#092 - Scott H Young - Ultralearning

what I'm trying to focus people on is not so much, okay, what is your schedule? Because that's really just up to you, is what are you doing when you're trying to learn? And that's where I think the ultra learning approach differs from a lot of more traditional approaches, both to formal schooling and to self-education, is that a lot of people, just the way they're approaching it. So my critique is not, you know, yeah, if you only have 10 minutes to work on Spanish, 10 minutes is enough.

It's just, what are you doing with those 10 minutes? And similarly with programming or with learning Excel or with, you know, enhancing a career skill or what have you, it's all about what are you doing with that time? So that's what we'll talk about in the book. If you get it, you read through it, you're worried, you know what, I don't have a lot of time to spend learning.

You'd be surprised not only how much you can do with the time you have, but also how much learning you're already doing that you could make more efficient if you rethink how you're approaching it, because we're all trying to learn new things in our jobs and lives. I'm joined by none other than Scott H. Young. Scott, welcome to the show.

Oh, it's great to be here. Good to be talking to you. I'm really excited to go through what we are discussing today, which is ultra learning. None other than, oh, we both forgot.

Have you read it? It's really good. So for the listeners at home who don't know who you are, would you be able to give us a little bit of background to you, please? Sure.

So I've been writing about learning and psychology and self-improvement from my website for over a decade now. And for a big chunk of that, I spent my time focusing on learning and how you learn things, particularly outside of school, including the kinds of skills schools don't teach. And part of this book was just me sort of documenting a little bit of my journey and all the really interesting people I've met who have taken on really interesting, challenging self-education projects. And in the process, really discovering how applicable this is to people who don't want to do something really crazy.

They just want to get a better job or they want to learn a language for the next trip, or they just want to be good at something that's going to make them feel confident and enjoy their lives. You did something, speaking of crazy things, you did something pretty crazy a few years ago, didn't you? Well, which thing are you talking about? The MIT.

We'll start with the MIT thing. All right. All right. Sure, sure.

So this was more than a few years ago now, actually. I was thinking back. Yeah, eight years ago, I believe, I did the MIT challenge. So this was a project that I did after I graduated from university.

And so I'll give a little bit of a backstory just to make us even understand why I would try to do something like this. But I went to university and I studied business. And I kind of gone into that thinking, well, I want to own my own business. I want to be an entrepreneur.

Therefore, I should study business. And I learned after a number of years in school that what business school mostly is about is how you be a good middle manager in a large company. It's not really telling you how to start a business. It's like, here's how you can be VP of whatever in blah, blah, blah, blah.

And so I graduated with this idea that, oh, I shouldn't have picked this. I should have made it something else. I didn't enjoy my time at university, but it was something of a, I don't really want to go back and do more of studying and do more of that experience. And so the big thing that I've been considering as an alternative when I was going to school was computer science, because computer science, you know how to program, you know how to make things like the whole world is run on technology now.

So even if you're not a coder, you still kind of need to understand computer science a little bit to sort of succeed, particularly as an entrepreneur online, which is where I was wanting to head in my career. And so I was thinking, well, should I go back to school? Should I go back for another four years? And that didn't seem very appealing.

And around that time, I stumbled upon some classes put on by MIT. So they have a bunch of their classes where they record the whole lectures, they put all the materials, throw it up online. Anyone can access it. You can access it right now.

It's MIT. So I think it's ocw.mit.eu. But if you just Google MIT OpenCourseWare, you'll find, you know, hundreds of classes. And so when I found one of these classes, I took it and I was like, you know what?

This is better than most of the classes I took in school, like the ones that I paid money for. So I took one of these classes and I thought, this is great. And I was being a little tinkering around. I was like, you know what?

Maybe you couldn't just take a class. Maybe you could take all the classes that you would need for a degree. So this sort of piqued my curiosity because I was looking around. It didn't seem like anyone had tried to do this before.

I don't know. Maybe there's someone who did it and it escaped my attention, but I couldn't find anyone to try to do this before. I thought, why has no one tried to do this before? And so I got through and I spent about six months researching and putting it together.

And obviously doing it this way where you're just doing online self-study, of course, is a bit different than being an actual MIT student. But with a few, like I would say, not too big alterations, you can learn pretty much close to the whole curriculum that an MIT student would do. So this kind of got me excited. And as I was going through, I realized that once you get outside of the school, once you sort of, you stop having due dates for assignments, you have to go to this lecture hall for your exam, you have to show up to this on time.

I can watch your videos and you can watch them faster, speed through the parts where they're rambling, you know, slow down, rewatch parts that are confusing to you, that you can actually do it even faster than when I was in university. So this sort of led to this idea, okay, well, what if I try something a little bit more ambitious, a little bit more challenging for myself? And so I set this goal, this MIT challenge to do this project over one year rather than the sort of typical four. I mean, I didn't take the summer off, but still like over 12 months.

And so that was sort of the first little project I did. And that kind of led me to doing some other projects and led me to meeting a lot of people who've done cool projects. And that's sort of how we, how I got to this, this book, because I think it has a lot of implications for other people. I don't think that you can pass doing a four-year MIT computer programming course in one year as a little project.

Well, I mean, there are people who I covered in the book that have accomplished projects much larger than that. So one of the people that I thought was fascinating was Eric Barone, who he basically brought the same time I started the MIT challenge, worked for five years straight building his own video game. And I've done that a little bit. I played around with that a little bit when I was high school into video games and stuff.

I think the average person does not really appreciate how multi-talented you need to be to create your own video game. You need to be good at music. So most people can maybe play the piano. Never mind, compose original music and multiple instruments.

You need to be able to do art. You need to be able to do programming. You need to be able to do game design. You need to be able to do, there's like, even within those things, there's multiple specialties that typically require a team of people.

So we worked on this for five years, had to completely learn tons of skills from scratch. The game you released, Stardew Valley, ended up becoming a massive hit and made him a millionaire pretty much overnight. So I think in comparison to some of these people, I feel like my projects are a little, but I know it's a little bit of a relative comparison. Yeah, you're totally right.

It's big fish, little pond, little fish, big pond, as soon as you start to delve into this world of ultra-learners, I guess. So going back to the MIT project, how many hours were you spending learning per week? So definitely when I started, there was a, well, obviously I picked a fairly ambitious technique for myself, I was a little anxious, I wouldn't be able to meet it. And I wanted to really go a little bit faster than what was strictly necessary.

So there are 33 classes that would have been made up the degree with some minor substitutions, but roughly the same amount of credit hours. And I did 32 of those in that one year. I did one of the classes before, I started a test. And so I started off with like basically the pace of about a class a week, as I was going through it, because that's a lot to do.

But if you do the math and you have 32 classes, 52 weeks in a year, 32 classes, so that's actually a little too fast. I did that for the first, I think maybe the first nine or 10, I did it in roughly a week. I wanted to do it a little bit longer. And then it was like, okay, this is working, let's slow it down a little bit.

So one of the problems with doing one class in a row, which I would not recommend to the average person, this was just sort of an artifact of how I did my project, is that it kind of makes it cramming, it's easier to forget things if you learn it over a short period of time. So I switched to doing it so that I'd be doing like three to five classes in parallel over like a couple months, and so that was how I did the rest of the classes, instead of over that a little bit more delayed pace. So in the beginning, it was actually pretty intense, probably about 50 to 60 hours a week, but then later on, it was probably a little under full-time, maybe 35 to 40. So not a trivial amount, mind you, I don't want to be like saying, oh, that's easy, I could do that.

