#557： Grow, Adapt, and Reinvent Yourself Through Ultralearning
Episode Stats
Summary
Many of us want to learn a new skill or master a new area of expertise, either to further our careers or simply for the sake of personal fulfillment, but going deep in a subject seems to require a lot of time and even require going back to school. My guests today say there's another way. His name is Scott Young, and he's the author of Ultra Learning: Master Hard Skills, Outsmart the Competition, and Accelerate Your Career. We begin our conversation with Scott s successful experiment of doing all the coursework for a computer science degree from MIT in less than a year, and for free. We then discuss the economic benefits of learning how to learn, as well as the personal benefits that come from mastering new skills as adults. In the second half of our conversation, we get into the practical techniques of the ultra-learning method, including creating a plan for your learning project, choosing active over passive learning, and drilling effectively.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. Now, many
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of us want to learn a new skill or master a new area of expertise, either to further
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our career or simply for the sake of personal fulfillment. But going deep in a subject seems
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like it would take a lot of time and even require going back to school, something most
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of us don't have the time, money, and desire to do so. My guests today say there's another
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way. His name is Scott Young, and he's the author of Ultra Learning, Master Heart Skills,
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Outsmart the Competition, and Accelerate Your Career. We begin our conversation with Scott's
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successful experiment of doing all the coursework for a computer science degree from MIT in less
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than a year and for free, and how this opened up Scott to the idea of ultra learning. We
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then discuss the economic benefits of learning how to learn, as well as the personal benefits
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that come from mastering new skills as adults. In the second half of our conversation, we
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get into the practical techniques of the ultra learning method, including creating a plan
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for your learning project, choosing active over passive learning, and drilling effectively.
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Scott and I end our conversation with how to figure out what feedback to listen to and
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what to ignore as you're learning a new project. After the show's over, check out our show notes
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at aom.is slash ultra learning. Scott joins me now via clearcast.io.
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So I've been following your work on your blog about, and you've been writing about learning
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how to become a better learner for, man, over 10 years now. So since 2006.
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And you finally have taken all the stuff you've been writing about, researching about on your
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own and put it into a book. It's called Ultra Learning, Master Hard Skills, Outsmart the
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Competition and Accelerate Your Career. In the book, you start off describing a learning
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project that you took on that was pretty ambitious. You decided to earn an MIT computer science degree
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on your own in like less than a year. So tell us about this MIT challenge you set for yourself.
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Sure. Yeah. So this is a project I took on in 2011, which so already a ways back. And I
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just graduated from business school. And I was feeling at the time, like I'd kind of picked
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the wrong thing to study. I don't know if anyone listening here has ever felt that where you
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go spend a bunch of time in school, and then you're like, Oh, that's what I really should
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have been doing. And the problem is that when you already have a degree going back to school
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for another 40 years feels like maybe not the best use of your time and probably not the
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best use of your money. And so I was sort of debating in my head, do I really want to do
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this? Do I really want to extend out my length of time in the higher education system? And
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around this time, I was sort of online just sort of fiddling around. And I found this class
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that was posted by MIT online for free. So anyone can access these. These are MIT's open
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courseware. And I took the class and I was really impressed. I was like, wow, you know,
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this is a much better class than the classes I remember taking in school. And not only that,
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you know, there wasn't just one class, there were many classes. And so this kind of got the
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gears turning a little bit that I was thinking in my head, has anyone ever tried to use the
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resources that MIT puts online for free to do something that approximates what an MIT student
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would learn when they're doing an undergraduate degree. And so I put together a curriculum trying
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to like mix and match to try to get as close as possible to what an MIT student would take.
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And then I decided for simplicity's sake, to focus on trying to pass the final exams and do
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the programming projects. And one of the things that I found going through this process, and as you
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mentioned, I'd already been writing a little bit about learning online. So I'd already kind of had
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this idea of, you know, learning efficiently and studying effectively for even before I started the
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project. But when you have complete flexibility, you have the option to do some things that maybe a
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normal student can do. So for instance, if you watch a lecture, I know people who listen to podcasts
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are probably aware of this, you can listen to it at 1.5 times the speed. And because you can listen
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to 1.5 times the speed, you can maybe take all the lectures in, you know, a couple of days instead
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of spending four months. Or if you're working on assignments, normally you have to finish the whole
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assignment, you get stuck on some problems, you don't know the answer, you leave them blank, you have
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to hand them in. And then, you know, you wait a week or two, and then you get your answers back.
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Whereas if you're doing it at home, you can do one at a time. And just when you get stuck,
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you check the solution, you get that quick feedback. So you can learn in some cases more
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effectively without having to go through school, even if you're using the same kinds of resources.
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And so with these sorts of ideas in mind, plus quite a bit of work, if I'm being frank,
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I decided I wanted to try to do it in 12 months. So this was sort of my first big
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ultra learning project. But as I talk about in the book, there's a lot of people who have done,
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I think, probably more impressive projects and more interesting projects. And so I wanted to write
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this book to not just talk about people who try to learn facsimiles of a degree really quickly,
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but rather, I wanted to focus on people who have mastered the art of learning hard skills. Because
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even if you don't want to go back to school, even if you don't care about getting MIT classes and
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learning math and computer science and that kind of thing, there's probably something that you want
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to get good at, there's probably a skill that would improve your life, your career. And knowing the
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essence of how to do that in the most effective way possible has been a big mission of mine in
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writing on my blog, and then certainly in writing this book.
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So did you successfully complete the MIT challenge? You get your computer science?
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Yeah. Yes, I did. So I finished the last class just before the 12 month mark in the whole process.
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So there was 33 classes in the degree. I did one class earlier as like a test class. I did 32 in that
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And as you talk about in the book, as you started this MIT project, where you were taking these
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courses and trying to finish them really fast, and you're studying going deep and being really
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intense with your studies, you found other people, like you mentioned, who were doing the same thing,
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who are mastering new skills and domains of knowledge in a short amount of time. I mean,
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tell us about some of these folks that you've come across, you know, since the MIT project,
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Yeah, so actually, my kind of inspiration for taking on this project was from meeting a fellow named
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Benny Lewis. And so this is a couple of years before I did the MIT challenge, I was
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a student, and I had the opportunity to study abroad for a year in France. And I thought it
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would be so cool to come back speaking French, I thought, you know, I'd really like to spend this
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year and come back and speak another language. And I was in France for a couple months, maybe three
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or four months. And it was really difficult. I didn't feel like my French was progressing that
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much. I didn't feel like I could have conversations with people. And I felt that most of the people
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around me, you know, they just spoke in English, even if they could speak in French. And so I was
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a little bit discouraged. And I was sort of chatting about this with a friend from home.
