the
questions that remain unanswered.
In the face of this, one must simultaneously have confidence and deep
humility. Without the belief that progress in one’s own
knowledge and skill is
possible, one cannot undertake the project required to generate it. This kind
of confidence may be mistaken for arrogance by outsiders, as it can seem that
an effort to learn something quickly and intensely is somehow an assertion
that the subject is trivial or that, having learned something, one has learned
everything. Instead, this confidence must be paired with deep humility. In
every project I’ve undertaken, including this one, my thoughts upon
concluding it were not to think I had finished but to suddenly become aware
of how much further I could have gone. Before I started my MIT Challenge, I
imagined that covering an undergraduate degree’s worth of computer science
concepts would be plenty. After I had finished, I could see how each topic I
had learned could be multiplied into a doctorate’s worth of research or a
lifetime spent coding to fully understand it. My experience in learning
languages to a level where I could hold conversations made me realize how
many more words, expressions, nuances of culture, and difficult
communication situations were left to explore. Finishing a project, therefore,
isn’t usually accompanied by a sense of finishing learning but by the creation
of a feeling of possibility as one’s eyes are opened to all the things left to
learn.
It’s this aspect of learning that I find most interesting. Many pursuits in life
have a kind of saturation point, after which the longing for more of a thing
eventually diminishes as you get more of it. A hungry person can eat only so
much food. A lonely person can have only so much companionship.
Curiosity
doesn’t work this way. The more one learns, the greater the craving to learn
more. The better one gets, the more one recognizes how much better one
could become. If you finish reading this book and have been encouraged to
try your own project, this would be my greatest hope—not that you’d be
successful at your project but that your ending would be a beginning. That by
opening a small crack in all the possibly knowable things there are in the
world, you might peer through and find there is far, far more than you had
ever imagined.