But if you think about how much time you spend when you go to university, not to mention that you're giving up four years of your salary, not to mention that you're probably paying tuition, that you are taking out student loans, et cetera, et cetera. I think that the way I did that project was a lot less onerous than getting an actual degree. So it sounds kind of, you know, I think it sounds a little weird, but I think when you consider the status quo, I think that's something that we should be questioning a little more. Yeah, there's a reframing going on here, isn't there?

Also, I know that some of the listeners and some of the guys behind the Modern Wisdom Project and the team will be thinking that your experience with your degree sounds very familiar, and it is debatant what I would have said about mine. Went to Newcastle University, did a business management degree, because I thought that if I did a business management degree, I would learn how to run a business, because if I run a business, I'll be rich and I'll make passive income, and I'll do this, that, and the other. And I started my business while I was at uni, so I sat down next to my business partner at my future, then to the business partner at my first seminar, and now 13 years later, we're still together, haven't got rid of each other yet. And what I was seeing was this contrast between what I was experiencing in the real world of business and what I was learning, and I was immediately, maybe some people more typically would find the lack of directness from learning to application when they eventually get into the job market.

For me, I was becoming disenchanted with education as I was going through it, which was especially a brutal realization. And then I went on to do a master's in international marketing, not because I wanted to, but because I thought this is so transactional and easy, that I, for the sake of one more year of commitment, I might as well crack it out. And then once that was done, I was at the end of academics. And I think a lot of people, a lot of listeners may think the same, that you've done this, you know, with my year in industry and my master's degree, I was in full-time education for over 17 years.

Full-time education, like that was it, from the age of five until the age of 23. Like, there we go, that's your job. So the fact, and then, whereas now, I'm 31 years old, and my passion is to learn new shit all the time. But somehow the education system managed to beat that out of me.

So I can see, I can see your desire to do it and other stuff. So before we get into the format and some of the awesome stories in ultra learning, could you run us through some of the other projects that you did, like your portraits, your portrait drawing and stuff like that? Oh, sure. Yeah, yeah.

So, so I've done a couple other projects, like public projects. I think, like you, I'm always learning things. It's just I don't always try to do them up so that I'm trying to document everything and post it online so for people to see that MIT Challenge was the first big one that I did like that. I did another one a little bit after that.

And this kind of goes to how I got into doing this. So when I was in university, I spent a year studying abroad in France. So it was an exchange opportunity. And with a lot of people who go to another country and are going to be there for a long time, you get this idea of like, oh, I can learn another language and I can come back and I'll be fluent in French and, you know, I'll be so impressive and everything.

Speak to all the foreign exchange goals and all that stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so I had this idea in my head and I went to France and a funny thing happened. All the people around me just spoke English all the time.

So all my friends spoke English, including the French ones. And it was getting really frustrating. It was getting really frustrating because I had been expecting, oh, I'm going to be learning French really well and I'm, you know, studying at home and I've also got my other business classes and stuff to do. And I'm just like, oh, it gives, you know, I try to speak to people in French and they're like, oh, yeah, yeah, okay.

But like, you don't speak very well, I'm going to speak to you in English. And it was frustrating. And so it was around this time that I met a very interesting guy who I talk about in the book, Benny Lewis. And Benny Lewis, well, I should just preface this with saying that like, like most people who are in this situation where you go and you think you're doing something, because I thought to myself, well, maybe I just don't have enough time.

Like maybe actually learning another language. You know, what made me think I could do it in a year? Maybe it would take like five, 10 years and I just didn't have enough time. And I met this guy, Benny Lewis, who does it in three months.

Now, I mean, I'm not saying he's fluent after three months. That's sort of his kind of goal, but it's more an aspiration than saying he achieves it every time. But the thing that struck me was just how radically different his approach was, because for me, I'm going there and being like, ooh, I hope that they accept me speaking French. He's just like diving right into conversations.

He's speaking from the very first day. He's getting tons of practicing and achieving quite a bit in a three month period of time. So seeing that contrast was one of the main motivators for me to do the MIT challenge was just this kind of it was a little bit of that, you know, what is it? The matrix, you know, taking whatever the pill moment is where you're like, oh, yeah, this is like different from, oh, maybe I don't have to do this the way that everyone else is doing it.

And of course, I applied it to computer science there. But obviously, that example stuck in my mind. I was thinking about, you know, language learning about, oh, man, if I had just done it that way from the start, maybe things would have been different. And so around that time, I had a roommate and he was planning on your master's.

He wanted to do some travel. So he started getting to talking and I was telling him about this. I was like, you know, what if we went to try to learn languages? And he was a little skeptical.

He's like, well, I don't know about that. Like, that's kind of hard. This kind of thing. But I think I persuaded him.

And we ended up doing this project that I called The Year Without English, where it was basically we would go to four different countries, Spain, Brazil, China and South Korea with the idea that we wouldn't speak English in those countries. I mean, we weren't perfect in every country, particularly in Asia, but that was the motivation that you land day one. We speak only in that language to each other. Everyone we meet, we speak in that language.

We're not like, oh, I don't know whether I'm ready yet to speak Spanish. It was day one going with that. Yeah. And the funny thing was, is that although when I describe this to other people, because I've seen the reaction when I describe this to other people, they're like, oh my God, I never do that.

The funny thing was, it was way easier than my time in France. So the kind of irony is, is that the staying at home, being in that bubble of English, just not being in immersion and really trying to learn French was harder than just, you know, ripping the bandit off, going straight to immersion from day one and doing that process. So we did that project, which, you know, even my friend who was really skeptical in the beginning, he can speak those languages too. And he went through and did those four countries.

And I've done some other projects since, like you mentioned, drawing the portraits. And I did one recently learning quantum mechanics. And I've done some others for cognitive science and things like that. But it's always for me just trying to, what's the assumption that everyone has about how you have to do things that if you break, you're able to get better results.

And that's sort of what I wanted to try to cover in this book is give people that kind of mindset. Well, I mean, you've definitely got some non-typical results there. I think learning four languages in the space of a year. What fluency did you get to with them?

So I will say this. Defining fluency is really fraught because I find that for people, especially people who are, you know, not fluent in a lot of languages, that there's kind of two assumptions that I have to deal with. The one assumption is, this comes from a story where I told someone this story and they said, like, so do you think you could ask for, like, you could probably ask for directions in like a taxi? And I was like, well, that's actually really easy.

Like, I could give you that in half an hour in almost any language. Like, there's very little to that. That's not really a difficult task. On the other hand, there's people who think you're 100% fluent, like you're completely bilingual and this kind of thing.

And obviously, that's not the case either. The way I would like to qualify is what we were able to do rather than some particular language exam. So in Spanish and Portuguese, we were able to make friends. We had an active social life.

We were living in the language. We could go to, like, you know, restaurants, do whatever we needed to do in the countries. It probably would have been, like, Spanish would have been maybe on the cusp of being able to study in it, but maybe a little bit more work would have been required to get to that level of technical understanding. For the Asian languages, they're obviously just harder.

There's more new vocabulary to learn. They're more different. So you have to spend more time learning them. But in Chinese, I feel like we got fairly well.