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And he was like, Have you heard of Benny Lewis? And I was like, No, who's Benny Lewis. And so Benny
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Lewis has a website very modestly titled fluent in three months. And it is about his quest to try to
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become fluent in the language in his littlest three months. And so he would do these challenges where he
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goes to a country where he only has three months, because that's how long his visa was,
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and try to learn as much as possible. And sure enough, he's posting videos at the end of it of
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him having like little conversations with people, which I was super impressed by, because I've been
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in France for longer three months, and I couldn't do that. And so this was sort of the first time
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someone had kind of pointed me out to the idea that there are rather unconventional ways to approach
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learning that are often a lot faster or more effective than the ways that we're taught in school.
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And, and so he was one example. Another example was another old school blogger was Steve Pavlina,
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who did a computer science and math double major over three semesters. Again, this was through actual
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school, it wasn't at a time when MIT OpenCourseWare was available, but he did it by allocating his
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schedule and, you know, optimizing the aspects of studying and doing that kind of thing. So I'd
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already had some of these indications that this kind of thing might be possible before I did my
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challenge. But then after, of course, you meet, you know, once you do something, you say, Hey,
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have you heard of so-and-so? Have you heard of so-and-so? So I I've gotten the chance to hear
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like many fantastic stories, people like Eric Barone, who built a million dollar video game
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business. He just learned all the aspects of video game design and built a bestselling game.
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People like Roger Craig, who really like studied the process for getting good at trivia and won
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hundreds of thousands of dollars in jeopardy, or people like Tristan De Montebello, who I even worked
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with him on his project where over seven months, he went from having near zero experience public
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speaking to being a finalist for the world championship of public speaking.
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And with these people, I mean, did you start seeing how, were they doing things similar? Like
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they were doing the same, like they, they've sort of cracked the code without knowing that there was
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Yeah. So some of them, I think we're quite aware of the learning principles involved. So Roger Craig,
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for instance, was a computer science PhD student when he was doing his project. And he was like
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already a really big fan of what are known as space repetition systems and spacing effects.
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So he was aware of this kind of learning principles, the kind that I discuss in the book,
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as in to say that most people do. I mean, I was never taught these subjects in school and it turns
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out they're very important for learning well, but other people, I feel like they just kind of happen
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upon the right combinations of principles by chance. And so, you know, even for me researching this book,
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having done a number of projects that I document in the story, even when I started doing the
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research, there were still new things that I was finding out. So I think it's kind of
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difficult that a lot of times we don't even realize that we're doing things that work well
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with how the brain learns things. And sometimes we're doing things that don't work well.
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We don't realize it. We spend months and months, you know, banging our head against the wall,
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so to speak. And then, you know, it's, it's, it's going through that process and that frustration.
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No one ever says, Oh no, you needed to do it this way. If you actually wanted to,
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to master this skill. And I think that's particularly true for the kinds of skills
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they're outside of school. Like we have, you know, for most of us, at least 12 years of
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experience going through the school system. And so we have some familiarity with like taking tests and,
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you know, studying and that kind of thing. But if I plopped you down and say, okay,
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you need to become a great writer or public speaker or, you know, programmer, even though you never
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studied that before, how would you set up a project to do that? I think a lot of people would give you a
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pretty blank stare. And so I think that exposing those principles of how it works was, was a big goal in my book
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because yeah, they just don't teach you how to learn in school.
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Right. And so you call this strategy of learning things and not even just learning. So we're talking
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about like mastery here. It's like, it's not just, you listened to all the MIT courses. Now you
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actually took the test to show that you, you, you learned what you were supposed to learn.
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You got to be able to have a conversation at the end of three months. So it's mastery,
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but you do in a quick amount of time, you call this ultra learning. Why do you think this ability
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to learn things is such an important skill to have, especially in the 21st century?
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Right. So I think we're seeing a lot of different trends that are all coming together
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that are pointing on the direction of being able to take charge of your own
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mastery is if we could say your, your own ability to learn things is going to become increasingly
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important. So one of the trends is just simply in the economy itself. We're noticing something that
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the MIT economist David Autor calls skill polarization. And basically what this means is that we all kind
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of hear in the background of the news that income inequality is rising and this is creating all these
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problems. But there's actually a little bit more nuanced picture that it's not simply that,
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you know, the income spectrum is just getting stretched out. It's actually getting stretched
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out at the top, but compressed at the bottom. So the way to visualize this is if you imagine
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this sort of line of all the people earning different incomes, it's a little bit like the
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middle class, the people in the middle are getting squeezed to the two extremes. So some of them are
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becoming richer, but some of them are getting pushed back down and they're getting compressed
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into the bottom. And so because of this effect and what's happening, it seems to be that the reason
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for this is due to the fact that computers automation and indeed also things like outsourcing and moving
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jobs overseas has created an effect where a lot of the jobs that you could have done, you know,
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in your parents' age, maybe your grandfather's age, that you could have just stuck your nose to the
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grindstone, done that job your whole life, gotten a decent salary, had a nice house, had a car,
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you know, lived well on that salary. A lot of those jobs are disappearing. And what they're
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being replaced with are jobs that are more difficult, require more skill and often more
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education. And this is also the thing that's driving the second trend, which is that education,
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everyone is getting more degrees now. So at the same time, they're becoming kind of less valuable.
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We all know that, you know, it used to be the case that you could have maybe a two years degree
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and then you could get a good job and then you need to have a full bachelor degree. And now a lot of
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people are saying you basically need a master's to do sort of serious professional work.
