Scott Young has recently been writing about a concept he calls ultralearning, a philosophy and collection of techniques for quickly gaining mastery of a subject. This week, I’m going to explore how we can use ultralearning techniques for competitive programming practice.

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Can you learn anything you want by reading a book? A blog post by Scott Young last week got me thinking about claims that some subjects are unteachable. Here are some examples:

Claim: Some knowledge and skills can only be learned using an apprenticeship approach.

• Scott contrasts two learning techniques. One is the standard school model that we’re all familiar with: a student reads textbooks, attends lectures, and turns in assignments. The other model has more in common with apprenticeship: a student finds an expert practitioner, observes what they do, and tries to replicate it.

Claim: You have to figure out your own path to success. You can’t learn the path from someone else.

• In his book Linchpin, Seth Godin writes: “Telling people leadership is important is one thing. Showing them step by step precisely how to be a leader is impossible.”

Claim: It’s not always possible to teach someone to be a top performer, despite the best efforts of teacher and student. Factors other than practice time explain why some people perform better than others.

• In her contribution to the deliberate practice debate, psychological scientist Brooke Macnamara published a meta-analysis arguing that practice doesn’t have a large impact on the performance differences between expert performers.

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In the Peak book, the authors describe the following learning challenge in a section called “Getting Past Plateaus”:

When you first start learning something new, it is normal to see rapid — or at least steady — improvement, and when that improvement stops, it is natural to believe you’ve hit some sort of implacable [immovable] limit. So you stop trying to move forward, and you settle down to life on that plateau. This is the major reason that people in every area stop improving.

The concept of the learning plateau is one way to describe how people approach learning, work, and self-improvement. With a new skill, there’s an initial period of excitement driven by how easy it is to make progress. Then a plateau arrives, and you have to decide whether to push through it or stick with your current skill level. And even if you push through it, you can look forward to another plateau where you’ll get to make the same decision again.

Skill Components

For most skills in life, there’s no need to push through plateau after plateau. It’s not worth the effort to become an expert in driving a car unless that’s your hobby or profession. But for the field that you specialize in, you probably do want to keep getting better. So what’s the secret to avoiding or conquering a learning plateau? The authors of Peak have something to say about that as well:

Any reasonably complex skill will involve a variety of components, some of which you will be better at than others. Thus, when you reach a point at which you are having difficulty getting better, it will be just one or two of the components of that skill, not all of them, that are holding you back.

According to this approach, the way to resist the plateau effect is to break down your target skill into its constituent parts, and be prepared to target those parts individually. In the book, the authors use typing speed as an example. Everyone who learns to type eventually reaches a speed plateau. Physical constraints mean you can’t keep increasing your typing speed forever. But you may plateau at a speed that is below your physical limits, or at least is slower than you want.

One idea for increasing your typing speed is just to push yourself to type faster whenever you get the chance. But according to the authors, there’s a more effective way. Rather than trying to type faster 100% of the time, try typing faster for just 15-20 minutes per day. During that time, document the mistakes you make. It’s likely that some letters or letter combinations will trip you up more than others. Once you identify them, you can more efficiently target those components, rather than trying to get better at the skill all at once.

Typing happens to be one component of the skill known as competitive programming. If your typing skills are slower than average, or if you’re competing at a high level in timed contests, working on your typing speed might be worthwhile. But for most competitive programming enthusiasts, working on other skills is more likely to produce results. What are those other skills?

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I love the idea of books. Years ago, I used to browse in bookstores. I bought paper copies of some of the books I looked at, and read some of the books I bought. Once Amazon came along, I clicked around their suggested items list for ideas. These days, I keep an Amazon wish list of Kindle books. When I’m reading online and someone recommends a book that looks interesting, I add it to the list. Often I can download it from my local public library. Sometimes I’ll buy a copy if a book is too popular to get from the library, or if I just decide that I want to have it around.

I find that always having an ebook on my phone is the best way to read more books. When I have some spare time, instead of clicking around the usual sites, I can read a few pages of a book. When I’m done with it, I download another one. Since the books are electronic, I don’t have books lying around taking up space and waiting to be read.

In some ways, it’s a better time to be a reader of books than it has ever been. But books still aren’t perfect. Here are a few complaints about (nonfiction) books.

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