For those of you who have some background in this, the level I reached, I wrote the what's called the HSK 4 exam. So China puts on four different, sorry, they put on language exams that are divided into six categories. And so at the time, I wrote and passed the level 4, which is considered to be kind of an intermediate level exam. But you can give a sense of 4 out of 6.

It's a little bit hard to explain if you don't know what the 6 levels mean, but I can give you kind of a broad quality of sense. Korean, we were a little bit weaker on mostly just because doing four languages in a row were getting a little burnt out. Yeah, I think for most people, when they think about languages, competence to just go day-to-day is what most people aim for. I don't think many people want to be able to write War and Peace in Korean.

They just want to be able to say, what's the best issue? What's your phone number? Like, where's good to go for evening drinks? Blah, blah, blah.

They just want to get around, right? That's probably the normal layperson's desire for it. But what's ridiculous is I did two years of a half GCSE at Spanish and got a D, which is so lame, at school. And now, outside of Mayan or Chris, it's like that.

And some stuff I picked up whilst partying in Ibiza. Like, I've almost completely forgotten it. So to hear that you were able to achieve competency in four languages in a year will be a big surprise for a lot of people. Well, so that's the thing.

I feel like when I, before I did this, again, my experience from France that I thought like even learning a language conversation in a year, I thought was very fast. I thought, well, you know what? Maybe it just can't be done. And after doing the research for this book, I find that like kind of the critiques and insight.