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And so this kind of credential inflation is just because people recognize that you need to have
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education and there's more people going into it. And so in the rush of all these new people coming in,
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how have schools responded? Well, they've jacked up tuition prices and college now costs way,
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way more than it used to. So in addition to being somewhat less valuable for getting a good career,
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college is now more and more expensive in obtaining it. So I think the combination of
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these things means that we live in a world where you need to have good skills, you need to be good
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at things for your career to be successful. But at the same time, a lot of the traditional options for
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acquiring that kind of knowledge, they're not really cutting it, they're not really making the
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grades. So I think that being able to take control and learn skills on your own, whether that's to
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improve your current career or switch careers, or, you know, even just to add an additional skill that
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you want to learn. I think that's going to be incredibly important. And companies have also
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responded to this changing environment. You know, before, like you said, to get a job at a good
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company, you'd have to have a degree to show, right? And like, that's how it is mostly, but
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there's some companies like Google, they don't even, sometimes they don't even care if you have a
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degree, they just want to see, do you have the skill? And so if you can show them a learning
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project where you're like, Hey, I did this thing, I made a video game, they'll take you on.
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Yeah, you know, and I think the right way to think about it is a lot of people talk about,
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they want to talk about it either or they want to say, you know, going to college versus not going
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to college. But I mean, I mean, a lot of the people I think who are listening to this podcast
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right now, you've already been through school, you've kind of already done what you were going
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to do in the education system. Maybe you've got some idea in the back of your head that maybe
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you'll go back to getting a master's or an MBA or something. But you've already done whatever
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school you're going to do, you're already working if you're in that situation. And if you're in that
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situation, you know, for a lot of people, the idea of going back to school doesn't really make a lot
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of sense. It's going to be, you know, take off years of your life, you're going to lose a lot
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of money, you're going to lose a lot of opportunities, and maybe not even increase your job opportunities
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that much when you're done after you've been saddled with a lot of debt. And so for people in
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this situation, I think it makes way more sense before you first plan out, you know, which school
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you're going to attend to figure out, is there a way that I can get the skills that will get me hired
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or promoted, or get me on the kind of work that I want on my own. And so I even documented people
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in the book that have done things like this, that have transitioned in new careers or advanced their
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careers, or accelerated them by taking on these kinds of learning projects.
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And besides the economic benefit, right, it makes you, you know, being able to learn things quickly,
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master things quickly, definitely makes you more marketable in the job place. But have you found
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other benefits that come from, you know, having the ability to learn things quickly?
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Well, so the funny thing is, is when I've talked to people who've done projects like this,
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the economic benefits are rarely the things that they harp on, even though obviously to,
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you know, a lot of ordinary people, that would be the thing that really matters that you got a
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big raise, or you, you know, got a better career, or you launched a business. But when I talk to people
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about it, I think the thing that strikes people who really dive deep into this is that you feel like
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there's a lot more possibilities for your life. So for a lot of us, I think we have this feeling of
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being stuck of being kind of straightjacketed into the roles that we're in the skills that people
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think we have what they think we're good at. And sometimes, you know, that's great, you love your
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job, and people think you're good at that job. And that that's a perfect fit. But other times,
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you feel like, ah, you know, maybe I wish I did study something different. Maybe I wish I could do
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something different. Maybe I wish that, you know, I could speak another language or play an
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instrument or know how to program or, you know, paint or any of those skills. But we just don't
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really know the right way to get good at it. And so when people do these kinds of projects, where
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they see progress in a relatively short period of time, and they see what it really takes to learn
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something well, I feel like the world kind of opens up a little bit. And there's so many more
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options than were there before. So this MIT project was your first one. And this sort of opened
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your eyes like, yeah, this is possible to master a skill quickly. Did that catapult you to go after
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Yeah, so the I after I finished that project, I was super excited and not so much even just about
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like, computer science and doing things the kind of way of like trying to simulate what they teach
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in school. Although obviously, I think that was very exciting as well. But just the idea of if you
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could apply this mindset and the strategies and the tools that I was using to other subjects,
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other things you were trying to learn. And so my next project I was doing was actually kind of
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going back to my first initial exposure to these sorts of ideas. And so Benny Lewis, who was doing
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these projects where he was learning languages in a short period of time, I started thinking about
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what he was doing. And I started thinking about my own experience trying to learn French. And after
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that year of working there and following some of Benny Lewis advice, I was able to get to a point where I
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could have conversations. But I recognized that, you know, there much more was possible that if I had
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structured the project in the right way from the beginning, I might have gotten better a lot faster
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than it actually took me to learn French. And so I discussed with a friend, and we decided to do a
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project after much discussion that I called the year without English. So we went to four countries,
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Spain, Brazil, China and South Korea to learn Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Chinese and Korean.
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And the idea of the project is that and when we arrived in each country, we got off the plane,
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we would not speak in English to each other, or to anyone that we would meet. And so as a result,
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we would only be speaking the language that we're trying to learn. So that meant that not only we
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were getting lots of practice time, so we were actually going to accelerate the ability to learn
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these languages. But at the same time, whenever we would meet people, they would know to speak to us
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in that language. Because one of the big disadvantages of learning a new language when you already know
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one is that it's almost always easier to use your native language. And so that becomes a big obstacle,
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not only to practicing the language you're trying to learn, but indeed, even making friends with
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people who speak that language. Because, you know, a lot of people go overseas, and they make friends
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with a bunch of expats who all speak English. And so we did this process. And I would say that for
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me personally, I mean, you can go to my website and judge the results for yourself. But for me,
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personally, I was blown away that I didn't even think that we would be able to approach the level
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that we did. So I was thinking, okay, well, maybe it'll be a struggle. And after like three months,
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we'll be finally getting to a point where we can have like real conversations and interactions with
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people. But, you know, it'll be maybe a difficult grind. And I found that in Spain, at the very
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least, we were, you know, having friends going on dates, really living our lives in even a much
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shorter time than that, about a month, month and a half. And so for me, I would say that that was
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another eye opening experience that, you know, the way we typically think about learning languages,
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where it takes years and years in school, is probably far from the most efficient approach.
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Well, let's talk about the time factor in this before we get into like the principles.