have is not that you know not that it can't be done but for the level of fluency that i'm thinking right now it's just kind of like well yeah of course you could do that so there's a lot like it's actually lots of people do it so it's not even really oh you need to be some kind of genius to do this it's just do you have the right approach and that's really what i try to talk about in the book um you know particularly directness is one of the things we talk about because i think the way they teach languages in school i don't really want to fault language educators because often they're trying to get the students to do the right thing the problem is just the assumptions of how classrooms work make it very hard to break out of it if a teacher says okay well you need to practice this at home and then they don't do that i can't really fault the teacher but at the same time i can kind of fault the paradigm of going to a class and the way students think is i should do a little bit of homework on piece of paper and that should be enough whereas the immersive approach which by the way you don't need to be in the country to do that if you want to do that there are services like um like italki.com live mocha or you can jump on and have conversations with people around the world if you get language partners it's free and so this is something you can totally do you can even you know have a if you have a spouse or someone who's interested in learning the language too you can have a little okay at home we just speak in this language and practice with each other so i don't want to make this idea that like well you have to go on some special full-time immersion project to do this it's just about thinking critically about how you want to acquire those skills i mean languages are just one example yeah so one of the things that might be going through a number of people's heads at the moment before we get into specific strategies of learning itself one of the things would be well i can't dedicate 50 60 hours a week 40 hours a week to doing computer programming i can't like just drop my life and like blast off to spain with my with my mate for a bit so their concern might be the amount of time dedication to that but i'm pretty certain having read the book that the time that you put towards something doesn't actually need to be that that's ruthless you can still get some pretty strong effects with a lower time investment so what you're saying is exactly right so i kind of define the ultra learning approach in my book as aggressive self-directed learning and i think a mistake and it's a common one because when you want to talk about dramatic stories those are probably going to be someone did something a short period of time right like that's just sort of what makes for a more interesting story and that necessarily is going to lean towards people who are doing it full-time so that is a lot of stories that i have in the book not all of them but a lot of them and i think one mistake to draw from that is oh me being able to learn spanish full-time is critical or me being able to you know i'd like to learn computer programming but i can't really put in more than two hours a week on it and you know so this doesn't apply to me but what i'm trying to focus people on is not so much okay what is your schedule because that's really just up to you is what are you doing when you're trying to learn and that's where i think the ultra learning approach differs from a lot of more traditional approaches both to formal schooling and to self-education is that um a lot of people just the way they're approaching it so my critique is not you know yeah if you only have 10 minutes to work on spanish today 10 minutes is enough it's just what are you doing with those 10 minutes and similarly with programming or with learning excel or with you know enhancing a career skill or what have you it's all about um what are you doing at that time so that's what we'll talk about in the book if you get it you read through it you're worried you know i don't have a lot of time to spend learning you'd be surprised not only how much you can do with the time you have but also how much learning you're already doing that you could make more efficient if you rethink how you're approaching it because we're all trying to learn new things in our jobs and lines yeah we are so we've danced around it for long enough we're going to talk aggressive self-directed learning which is an ultra learning project why do we stop so the first step is to figure out what you want to learn and i think that that sounds like a trivial step and for some people maybe you know you've really wanted to learn guitar or painting or french for a long time so you kind of already know what you want to learn but for a lot of people it's not that they want to learn something particular but they want to get some outcome in their life so they want to get in shape or they want to start a business or they want to get a promotion or they want to do they want to do something else and learning is how you get at it and so the starting point is to figure out well what is the skill that you actually want to learn so there's lots of different ways to go about it i have different techniques in the book for kind of listening ways to figure it out one of the ways i really like is what i call the expert interview method so basically if you want to let's say improve your career a good idea is to get some idea of what skill you might want to learn so okay i'm an engineer and what if i improve my public speaking ability and then you talk to some people that have the job that you want or that have already accomplished what you want and just start asking what do you think about if i did this kind of project or got better at this now i do think it's okay to learn something and then realize oh that wasn't exactly what i needed that's sort of part of the learning process but part of what i talk about is the process of thinking about why you want to learn what you want to learn is not just an issue of well then i might learn the wrong thing but even if you um even if you decide what you want to learn like you want to learn french thinking about how you're going to use that french can be really informative for how you should actually practice it because i would have a completely different set of recommendations for learning languages if your goal was to learn like ancient greek or something to read classics like it's you're not going to be trying to have conversations with people in ancient greeks greek at like parties and stuff um you're going to be approaching it in a different way so thinking about why you want to learn something what's the situation you want to apply it in um is so critical so that's another principle i talk about in the book directness which is essentially that uh 100 years of educational psychology research shows us that transferring skills from one domain to another is really hard to do and it only usually happens once we're near a level of mastery so at a beginning standpoint it's very difficult and so the ultra learning approach when i talk about the book is always to try to fine-tune how you're practicing it so that it more matches the situation where you want to apply it and this has a lot of profound impact because if you choose the wrong way to practice it you can spend hundreds of hours learning something and be like oh this isn't actually very useful yeah i think a lot of people will potentially spend quite a bit time thinking about what it is that they want to learn and i know certainly that i get stuck in that um paralysis by analysis or the the plan the planner's dilemma as me and some of the guys have come up with in the modern mission group um that's the the terror or the understanding of compounding interest is the eighth wonder of the world is a little bit of a blessing and a curse because if you're always terrified we'll take the wrong fork in the road think about all of the missing compounding interest that i'm going to lose out like you're not doing anything so choosing something and also i know that you'll you'll talk about this but an ultra learning project based on my understanding of it the skills that you learned from one will make all subsequent ones more easy the fact that there are particular cadences is the strategies there's simply the art of like a massive amount of recall which is probably going to be like every ultra learning project and like progressive overload and strengthening a muscle the second time you periodize your strength training you will have greased the groove from the first one and will pick up some skills more easily so that's one of the things that i try to talk about in the book is that you know you could you could read this book but reading the book is just the starting point because even though i've tried my very best to try to break down the core ideas and what i've learned from doing this there's a lot you have to learn from experience and that's again kind of this directness in the book is that just reading about something does not necessarily make you good at it and so what i'm hoping to get people is sort of a roadmap but obviously they have to you know start driving their car along it and so for for me when i'm giving people suggestions for ultra learning projects is don't sweat too much about which ones you pick for right off the bat pick a short one doesn't have to be crazy ambitious pick something you'd like to learn because you're going to start to find these things um like what you said you're talking about cadences and rhythms but lots of things like oh this is the difficulty with this this is the thing that you really have to pay attention to versus oh no actually i was spending a lot of time with this that's actually not a problem i don't need to worry about that not to mention there's a lot involved with the self-motivation angle so a big skill you'll learn is just like you said how you pull the trigger on projects how you design them so that you actually can finish them you know so many people come to me and they tell me oh you know what i really like to do this but everything i start i start learning guitar i start learning french i give it up i start doing this i give it up and a big part of this process is okay let's get through one complete very like even if it's a small project so you can be like ah this is start to finish how it works and then you can just iterate and repeat so a lot of what you're learning when you do these projects is not just the approach to learning guitar french but how do i have this lens this eye for viewing all the things in my life and how do i accomplish them and finish them and break down things i don't know how to do right now yeah so would you potentially suggest that people aim towards one which is slightly less uh ambitious than trying to before you agree in one year yeah that that project but i mean that project was my first kind of public project but i think i kind of came to it after taking a lot of smaller projects as well so i wouldn't recommend doing something crazy ambitious unless you have like you look back at your track record and like well maybe i haven't done an ultra learning project but you know started my own company and some people yeah some people have that but if you don't feel like you have that don't feel like this concept is it for you that's i guess not the point i'm saying that you can break it down to something very small so one of the things i often recommend is you know pick a goal that you can that is really bite-sized it seems kind of contrary to the idea of ultra learning but you know i want to learn enough spanish for my upcoming trip to madrid so that i can you know order tapas at a restaurant is a perfectly fine you know month-long project to do on the side you know after work before your vacation that's totally fine so don't think they all have to be these big dramatic projects but when you start speaking in spanish in madrid maybe you'll think hey you know maybe bigger right exactly got you so we've chosen a project the listeners have decided what it's going to be they haven't waited around for too long they're not obsessed over it they've got the project where are they going next so the next thing to do is to look at what is the actual mechanism you're going to use to learn that sounds a little abstract but i think it's something that we often don't think about because when you're in a classroom the teacher's like okay here's a textbook you know sit listen to me talk for a while go to your homework and then you'll pass the exam and maybe there's a little bit of thought to like how should i study this there isn't that much choice you've just been told what to do and that's so ingrained in our thinking that very few of us like when i talk to them about learning a language for instance they're like well where do you go to study it like the concept of learning it on your own with just sort of like random resources seems kind of impossible to them and languages are just one example like programming or you know any other skill you could think of a lot of people are like well i need to go into some kind of formal process and for some that might be the best way of doing it but what i usually recommend is doing a little bit of research ahead of time so you figure okay what are all the materials that i could use for this if it's a popular skill there's likely many so it could be a book you want to use as a guide it could be an online course it could be an app it could be something that you want to use as a resource if it's a popular skill again programming languages are good examples there might be many resources you might want to jot something down the next thing i like to look at is not thinking in terms of the material you're using but what is the actual activity of learning because a lot of people think the activity of learning is you know picking up a book and flipping through it like this but really what the activity of learning is is some kind of practice and that's true even for book learning subjects even if you're you know learning about i had an eye who was i was helping with was learning military history and we decided you know his practice activity was going to be to write like some essays or some book reviews of some of these things because he was taking these ideas and then he had to synthesize it and make it into a format so we could have a conversation with people about it and so focusing on that practice activity is a really important piece because a lot of us just take the material okay i'll flip through it and be like i'm not very good at this right so thinking about the practice material is very important and then once you get into the project then there's a lot more tweets you can make and you can start looking at okay feedback what kind of feedback am i getting how do i have to turn that little dial um drills like how can i break apart this more complicated skill to get good at some of the components certain skills have like a natural pattern to them uh languages for instance it's very easy to get hung up on not having enough vocabulary so once you're in the process of learning you're actually speaking with other people you may want to inject more vocabulary so you can speak better or or practice grammar if it's if it's tripping you up so there's lots of little things you can do once you get started and the way i like to see about it the way i wrote it in the book is that the nine principles are all trying to like these little dials that you can kind of twist so you're kind of like oh this is a little off and if you do more together feel like this is why this isn't working this dial is turned to how can i turn it over to where it needs to be so that would be my advice for people getting started yeah you give a proposed ratio of planning to work i think in advance of a project and certainly we've been talking a lot recently on this podcast about the difference between strategy and execution and i know one of the problems with executing is the fact that by strategizing you don't ever need to actually meet the real world with whatever it is you're trying to do and your dreams you're much sooner going to forego the potential of failure in place of never starting at all um that's one of the reasons also actually you have to put your mouth is get off your ass and do something so yeah i think what i particularly liked was the um prescription for not getting bogged down in a planning period the planning is important and that revisiting the and reassessing your learning method is important but probably less important than just getting started just doing whatever the project is well the way i like to see it is that the planning you're doing is a little bit like packing for a trip so you want to make sure that you got enough in your trip so you get there oh no i don't have my passport i don't have this and then the trip's ruined and then you're not doing anything but at the same time you could be that person that you know brings every single thing from their house in their suitcase and they're running along and and they're not able to actually flexibly cope with things in the real world like when you're on a vacation you can buy things in that country so you don't have sunscreen you can probably get it there or something like that so to continue that metaphor the way i like to think about it is that the longer and more ambitious your project is the more time you should spend on planning because for two reasons one is just the preparation part but the other reason is just psychologically you need to commit to it so one of the things that i found very valuable about the mit challenge was doing this research ahead of time so i spent about six months part-time doing some research and the reason i found it very valuable is it started to get me in the mental headspace of like okay this is what it's gonna be like for years what i'm gonna have to do is how i'm gonna have to think about it whereas if i just said on monday okay next monday i'm doing this i would not have psychologically prepared enough so that when it starts and things get difficult i'm like okay now you know continue the travel metaphor i'm going home i don't like this yeah so there is a balancing point i suggest what i call the 10 rule which is that for projects you spend about 10% of the total time you expect doing some preparation now again it really depends on what you're trying to do if you're trying to do something smaller like we were talking about some smaller projects those are probably best off just getting started with them and then changing your approach while you're doing them i've done that in projects before so i mentioned um doing this portrait challenge so i had kind of this approach that i used for the first two weeks and then i'm like all right i can get about this good but i can't get any better with this uh i need to find something else you know hit the brakes did some more research found okay actually there's this different method that i can use and i took a little course and learned that method like okay this actually works a lot better and so you might find out when you're learning as well that you're doing things and you're kind of like oh this doesn't seem to be getting me where i thought it was going to go and now i need to readjust so i talk a lot about this sort of like balance between what i call learning and meta learning so the learning is the actual thing you're trying to do you're acquiring knowledge you're getting information about what you're trying to learn and the meta learning meta of course refers to when things are kind of about themselves so meta learning would be learning about learning and so for the meta learning is the kind of understanding how learning in the subject works so how do you learn a language how do you learn programming how do you learn programming how do you get good at salsa dancing or public speaking or haekwondo or whatever it is and that kind of meta approach there's sort of an oscillation between what you're doing to actually learn the skill and what are you doing to try to understand that same process you can note inefficiencies and find things you can prove in it yeah one of the things that i think a lot of people may be thinking at home is well like i've been to school for ages or i was never a good learner i was never academic or whatever it might be obviously there are there are some people out there who skill acquisition naturally is pretty rapid but also there's there's uh some commonalities between them what was the story was it a scottish physicist lady this scottish scientist mary somerville yeah yeah can we hear the story about her because i love that yeah so mary somerville um i cover her in the chapter on focus and i really loved her biography because she's um not the most famous person like a lot of people perhaps haven't heard of her but she's quite an accomplished woman in terms of science um i think her biggest accomplishment was a sort of a translation expansion of um laplace's uh celestial mechanics which was kind of like the follow-on to newton's principia mathematical so very advanced lots of calculus lots of like advanced physics for um you know this was the cutting edge in the 18th century but the interesting thing about her story is that you know she grew up in kind of a poor household in scotland and she was a woman and so in that time period you know she didn't have a choice about like you know pursuing science professionally and so she kind of had to make do with the fact that you know people would come over and be like okay i can visit you now drop whatever you're doing spend some time with me or or you know there's a story i really like where she was uh you know she's raising children and she's talking to some colleagues like convinces her to study botany so she spends the morning studying botany while she's breastfeeding her child and there's these kind of little tidbits of her life which are showing dedication to learning things but at the same time and i mean it's hard to peer into this because obviously when someone's super accomplished and then they're being modest there's a little bit you kind of doubt how how modesty is or how much false modesty there is but you read her biography there's so many examples of her doubting her own capacity and her like well like i couldn't i didn't think i would be able to ever learn a language and then she was like six or something like that so she said she has a lot of focus didn't she she said she has a lot of focus like super distracted yeah yeah yeah she had a bad memory well i picked her as an example for this chapter on focus just because she uh she was um you know in this situation where it's not conducive to focus you know like if you think about albert einstein or you know in the quiet patent clerk formulating uh his theory of relativity whereas this is a woman you know she's got four kids about people coming by she's got to take care of the house and you do all of that kind of stuff and people aren't taking it seriously a lot of people aren't so you don't really have the ability to just okay i'm dedicating myself to this so i wanted to pick her as an example for focus just because it's just sort of a to show that you know so much of what we think of as focus is a kind of choice about what to do rather than simply you know being in a log cabin somewhere isolated from the world yeah i uh i absolutely love that that story it's the same as the stupid podcast i did recently where there was a guy who shattered his sacrum and his l5 that just obliterated two of his vertebrae um and he was a world record uh swat holder and he said once i get pain free i want to go back and break my squat record and it's like the radiologist that's seen his mri just it just looks like a bomb's gone off in his back and i'm like look man you're gonna be walking again and then sure enough three and a bit years later he goes back breaks his squat record and i think that framing that contrast effect similar to um some of the story that you've just given us there or uh brian harold i'm talking about now it frames people's own um excuses in a really harsh light of day i think it's so it's so important for people like me as well right like i make yeah all the excuses in the world i interviewed we had peter c brown make it stick we had him on a year ago and even even hearing look you can employ these f these um by the way if you're listening and you're a recent subscriber you may miss it peter brown is on the back of ultra learning actually i think um it's one of the one of the guys that helps to uh formulate your ideas for this and it's a fantastic episode i'll link in the show notes below if you want to go back check it out but um yeah like i was listening to him say look there's a formula for you know repeated exposure is not the key repeated uh recall is etc etc etc and i'm still telling myself this story about oh yeah but you know like i'm tired or i've got this or this that and then there's mary somerville like uh baking baking baking a cake whilst breastfeeding a child whilst rewriting like one of the