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So you're in your experiences, you've had, you were able to take on these learning projects when
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you're in those sort of transitory periods in your young life, right after college, and you had some
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free time. So you're able to go deep, right? Did you find people who, you know, had jobs,
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families who are still able to take on learning projects and master them relatively quickly?
00:19:53.880
Absolutely. And you know, I think I think it's important or worth saying, because I think a lot of
00:19:57.720
times when people see a project like this, they're like, Oh, that sounds really cool. But yeah, I can
00:20:02.040
never do anything like that. You know, I have a job, I have kids, I have family commitments, I maybe
00:20:08.080
only have a couple hours a week. At most, I don't have, you know, 80 hours a week, or I don't have an
00:20:13.860
extreme time commitment. And I think in these situations, I think what's important to point out
00:20:18.160
is that when I talk about kind of the strategies and the principles for learning, one of them isn't
00:20:24.060
spend 100 hours a week. And in fact, there's even some evidence that spending a smaller amount of
00:20:29.260
time per week spread over a longer period of time is actually more efficient, more effective. So
00:20:34.040
in some ways, the research actually points in the opposite direction. So rather, what I think is that
00:20:39.700
the right way to think about it is what are you doing with each moment that you spend that you're
00:20:44.020
trying to learn. And so already, there's a you're probably, you know, reading books, you're listening
00:20:48.480
to this podcast, you're trying to learn things right now. And so there are adjustments you can make to
00:20:53.180
the time you already spend. And at the same time, you're there's also, you know, maybe small little
00:20:57.760
part time projects you can do. So one guy that I remember talking to, in the research, he was a
00:21:03.480
programmer, he was doing database programming. And he wanted to improve on his career, I think he was
00:21:08.380
working for like an airline company. And he decided just going to wake up a little bit earlier. And he
00:21:13.460
was going to for his particular project, he was going to make these online quizzes for the database
00:21:18.120
language that he was doing. And the nice thing about this is that the quizzes forced him to think of
00:21:22.780
like fairly detailed questions that maybe don't come up in his everyday work. So he really had to
00:21:27.720
master the programming language he was using. And it turns out that not only did, you know, he master
00:21:33.740
that skill, and he got really good with the database language, but it also allowed him to interact with
00:21:39.060
some people who were, you know, very prestigious in that sort of niche of that particular language of
00:21:44.200
database programming. And he ended up getting a new job with a raise, and it was sort of his dream job
00:21:49.340
and this kind of thing. And so this is an example of a pretty small project. I mean, it's not going
00:21:54.080
to make headline news. But I think it's an example of where applying a concentrated burst of learning
00:21:59.800
at a very specific purpose can have outsized results for the amount of time you spend, even if
00:22:05.180
it's not, you know, 40 hours a week. All right, so let's dig into these principles of ultra learning
00:22:10.280
that you uncovered based on your own experience in your research for the book. The first one I think is
00:22:15.080
really important, because I think it sort of gets people thinking about learning a different way.
00:22:18.660
And it's meta learning. What do you mean by meta learning?
00:22:22.200
So meta learning is basically when you use meta before a word, typically what you mean is that
00:22:27.940
it's about itself. So meta learning is another way of saying learning about learning. And this is
00:22:33.760
extremely important when you're taking on a project that you are going to be initiating and
00:22:39.180
managing yourself. Because the one advantage that school does have is that someone who knows the
00:22:44.440
subject design the curriculum, they designed decided, okay, well, first, you need to learn
00:22:48.060
this, and then you need to learn that, and then you learn some other thing. And there is problems
00:22:52.220
with this. I think that often schools will emphasize subjects that maybe the teacher thinks is important
00:22:58.160
or because this is what they've always taught. And it's not necessarily what's going to get you to
00:23:03.380
your result the fastest. So it doesn't mean that just because someone's made it a curriculum that
00:23:07.680
they necessarily know the best way for you to learn for your particular goals. But at the same time,
00:23:12.600
it is a challenge. Because if I said to you right now, okay, you know, you're going to have to learn
00:23:16.240
something really difficult, you're gonna have to learn machine learning, let's say, you might feel
00:23:19.800
well, I have no idea how to learn that. I don't know anything about that subject. How, where do you
00:23:23.980
even start? And so the first point is to start doing a little bit of research. And this can be just as
00:23:28.780
simple as just googling, like, how, how do I learn this subject? I know, that sounds pretty brainless. But
00:23:33.060
if you just google that, and you spend like, you know, half an hour, an hour, maybe even two hours,
00:23:37.760
just looking at the results, you will start to find books, resources, you'll find reviews of what
00:23:42.800
people have said about their experience using those different tools to learn it, you learn about
00:23:47.340
different methods. And you'll also start to get a better idea of what's involved in learning that
00:23:51.940
skill. So that's a very important kind of very first touch point. I often recommend if you're
00:23:57.880
serious about learning, or if you are thinking that you want to learn something to improve your career,
00:24:02.640
let's say that you go a step further and do what I call the expert interview method. And this is
00:24:07.100
where you pick someone who's already learned the skill that you want to learn. Or alternatively,
00:24:11.300
if you're trying to use the skill to accomplish something, get a new job, get a promotion, etc,
00:24:16.520
then find someone who has the role that you want, and basically interview them and ask them,
00:24:21.660
how do they acquire the skill? And what steps did they take to get where they are today? And this can
00:24:26.820
often also reveal sort of what might be necessary, what are the difficulties, what are the things that
00:24:31.680
they would have done that would have allowed them to get those skills. And it doesn't mean you have to
00:24:35.080
go down exactly the same path, but it gives you a sense of what is the default approach
00:24:42.080
And I think one thing to start off is just like have a definite goal in mind. That's one thing
00:24:46.440
I noticed through all the examples, your own and the people you highlight in the book,
00:24:49.620
they had like a specific goal of a skill mastery they're trying to go after. Like if you're just
00:24:54.980
saying like, I want to learn machine learning, that's tough, right? But if you said, okay, I'm going to
00:24:58.980
learn machine learning so I can do X project, well, that'll help you fine tune like what you need to
00:25:07.220
Yeah. And that's one of the things that I think is really underrated, just generally talking about
00:25:12.340
this is actually having a project. I know that that sounds kind of, wow, okay, project, whatever.