most difficult things in all the physics while being like under the feet of the kind of uh i guess typicals uh route that women in the 1800s are supposed to take and all this sort of stuff so what i'm saying is to listen at home your excuses are probably not as strong as hers so undertake your learning project well you know what i would take even i would take perhaps a softer take but i know from talking to a lot of people that they've had bad experiences in school and they associate school with learning so when you tell them this is gonna be a big book about learning it just brings up all this trauma right so they have like that nightmare of like oh my god i've got the exam and i'm not prepared it's not doing it and so one of the things i want to talk about this is an interesting thing that i've had with the people who've read some of the earlier copies is they come back to me and say hey you know what like i don't see myself as an but when you're talking about this that and i was like you know i did that for this thing that i got you know i did that when i was learning photography or when i was you know trying to start my business or when i was you know it could be something completely unacademic and they're like yeah but i was doing that and so the thing i want to point out is that learning is not school school is i don't think there's anything wrong with school and i've learned a lot of subjects that you know you can study academically i think that's great but when we think about learning school is just a really narrow aspect so if you weren't good at that narrow aspect if you you know weren't top of your class and you feel bad about it there's so many other things that you can learn so many other things that you are learning all the time things you're spending time trying to figure out trying to get better at trying to improve that i think understanding the process of learning is really understanding the process of this kind of mental self-improvement so anything you want to understand better get better at is going to be through learning and so this is really what i wanted to try to write the book about is not to you know shame people for not using the right setting approaches or not to make you feel bad because you don't see yourself as an ultra learner but to point out you know that thing that you did in the past that went well this is why it worked and this is how you can do those kind of things in the future so that's what i've been trying to do with this book is and i'm hoping that when people read it they're going to see parallels in their own life and just know how to apply that more consistently for the future what other strategies have we got we've got directness which is a similarity between the thing you are learning and the outcome that you want to achieve or the way that you are practicing and the outcome you want to achieve on the other side we've got we've talked about drilling which as an analogy i was explaining to someone the other day is the equivalent in crossfit of looking at each of the lift individually you're working on your pull-up technique and then your um your direct learning would be doing a metcon doing a workout what's on the whiteboard so you drill down look at the specific elements um i'll tell you one of the in fact two of the two of my most favorite models which have come out of this we're big fans of mental models on the podcast and one of them was the uh rate determining step rate limiting step yes and the other one is judgment of learning yes yes okay so i love both of those let's talk about that happy to jump in so the the rate limiting step is actually a concept from chemical reactions so a lot of times when you have a chemical reaction you have like some molecule here and some molecule there and they like bang into each other and they like separate off you get a different molecule and often there's more than one step so for a lot of chemical reactions you're putting a big stuff in a big liquid and there's one thing that leads to another thing that reacts to another thing that reacts to another thing etc etc and one of the concepts um from chemistry which i think is really interesting for this process is that sometimes one of those steps is a bottleneck so it happens way slower or with more energy or more difficultly than than the other steps and that will be the step that governs the rate of the reaction so you can speed up that step everything else gets faster so i'm kind of creating analogy this to learning because sometimes this doesn't have to be thinking about things in terms of happening sequentially but just you can imagine that there are components to the thing that you're doing and one of those will be the thing that governs your overall performance so the analogy i used again from language learning was that very often vocabulary is the rate limiting step because vocabulary is that if you could just improve your vocabulary assuming again this is not always the case but if you're practicing you're using directness and you're speaking a lot if you just triple your vocabulary you would be much more fluent than you are right now that's just obviously true so then you can sort of say okay how do i get that vocabulary um another example could be uh you know if you're talking about mathematics for instance it could be that understanding having a really good intuition of one of the core concepts is the thing slowing you down or it could be something technical it could be that you're not doing your algebra correctly you sometimes make mistakes and that's why you're slowing it down so rate limiting step is one of the things that i talk about when you should be keeping an eye for for drills it's like is there one thing that like really you get better at this one thing you'll get better at all the things and then the other thing i like to look at is what i call cognitive components so when you are trying to practice a complete skill i think about driving a car this is a good example so when you're driving a car you're doing a lot of things you have to have your foot on the accelerator pedal you have to move it over to brake occasionally you have to be steering you have to have your signals you have to check your mirrors you make sure cars aren't coming out make sure pedestrians aren't running across the road you have to make sure that you know all the bells and whistles on your car are like not you know saying the engines on fire and this kind of thing and when you start that feels completely overwhelmed like there's so much stuff happening and so what you what you can do when you're learning is you can often like try to focus on one of these elements at a time obviously the car if you just focus on the accelerator pedal you're gonna crash really easily but for a lot of other skills that's not necessary you can just focus on doing that so if you're drawing a picture you can focus on just putting the lines in the right place rather than worrying about shading at the same time or if you are working on public speaking you could just focus on you know how is my pacing am i going too fast or too slow and the reason for doing it this way there's different ways of slicing apart skills is it very often the limit to improvement is that when there's so many things going on it's hard to get better at any one aspect because your mental resources are kind of spread over everything and so what they sort of deliver practice approach or the approach i talked about in that chapter is slicing things down so you can focus on these sort of smaller elements and there's different ways for doing that for different skills yeah moving on to the judgment of learning things so this is it's actually not a massive uh section in the book it's only a couple of paragraphs but like fuck me it really swiped me honestly scott i'm telling you man i was reading it and i was like that's that's me right there there's an asymmetry between how you feel learning is going and how learning is actually going and it's reflected in the data as well isn't it at least in the short term and i was just like my company we run club nights right we have about 400 students that work for us 18 to 21 at university doing some difficult degrees some doing less difficult degrees but all of them learning right and there's our office gets used like a um a private library typical to a lot of universities any uni students that are listening join a promotions company that has the nicest and most convenient office that you can become an event manager they'll give you a key and then you can just go in and learn instead of going into the library that's i think the life hack that a lot of managers have decided to use yeah but yeah i look at their learning strategies and some of the guys are using a review method and some of the guys are using a recall method would you be able to just take this judgment of learning for sure so i'll speak about specifically this judgment of learning planning so this is um research done by jeffrey carpicki and janelle blunt i believe janelle blunt was um uh i think carpicki is the lead researcher on that and he has done a lot of work on the testing effect and what he calls retrieval and this is similar to what you were talking about with the make it stick that essentially um this was a very interesting study i just thought this result was fascinating but they took students and they broke them up into different groups and assigned them different studying techniques so students didn't choose what studying technique theories and they were assigned it and so i believe the four groups were one of them was uh they reviewed the material once so you know like reading it over the other one they reviewed multiple times and then there was one that was concept mapping and then the final one was what's called free recall where basically a blankie's paper and you try to write down everything you remember so it's not like a it's not like a test or a prompt it's just okay what do you remember from that and interestingly they didn't ask the student which one do they think could do better out of these four but what they did ask the students is how well do you think you learn the information so that was the question so they've given them a technique and they said how well do you learn the information and what was interesting is that the students who did review repeated review thought that they learned the material the best and the students who did free recall thought that they learned the material the worst and when you actually test them it does the complete opposite that those who do the free recall do above and beyond the best um compared to uh repeated review and so the reason uh the sort of explanation for this proposed by carpicki and blunt and other researchers is what you were calling this judgment of learning is that we don actually have the ability to peer into our mind and see that there's information stored there instead we use a certain proxy signal to try to guess how well we've learned something and one of these is considered the fluency of the information so when you're doing repeated review you're seeing it a lot and that processing feels easier and easier so each time you review it you're like oh yeah i remember this i remember this i remember this and that's convincing you that you understand it very well now the free recall people when you put a blank piece of paper and you try to recall like i'll give us an exercise okay after this podcast is done or you can pause it right now try to recall what we talked about so far in this podcast you'll be surprised like oh wow actually it's really hard to remember a lot of things yeah there's the thing there was a direct answer then i went to spain and then so maybe they can jot down a few things but the thing is that's really hard to do and so when you're doing this really hard thing you're like oh wow i actually don't know this at all and so your judgment how much you learned is much lower however the act of trying to recall it makes your memories much better so there's a bit of a paradox here that when you think that you learn something really well because you can process it really fluently is actually when you don't have it memorized and when you are doing free recall and you're like oh my god this is so difficult that's when you're really learning it and this i think was just sort of a very small slice but really um uh really typical of the whole ultra learning idea is that something that feels nice and easy and comfortable is actually a lot less effective than the thing where oh wow this is frustrating and difficult and hard and um and challenging for me but you're actually gonna learn much faster so there's this kind of paradox of learning there it's the same especially going across analogy the strong guys in the gym will continue to work on strength because it makes them feel good they have a degree of fluency in that they feel oh i'm progressing well yes you are but you're deficient in this particular area and if you were to work on that instead your overall game would improve and the same thing goes for this i think i'm right in saying that um it's actually matched in someone's ability to uh take tests immediately after a review i think in the super super short term review is more effective like very like hours or maybe even less than hours so um i don't know i don't know the exact time frame that they did the study there's been different studies on this but generally when you show someone something so the basic idea is really easy to understand um if i were to like imagine that there's no delay imagine that i like put a word on the screen let's say the word is dog and then just like what was that word well you're gonna know it for sure right um however if i say you know like you read dog like you know 10 minutes ago and then i said what was that word maybe you would have forgotten it by now if i just asked you to recall it because if you didn't recall it successfully you don't know what the word is so there is a sense in which review can be a little better in the short term and um it's just that we don't really i guess what i would put it this way that our intuitions about how we process information don't actually say a lot about how well we're going to remember information in the future if you all have experienced this when you go to a party and someone tells you their name and you're like oh yeah i know that name and then two seconds later you're like oh my god what was the person's name and so it's it's when the person tells you your name it's like oh yeah steve oh that makes sense i won't forget that and then five seconds later you forget and the reason why is because when you said steve you're like yeah that's a normal name that people have and we're processing it fluently so you're like oh okay i know that but then when it's two minutes later you have to be like oh this guy what's his name yeah you forget it and it's not just i'm not here to criticize people this is human nature and so i do this the same way i also forget people's names at parties the thing is is that you need to understand this when you're approaching learning projects when you're learning things like languages or medicine or things which require a lot of um memorization or things that have a lot of memory because if you are not approaching it right you're going to put in a lot of effort that's just going to go to waste because it's not actually going to be um stored for recall later introduce yourself at parties as something very memorable like xavier or like yeah like some really exotic name that's never got you no one's gonna be like that's a normal thing i'm like fuck me remember xavier from last night um but yeah so moving on moving on to where are we up to now like retrieval i guess we're kind of in around there and i guess a lot of people when they think about learning they think about memorization right they think about like school remembering formulas for chemistry remembering like algebraic equations or um you know even in our business degrees like who was it that came up with the scientific management method and stuff you're talking about and stuff like that um but you know retrieval and especially for me i'm particularly interested in this retrieval is learning something or even comprehending it but then not being able to recall it it's essentially the same as not knowing it like if you can't ever recall it like you're wrecked so so yeah i was just gonna say on this point about retrieval uh the perfect sort of illustration of why the ability to retrieve things matters and indeed not to say the ability to memorize things better it matters but the ability to have knowledge inside your head so i'll put it that way is that in the last 20-30 years essentially all human knowledge has been put on the internet you can search with the right type into google in about 5 to 10 seconds right but the average person is not 30,000 times as smart as they were in like the 60s and so that itself should be an illustration that just merely having the ability to look something up when you need it is not enough to be smart yeah yeah totally that's such an interesting uh comment on what most people would consider as knowledge right there's a recent uh i did listen to know what i'm about to say nabal rabbi counts on joe rogan recently and it is by far one of my favorite podcasts of 2019 and in that he talks about people having a simulacrum of intelligence which is just recall and he's like nobody needs that anymore nobody needs to have just recall he's like we have the internet for that what we need is understanding comprehension the ability to link multiple different concepts together if you haven't already i'll link you once we once we finish the podcast it is an absolute game changer but yeah looking at specific tactics for recall what are the ones which you yourself found to be most useful or what works best with your particular side of ultra learning so um just before i jump into that one of the reasons i just want to bring this up because i thought it was interesting that um retrieval is one of the principles i had and originally when i was writing this book i kind of thought well retrieval is just one of the other ideas so retrieval is just feedback that you know you just get feedback and therefore you know if you try to retrieve things because you're getting feedback feedback is good or retrieval is just directness that when you do a test if you practice doing something like the test it's similar to the test and that's why you learn it and the thing that i found really funny is that retrieval is actually a separate thing there's a separate idea there that is important that is not related to those ideas directly at least and that was why i wanted to include it and so the first thing i want to point out is that a lot of research on retrieval seems to be done with the kind of memorization tasks that you might load but just because they're easier to study in an experimental setting so lists of words or matching questions there has been retrieval stuff on more complicated things but again the more complicated it gets the harder it is to study there might be more confounding effects so psychologists tend to prefer simple memorization things however it's my belief and i'm stretching a little bit beyond what the reason research says exactly is that retrieval is really a process of all skills so even though a lot of the research is about like how you recall the foreign language word when you hear spoken it's really a process of everything that you do and what it is when you think of retrieval it is i'm in a particular situation where there is some kind of cue from the environment so that could be i'm speaking to someone in another language and i need to communicate something or it could be you know i'm writing a program i need to solve this particular problem or it could be you know i'm dancing and i want to be able to do this kind of turn or something like this and there's a cue in the environment and you need to be able to access the sort of pattern that's stored in your head for dealing with that situation appropriately and the challenge is that often that pattern will be stored somewhere but it's not linked to the cue in your mind so this sort of path between where the trigger point is and where the cue is is not linked together and so you have the knowledge but you can't use it and so i talk about a lot of different techniques for retrieval but the easiest one is just to practice retrieving things so when you are doing things don't have the book open put the book closed and try to recall it um you know when i was reading that when i was doing the research for this book i had a bunch of journal articles i got big binders back on top of my bookshelf now journal articles and once i was sort of describing this i was like you know what i should do i should just start writing down what did i learn from this journal article on a blank piece of paper at the end of this i got all these blank pieces of paper inserted in between so this is really easy to do this free recall stuff and it really helps you solidify your knowledge for more specific topics there's more specific strategies so flashcards are good thing to do if you have to learn pair association so like an english word and a spanish word or like some medical term and what it means or or things like that you can do really well with flashcards um so there's lots of different strategies i think the thing i want to leave your listeners with right now is just the idea that if you want to be able to perform in a particular situation you have to actually practice retrieving not just reviewing yes absolutely again to sing the songs of uh peter c brown make it sick episode it'll be in the show notes below if you if you feel like you have a particular difficulty with retrieval peter's approach for that and space repetition we're big uh fans of anki on here and other similar space repetition flashcard programs one of the co-hosts is a doctor who just completed his medical degree so he's like he's no he's got anki just coming out of his like eyebrows anki growing up his head um so yeah we've gone we've gone through retrieval what's some of the other principles of ultra learning that you think people should be aware of well so there's uh one that i cover in the book which i call intuition which is really the idea that you're talking about when you're talking about this noval podcast which is that people don't need to just have memorized facts these days because if you're like what's the capital of hungry i can go up look that up and what if it comes up right so there is a sense in which a lot of the brute memorization of factual details is a little overrated nowadays i'm not going to go so far as to say that memorization or remembering things is all as bad and this is why is that when i was doing the research on intuition one of the things that was kind of surprising to me is that the question of what does it mean to understand something is actually a lot more complicated than it first appears um there is a really interesting experiment which is called the illusion of explanatory depth i have in the book but basically the idea is um do you know how a bicycle works and most people would say oh yeah i know how a bicycle works and i said can you draw one and the funny thing is they've done this as a study and they show people trying to draw a bicycle i don't mean like some you know photorealistic rendering i'm just talking about like do you know where the chains connect and like where the pedals go and stuff and you see some of these drawings and it's like completely non-functional bicycle the chain connects the tires and like the pedals are over here and like it's rigid there's no like handles so it's in the book you can look at some of the um the diagrams that are from that actual study in there but the thing is really important is that why do people get that wrong why do people think oh i could draw a bicycle and then they can't and the reason why is that we're talking about factual knowledge again this is the suggestion of learning it's really easy to self-assess yourself so you can say what's the capital of france and if paris doesn't immediately come into your mind or something else comes in your mind well it's not london right then you just don't know it and you can say no i don't know whereas if i say do you understand how a bicycle works there there's a lot of nuance to that like you could understand how to ride a bicycle you could understand that bicycles are things people ride on streets but maybe you couldn't draw a bicycle maybe you couldn't repair a bicycle maybe you couldn't you know explain how the gear mechanism works on a bicycle so the idea here is that understandings are quite a slippery concept and when i was doing this research and looking in particular the story for that chapter was for richard fineman is that a lot of what his sort of magical intuition is is really actually a lot of stored patterns in math and physics not just memorize things but things that he was actively using and working with all the time and so his ability to just