00:25:18.020
But when I talk to people about their actual learning efforts, the reason that they fail is not usually
00:25:23.720
because they're doing something like wildly inefficient, although that does sometimes happen,
00:25:28.960
but rather it's just kind of, well, I was thinking about learning the piano and then it just,
00:25:33.260
you know, there's nothing happened. Or I was thinking about learning programming and then I
00:25:37.220
just started doing it a little bit and then nothing happened. And so I think the problem in a lot of
00:25:41.200
these situations is that there's actually no project there. There's just a sort of a vague
00:25:45.420
feeling that you'd like to learn something or like to get better at something. And so what a project
00:25:50.240
separates is that you actually decide, okay, I want to learn this thing. How am I going to learn it?
00:25:54.820
Like what resources am I going to use? How am I going to spend my time? You know, how am I,
00:25:59.300
like, what am I going to be doing to learn it? And I think if you even just go through that process
00:26:03.000
of thinking what should be in the project, you're going to be miles ahead of most people who just
00:26:07.200
have sort of a vague notion that they want to learn something.
00:26:09.880
Right. And as you were talking, it made me think of like, you know, we've been talking about a lot
00:26:13.260
about skills, like speaking a foreign language, learning computer science, but you could do this
00:26:16.380
for things like, I want to learn about World War II history instead of just reading World War II
00:26:20.840
history books randomly. Like say, I'm going to write a paper about X thing by this time of year,
00:26:26.580
or I'm going to give a lecture somewhere about World War II history, because that will
00:26:33.060
Well, yeah, that was actually one of the people that I worked with when I was working on the book,
00:26:36.360
he wanted to do a project that was going to be somewhat the equivalent of a master's in military
00:26:42.820
history. And so obviously, we're not talking about a super practical subject here, you know,
00:26:47.180
unless he's going to go back and build some chariots or something. This is a very much a theoretical
00:26:52.240
project. And so in these kinds of projects, it often just comes down to, well, you do have to
00:26:56.900
do a lot of reading that there's no way around it for something like military history. But often it
00:27:02.040
was making these kind of touch points of how do I know that I've learned what I've learned. And so
00:27:06.200
he decided that how he was going to structure it is doing these sort of book reviews, and then
00:27:10.400
building towards having some kind of thesis paper. And so this is closer to what you would actually do
00:27:15.360
in a master's program. And for good reason, you know, you're if you do this kind of work where
00:27:19.500
you're producing something, it forces you to think about it much more deeply than if you just, you
00:27:23.580
know, check, read that book, check, read that book. And so I think that a lot of people could apply a
00:27:29.220
similar mentality to doing learning for all sorts of subjects. So, you know, what if you wanted to do
00:27:33.920
your own version of an MBA, right, then you could figure out, okay, what are the things that people
00:27:38.680
learn in an MBA? And how will I test myself? How will I practice the things? And then how will I apply
00:27:43.360
it to my career business? And so designing a project is not only about just picking the right
00:27:48.920
materials, but recognizing, okay, how am I actually going to get that depth? How am I actually going
00:27:53.440
to get that feedback that tells me that I'm learning what I'm supposed to learn?
00:27:58.300
And this idea of having a project to getting direct feedback goes, the next principle of
00:28:02.300
ultra learning is choosing direct learning over passive learning, right? So I mean, direct learning
00:28:07.580
is, you know, if you're gonna learn a foreign language, we'll go out there in to Mexico and speak
00:28:12.640
Spanish every day instead of just doing like Duolingo online.
00:28:16.140
Yeah, so, so I think there's a simple version of this principle that I think most people will
00:28:21.160
recognize and accept. And this is just the idea that if you want to be good at something, you have
00:28:24.700
to do that thing. You can't just read about it, can't just hear someone talk about it, you actually
00:28:29.700
have to do direct practice. And it turns out that this principle is a little bit more deeper and a
00:28:34.720
little bit more surprising, I think, when you dig into the actual science of it. And part of it is that
00:28:40.120
most people have a sense that the brain is a little bit like a muscle. I mean, a lot of us use
00:28:44.660
this metaphor, like straining our mental muscles or our mental faculties. And this metaphor actually
00:28:51.240
has a long history. So if you go back in time to when, you know, people used to study Latin and
00:28:56.620
geometry in school, this was a time period when the faculty view of the mind, the idea that there
00:29:02.980
are a few discrete faculties, and by training them the same way you would lift barbells or dumbbells
00:29:09.120
with your arms will train your biceps, that if you do this kind of exercise, it doesn't matter that
00:29:14.780
what you're learning isn't super relevant or important. What matters is that you're straining
00:29:19.460
your mind. And by straining your mind, you'll just be good at things that involve those kinds
00:29:23.220
of mental muscles. So just similarly to how, you know, if you do pushups in the bench press, you
00:29:28.280
know, the bench press, you're not really trying to lift that weight. But then if you have to do
00:29:31.240
something involving your chest muscles later, you'll be a bit stronger. Now, it turns out that this
00:29:35.760
isn't how the brain works at all. And it turns out that the brain is actually extremely context
00:29:39.900
specific, especially when you start learning things. So what happens is that the things you
00:29:45.020
learn tend to stay welded to the situations and contexts that you learn them in. And this can
00:29:50.100
happen in two ways. So one way is that you're actually doing something different when you learn
00:29:56.880
than when you actually are practicing. So the Duolingo example is a clear example of this issue with
00:30:01.800
transfer is that what you're doing in the app is, you know, looking at a sentence and then looking
00:30:07.520
at words in a word bank on your phone and tapping them with your finger. This is nothing like actually
00:30:12.320
speaking a language. Maybe it involves only about 10% or 20% overlap with the actual things you need
00:30:18.980
to do when you're speaking a language, which involve retrieving the words from memory, they're not going
00:30:22.900
to be in front of you, turning them into sentences again, without having the word bank, producing them
00:30:28.200
with your mouth, making sure you're intelligible, you know, dealing with the fact that maybe you
00:30:33.340
don't know that word and you actually have to look it up on the fly. There's a lot of these little
00:30:36.880
skills that are just never being practiced in Duolingo. And so you're going to have obvious issues
00:30:41.640
with transfer there. And the other reason that transfer can be an issue is even if the skill
00:30:46.260
transfers perfectly, even if you're doing exactly the same thing, often you don't activate the
00:30:51.380
knowledge if the situation and context you learned it in is different from the way you apply it.
00:30:56.340
So a lot of studies show that you can teach students, you know, a particular set of skills
00:31:01.860
in the classroom. And then there's some obvious application that they should definitely apply
00:31:05.900
their knowledge and they fail to. And the kind of way you can think about this is that when they
00:31:10.760
were learning in the classroom, a part of their mind said, oh, this is the knowledge that I need
00:31:14.600
to learn for this situation. And when you go to a new situation, it just doesn't apply. I don't need
00:31:18.720
to use it. And so the idea here is that again, you want to be working in a direct situation as
00:31:24.820
closely as possible, because that is going to tie your memory. So you're going to be able to
00:31:29.080
remember the things that are actually important in that situation. So this turns out to be a fairly
00:31:33.360
deep principle that has a lot of ramifications for how we learn that just go well beyond simply,
00:31:39.320
you know, well, you got to do stuff to learn it. Although that is an obvious implication of it.
00:31:43.160
Now, I think that was a really useful insight, the idea of the transferability of knowledge,
00:31:47.880
because I've experienced that in my own life. One example, when I was preparing for the
00:31:52.120
law school exam, the LSAT, you know, they had like these logic puzzles that is part of the test.
00:31:57.580
And I sucked at them when I first started, but then I got really good at it because I just practiced
00:32:01.320
them and I drilled them. And, but I don't know how that transferred over to other aspects of my legal
00:32:08.300
education. Like as soon as I was done with the LSAT, I've completely forgot how to do these logic
00:32:13.100
puzzles. Well, you know, it's funny because you're talking about logic puzzles. And I think one of the
00:32:17.600
clear examples of this today is, is critical thinking that everyone wants to, you know, we
00:32:22.500
should, we need to educate people on critical thinking and we need to take more critical
00:32:26.140
thinking classes. And I've even taken a critical thinking class. I had to do it as part of my
00:32:30.100
undergrad. And I am of the opinion that these probably don't work and they probably don't work
00:32:35.380
for this exact reason that critical thinking is not a faculty. It's not actually just an ability
00:32:40.200
you have. Rather, what it is, is it is an accumulation of many, many, many, many quite specific
00:32:45.200
skills. So, you know, that when you're evaluating, let's say dietary information, that you're going
00:32:50.500
to be skeptical of someone who says X, Y, Z, because you have some model of how the world
00:32:54.440
works. And so it's actually not really that easy to just teach people, you know, modus ponens
00:32:58.860
or, or something like that. And they can be like, aha, you've made a fallacious statement.
00:33:03.560
I'm not going to listen to your advice. People tend not to do that. And so I think that in a lot
00:33:08.960
of cases, if you want to have general skills, the disadvantage of this is that you actually have
00:33:14.560
to do a lot more practice than people often realize. But the advantage of this is that if
00:33:20.340
you know that you're going to be applying this skill in a particular context, you can accelerate
00:33:24.440
the learning dramatically by tying your learning to that context fairly early on. So if you know
00:33:30.660
that you're going to be learning a language to have conversations with people, trying to practice
00:33:34.840
those conversations is going to help a lot. Now, it may not help you as much as you would like
00:33:39.360
in being able to understand movies when you watch them or being able to, you know, read a novel
00:33:44.540
but at the same time, it's going to really help you in the thing that you care about.
00:33:48.420
All right. So choose direct learning. So instead of just watching videos online,
00:33:51.840
like actually do the thing you're trying to learn is the takeaway that, you know, reading
00:33:57.640
and watching things isn't bad. Like often you need to do that to learn something, but at the
00:34:01.760
same time, how many of us read a book and then that is the extent of our investment and we never
00:34:06.940
go beyond that. And the lesson of this is just that if we want actual skill, that's just not good
00:34:11.640
enough. All right. So another principle is drilling. And I think folks have probably done
00:34:15.820
drills in school. It's like, that's how you learn the multiplication tables. Like when you conjugated
00:34:19.740
verbs in a foreign language, you just drilled that thing over and over again. How do ultra learners
00:34:28.080
Right. So I think part of the difficulty, and this is sort of the challenge, is that often when we're in
00:34:32.340
school and we have drills, we're just kind of assigned them. It's just sort of like, okay,
00:34:36.980
you know, do these problems. Okay. And then you do those problems and you, and it feels often
00:34:43.100
arbitrary, boring. I like, I remember doing schools in, in drills in school and thinking, you know,
00:34:49.000
why are we doing this? This doesn't mean like, what is the possible relevance of this to the real
00:34:53.620
world? And so I think there's two issues with drilling. One of them is not knowing why you're
00:34:58.300
doing a drill, which is often the case in school is that you've just been told to do it. You don't
00:35:03.780
really have a sense of, ah, okay, I need to actually master this thing and I need to master
00:35:08.640
it in isolation so that I can get really good at it. And then the second thing I think about drills
00:35:13.480
is that often they're just sort of assigned to everyone in exactly the same way. So they're not
00:35:18.400
motivated by an observation about your own strengths and weaknesses, but they're just, okay,
00:35:23.520
everyone's doing this now. So everyone's doing this grammar exercise. Everyone's learning the same
00:35:27.840
vocabulary list. And the way I like to view it and the way I think ultra learners do things quite well
00:35:32.360
is that there is an actually a larger process for which drills are just a smaller part.