have this insight that seems to come from nowhere is really built off this really large foundation of tons of patterns and so why i'm a little bit skeptical of the kind of normal that we don't need to memorize things advice is that true understanding often comes from a place of having a lot of things remembered now not necessarily wrote memorized the way that we do it in school but if you don't have things remembered if you don't have things that you can recall for instance if you don't have that knowledge in your head if it's just out on google then you won't have part of the reason why you see expert performers or people who can do seemingly miraculous mental feats it's because they have all these patterns so that the classics were done in chess grandmasters but you know it really applies to lots of different subjects couldn't agree more about the comment on naval he is he says it in the podcast with joe that he went to the library um in new york as he was growing up as a child every night because his mother wanted him to be safe before she came home from working on an evening time and he says himself he's like i read everything that was in the library from every magazine every textbook every like reference book anything i get my hands on and you've struck on something that's very interesting there that there is a foundation of knowledge that naval is standing on which is so much higher than everybody else's he's able to connect these concepts together because the base knowledge that he has all of these different nebulous like out on a limb hub and spoke style concepts that he's got going on he's got massive array at his disposal that he can choose to use in like that but if someone doesn't have the foundation that they can build off they don't have any mental models that they can use for these these sort of situations you're going to start bouncing off a particular ceiling right so the thing i would add to that in that discussion is just that um the way i see sort of the comment what i would kind of amend if i can you know amend someone else's words what i would say that i would think differently is that i agree it's not so much that memorizing is not important but that how you memorize or how you learn things is what's important and the way that we often do that to pass exams in school is just not related to how you actually apply it so this again goes to the recall it goes to the rightness idea because it's not enough to have the knowledge in your head it's not enough to have it on some list somewhere that you only used for one exam 20 years ago but you have to have it in the context where it applies so i have this story that i've been telling you it's really trivial but i just think it's so good for illustrating that i run a little business and we uh we sell products and we were supposed to be charging sales tax on top so it was a dollar it was supposed to be like 14 cents more but we weren't doing that or software didn't do that so at the end of the year we had to calculate the amount of sales tax we should have paid them but we didn't you know this kind of thing and so one of my associates he was like working on it he was like oh well you know if the sales tax is 14 and it was like $100 then it's just $14 and i was like no it actually isn't that because you have to think that it's whatever the purchase price was plus 14 has to equal $1 so you gotta get your algebra out and be like 1 plus x and do the division and this kind of thing and the funny thing was is that as soon as you frame the problem as like 1 plus x and the algebra oh he doesn't have to solve it immediately right this is like grade 8 math the problem is that in this situation he didn't recognize that that's what you have to do that that's actually what the problem is asking you and even if you'd heard a word problem in a math class where they were asking this he might have gotten the answer correct it's just an issue of the knowledge is there but it wasn't accessible in that particular moment so i think that a lot of what we're doing with learning is not even so much getting the knowledge inside of your head or the skills inside your head but creating the association so that when you were in the right situation it arises as opposed to being sterile on some of my list somewhere moving forward through a life of prolonged learning as well i'm going to guess that that will compound i mean there must be some people that you spoke to for the book who like fineman i recently had mario livio on talking about his new book curious and in that he like fineman's his he's got a bit of a bromance going on with fineman everyone does yeah exactly um so how how do you explain or did you come across in fact any people who seemingly had this kind of polymath um like unbelievable capacity any people that's still around now that were oh well there's there's tons of people there's tons of people there's just like extraordinarily brilliant and just had lots of different knowledge and a lot of these people aren't even that famous i mean just off the top of my head right now a person who i follow martial revolution tyler cowan who i even mentioned a little bit in the book is just someone who like always impresses me with just like the sheer breadth of ideas he covers and there are people like fineman who are kind of more specialized polymaths that they have like you know real deep understanding of let's say physics and that allows them to do incredible things within physics you have people like terence talent in the book who's just phenomenally brilliant with mathematics and i think when you deal with people who just know so much over a long period of time it's really difficult to kind of tease apart methods or what are the different contributions for their success largely just because you know if they did have a natural talent that compounding interest has just been accelerating for so many years that it's really hard to see well how much was it that they did the right things and how much of it was that they're just really smart or what have you but i do think that for the average person listening here if you start investing in learning skills now and you start investing in just always having a learning project doesn't have to be full-time just can be something ongoing in your life you're always learning new things you're always picking up new stuff you'd be surprised how fast it accumulates you know if you just get the habit of you know reading a book a month you're already starting to compound and generate new ideas so the the real shame is i think the people who you know say to themselves well i'm never gonna learn that so i'm never gonna start and then they go 10-20 years they're outside of school they're only doing the same thing every time and their knowledge and skills just starts to contract and then um they're not able to do that whereas if you keep staying fresh you keep staying in the kind of learning mindset uh yeah by the time you are in your um you know later years you can have accumulated quite a bit of knowledge and you'll be like a small version of eric weinstein who is as far as i'm concerned essentially a different species to most of us that guy that guy's breadth and uh understanding across multiple fields is insane i heard him talk with the same degree of uh like resolution about maths physics jazz music and cephalopods in the space of like 10 minutes on a podcast the other day um but yeah so to round off the discussion i think that's a really nice point to make scott that what you're talking about is the fact that there is a there is a degradation over time of some of the learning skills that you've used and the longer that you kind of wait on that the more difficult it's going to get but the converse has to be true as well that once you've done right i'm going to spain in two months time let's spend four hours a week you know an hour a night four nights a week i'm going to commit i'm going to make sure that my learning process has been well planned that it's direct i'm going to drill down into my specific skills i'm also then going to do practice which is as close to the situation as i can get i'll make sure i'm working on my retrieval i'm using my intuition and blah blah blah all these sort of things once you've done that first one the dominoes kind of i'm going to guess will continue to tumble i also imagine as well this is speaking of someone who hasn't done it but i have to say it's been quite uh romanticized by the concept of doing an ultra learning project i mentioned that it must become an addiction for some of the people that you've spent your time with that they do one and then you find oh hang on a second he did a public speaking project now he's decided that he's going to become a photographer oh my god he's picked up the saxophone like well you know it's funny i um this has sort of been kind of my inspiration for writing this book is that it's really hard to communicate some experiences and so i'm going to try to do my best but one of the reasons i was motivated to write this is not just you know obviously i think learning is important and i think that you know people will benefit from this book even if they want to do something small in their life or they want to just learn a little bit better skills for their work or their hobby or for their life but i do feel like if you can go through this process if you can do some sort of project and set this challenge and do something that felt impossible for you and make it happen and have that achievement in your life the feeling that i had after doing the MIT challenge wasn't just oh i learned a lot of computer science and oh studying is hard it was this feeling of wow if you could do this what else could i do and that's the big reason i took on a lot of these other projects is that you're absolutely right it really does become addictive and not just any intense can devote a lot of time to this but there is a real kind of steamrolling of self-efficacy of a feeling like you know actually i figured this out so i could do something else and so i like to think of it that you know these people who you hear about let's say like Elon Musk or Arnold Schwarzenegger who just have like massive accomplishments in many fields a lot of people see these folks and they say well this person must just be brilliant and super talented and you know what they probably are but the other way i see it is that this is someone who's been on like a non-stop confidence like positive feedback loop for the last 30 years and they've just been accumulating more and more experiences and so i'm hoping that for some people who want to tackle a vicious project or they want to learn something harder they want to try to get good at something that they care about they can use this book and start that cycle going and get that confidence so that they can learn all sorts of other things in their life that's awesome scott i uh i hope that we've inspired some people to be in an ultra learning project um if you if you are deciding to undertake one i would love to hear from you and i'll be able to pass it on to scott so as always drop me a message or tweet me at chris will x on all social media i'll make sure that link to ultra learning will be in the show notes below don't forget if you follow the show link down there you'll be supporting the podcast by buying a book through that at no extra cost to yourself scott where can the listeners find you online so obviously i would like it if they can read the book um if they want to check out my website they can go to scotthyoung.com and i have been writing for over a decade so there's lots of articles about learning habits goal setting and self-improvement amazing i will also make sure that i link to scott's twitter and if you've got any questions you want to get to indirect then feel free to hassle him on there of course um but yeah if you're going to take one i'd love to hear if this inspires you to maybe restart or continue your learning or add an extra skill in my one for this summer is to try and slackline so i'm going to try and get good at slacklining um the i'm definitely starting at the if i can become even remotely competent at it it will be a universe away from where i'm at now but uh well best of luck to you i hope that the ideas of ultra learning won't be there yeah me too i'm worried that i might not be salvageable on that thing but i'll be giving it i'll be giving it a crack scott thank you so much for your time man yeah thanks for thanks for having me it's been great chatting about this stuff and i'll see you next time