00:35:37.620
And the larger process starts with some direct practice. You actually try using the skill
00:35:41.420
and then you do a bit of analysis. You try to say to yourself, okay, if I want to keep getting better,
00:35:46.580
what parts of the skill could I isolate off and practice separately so that I could really focus
00:35:51.440
all of my attention on getting good at them? And I think if you ask those questions, then drills
00:35:56.580
don't become this sort of boring chore you have to do. They actually become a little bit of a
00:36:00.280
creative exercise because let's take the example of writing. For instance, if you want to get better
00:36:04.700
as a writer, this is now actually not a super easy process to figure out what are the drills you
00:36:10.180
should do. You have to think about what are all the different components of writing well. So there's
00:36:13.960
things like writing headlines and, you know, making sure you're using the right words and doing
00:36:18.440
research and humor and storytelling and all sorts of things. And then if you ask yourself, okay,
00:36:23.820
how would I get better at writing headlines? Well, now this isn't just sort of, okay,
00:36:27.980
you're just going to go do this assignment and write 50 headlines. Now what you're doing is you
00:36:32.220
actually have a little bit of a sort of mini project of like, okay, how would I get good at
00:36:36.300
this particular skill? And so the ultra learners I met are often very good at breaking down complicated
00:36:41.640
skills and working on the components. So one of the people I mentioned, Eric Barone, who developed
00:36:46.360
his own video game, he was really struggling with the art in the beginning. And so he would do this,
00:36:50.620
he would create a bunch of art and then he would say, okay, what is the thing I don't like? And so in one
00:36:54.440
case, he was saying, you know, I don't like the colors. I don't feel like this is very vibrant.
00:36:58.180
It feels kind of dull. And so he actually went and got a book on color theory and he was researching
00:37:02.740
that and being like, okay, now I can go back and approach this in a new way with the things I've
00:37:06.620
learned about this specific aspect of my skills. So I find that to be a much more valuable approach
00:37:11.840
than how it's typically tackled in schools. Yeah. I use that same sort of, you know, figuring out,
00:37:17.320
doing analysis to figure out what do you need to work on, what you need to drill on when I was in law
00:37:20.220
school. I'm going to bring back the law school example, because that was the last time I actually
00:37:22.820
like did a heavy learning project, but like with writing, legal writing. So in legal writing,
00:37:27.040
they put a premium on being short and concise, but while still conveying the information you need
00:37:31.060
to do. So what I would do is I would find like verbose, you know, literature, like it's just like
00:37:36.840
super wordy. That's unnecessarily wordy. And then see if I could rejigger that in a way that's much
00:37:42.420
more concise, that still conveys the original meaning. And I just do that over and over. And it's really
00:37:46.600
hard, but it was useful to figure out, okay, instead of using these three words, you can just use
00:37:50.580
this one word, or you can eliminate this thing. And it was, it was a useful drill practice for me.
00:37:56.960
So another principle of ultra learning is this idea of retrieval and it's using testing to retrieve.
00:38:03.900
Cause so we usually think of testing as a way to show that we have mastered a skill and it's still
00:38:09.580
part of ultra learning, but you actually use testing in the learning process. So what, how can
00:38:15.400
taking a test sometimes even before you know a subject help you learn that subject even more?
00:38:21.020
So retrieval is another one of those kind of deep principles that it sounds like, okay, yeah,
00:38:25.720
I kind of get that at first, but if you really explore it, you'll realize that it actually impacts
00:38:29.980
a lot of areas of your life that have nothing to do with testing, nothing to do with studying.
00:38:34.200
And if you really deeply understand this principle can apply, you can see lots of situations. You're like,
00:38:39.180
oh, that's why I can't remember this. And that's why I, you know, and so I'll just briefly
00:38:43.980
explain the principle through a study that was done by Jeffrey Karpicki and Janelle Blunt. And I love
00:38:48.380
this study because it just shows this kind of, it's like the perfect crisp counterintuitive study
00:38:54.140
where people think one thing and the reality is the opposite. And so what they did is they took
00:38:58.180
students and they split them up into different groups. And one of the groups, they got them to do
00:39:02.180
repeated review, which is a very common studying technique. A lot of students do it where you just
00:39:06.000
read something. And then when you have more time, you just keep reading it. You read it again and again
00:39:10.320
and again. And I mean, some students will do something a little bit more sophisticated than this.
00:39:13.980
They'll like recopy their notes or, or they'll use special highlighters or pens, but it's
00:39:18.840
essentially the same kind of activity. The other group, they got to do free recall, which is a
00:39:24.100
little different where you read it once and then you close the book. You're not allowed to open it
00:39:28.060
again. And you just have to try to remember as much as possible from the text. So it's called free
00:39:34.080
recall because there's no questions or prompts. So we're not even talking about doing a practice test
00:39:38.280
or, or doing flashcards. We're literally just talking about the books closed. What was in the book?
00:39:43.980
And after this was done, they asked the participants, how well do they think they
00:39:49.180
learned the material? And the people who did repeated review, the people who just read it over
00:39:53.580
and over again, gave themselves really high marks. They thought they had really learned and understood
00:39:57.980
the material. In contrast, those who did free recall gave themselves terrible marks. They're like,
00:40:02.540
oh my God, that was so difficult. I cannot remember anything at all. That was terrible. I must not know it
00:40:08.340
very well. I will probably score poorly on the test. Funny thing is you actually give them a test.
00:40:13.300
It's the total opposite. Those who did free recall do much better on the test than those who did
00:40:17.640
repeated review, despite their intuitions about how much they learned pointing in the opposite
00:40:21.840
direction. And so obviously the first implication of this is that the way most students study is
00:40:27.040
terrible. If you want to actually be able to remember things on tests, you have to close the
00:40:31.640
book and practice remembering it. You can't just look at it again and again. And so the way most
00:40:36.580
students study is a form of open book studying where the material you're trying to learn is in front of
00:40:41.700
you. It is not being forced to be recalled. Now there's, you don't have to do free recall,
00:40:46.760
although free recall is, is a pretty flexible technique. You can do things like cued recall,
00:40:51.440
which is like flashcards. You can do things like a practice tests. Practices are extremely helpful,
00:40:56.920
especially for problems where, you know, you need to solve problems. If you're dealing with physics
00:41:01.860
or something, a practice test is going to probably be more valuable than free recall. But the same ideas
00:41:06.480
here throughout that you are trying to solve a problem, answer a question, remember what was said
00:41:12.360
without actually looking at the answer. You know, obviously this applies to studying, but one place
00:41:17.020
that it applies that a lot of people don't think about is in your day-to-day life. So I was talking
00:41:21.460
to someone who was getting prepared for a big speech that they had to do and they, you know, how do most
00:41:26.640
people prepare for their speech? This person was silently reading their cue cards over and over again to
00:41:32.160
like, okay, I'm going to, this is how I'm going to memorize my speech. And I was like, no, no, no,
00:41:35.780
that's the wrong way to do it. You have to put the flashcards down, put the cue cards down,
00:41:39.940
try your speech. Obviously it's going to go abysmally because you haven't memorized it yet.
00:41:44.160
But when you get stuck and you're not sure what has happened, only then you try to look at it.
00:41:48.960
And so you actually have to practice remembering it and recalling it from memory and not just reading it.
00:41:53.840
And so this turns out to be a robust result that impacts our ability to remember many things in our
00:41:58.020
lives, not just things that we're studying, but, you know, things we read from books,
00:42:01.460
things that we hadn't heard in conversations, all sorts of things. And it's something that we
00:42:07.020
often miss when we actually want to make sure that we have knowledge inside of our head.
00:42:11.240
So, I mean, so a big principle from that is listening to you is like, if learning isn't hard,
00:42:16.780
you're probably not learning. If like the learning seems easy, you're probably really not learning it,
00:42:21.040
right? So if you're not struggling, right, with trying to recall with the test and fumbling,
00:42:25.500
then it's probably too easy. You're not actually learning it, even though you might think you're
00:42:28.660
learning it. Yeah. So this is actually a really interesting point because I hesitate to say that
00:42:33.940
difficulty itself is always good because, you know, you can do make things, okay, I'm going to
00:42:38.660
learn my physics textbook and it's going to all be in Chinese. And so like, that's going to be really
00:42:43.440
hard. So I'll learn physics. Well, you know, maybe not, right? I mean, if you don't speak any Chinese,
00:42:47.880
you probably don't understand anything. And so you're not getting that much value. That being said,
00:42:52.200
though, there's a lot of directions where the more effective tactics, so direct practice, retrieval,
00:42:58.120
a lot of the things that work better for learning, it just turns out that they're more mentally
00:43:03.120
strenuous and more difficult. And so the way that I like to think about it is that the brain is kind
00:43:08.140
of an energy saving device, right? If it doesn't have to learn something, it probably won't. It'll find
00:43:13.400
some way to accomplish the result without actually making, you know, costly changes to your internal
00:43:19.940
nervous system in order to actually encode that knowledge and embody it. So if you're able to do
00:43:25.600
something without getting good at a skill, then that environment probably will not push you by default
00:43:30.960
to learn the skill. And so what separates ultra learners is that they are committed to really learning
00:43:36.160
these skills. And so they will deliberately choose the non-default option. They will choose to do
00:43:40.880
retrieval practice instead of review. They'll choose to do direct practice, even though it's more fun to play
00:43:45.860
on an app or just watch a YouTube video. And so because of this, they're able to get outsized
00:43:52.400
results. Because if you focus your time and energy on what actually works, like in the study with
00:43:56.900
retrieval versus review, you will actually learn faster because the amount of time you spend will
00:44:01.260
be much more efficiently developed. Now, in this particular case of retrieval, there's one researcher,
00:44:06.260
R.A. Bjork, and he has a particular theory called desirable difficulties that particularly applies to
00:44:11.960
this idea of retrieval. And it basically says the harder it is to retrieve something, if you are
00:44:17.040
successful retrieving it, the better the impact will be on your long-term memory. So this creates
00:44:22.640
kind of an interesting trade-off that you want it to be a hard enough question that you actually have
00:44:26.940
to struggle to get the answer, but not so hard that you can't possibly remember anything. So
00:44:32.140
finding that kind of right balancing point can be a little bit difficult, but the reasoning seems to be
00:44:37.700
that if something was fairly easy to retrieve, it might also have too much of a hint, too much
00:44:43.040
context specificity, and that might also mean that it's generally less helpful. So for instance,
00:44:48.500
if you give a lot of hints in the question, then it tends to be less beneficial when you remember the
00:44:54.180
answer than if, let's say, you have a pretty vague question or a question that doesn't actually
00:44:58.980
give you that much detail. If you can nonetheless remember those details, it tends to be better in the
00:45:03.860
long-term. That idea of, you know, if it's hard, you're probably learning it. That's the kind of,
00:45:08.600
it's the easy thing to, I tell that to my son, he's nine. He's like, oh, this is so hard. And I'm
00:45:12.140
like, well, it means you're learning. It's like, it's good. So another principle is feedback and
00:45:17.020
feedback, particularly negative feedback is always hard to get. How does an ultra learner handle
00:45:23.420
negative feedback? They just relish it. They think, oh, this is great that someone says this sucks.
00:45:27.320
Well, not always. Like, I mean, I don't like getting negative feedback. I mean, you know,
00:45:30.820
if someone writes a negative review of my book, I don't like reading that either. I'm still a human
00:45:34.860
being. So I think people who are ultra learners, I don't think that they, you know, leave their
00:45:39.440
human identity at the door and they're going to be, I'm just going to become a feedback machine. And
00:45:43.280
you know, you can say whatever you want to me. Rather, I think that we accept that if we are going
00:45:48.200
to try to learn a skill, we're often going to face some uncomfortable experiences. And so it's not so
00:45:54.120
much that you, you know, relish it and that you love that you have to do all these frustrating and
00:45:59.240
sometimes painful things, but that you recognize that what you're doing is important enough to
00:46:04.180
warrant this. And so what you can do often is structuring feedback. So when we're talking about
00:46:09.560
feedback, I think there's two things that are important. So one is calibrating feedback to your
00:46:14.240
level. So I think that there is an intuition that we have that if we got harder feedback, harsher
00:46:20.100
feedback, we would probably improve. And I think in a lot of scenarios, this is probably the case because
00:46:25.580
the feedback that we get is probably too soft. It's not cutting enough, particularly if you've
00:46:31.960
learned a skill for a long time and you feel comfortable using it. Yeah, it's probably going
00:46:36.800
to be too easy. But at the same time, there's the case where you set the bar way too high and it's
00:46:41.940
just fail, fail, fail, fail, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. And then you're also not getting much benefit
00:46:47.820
of feedback either. And where feedback seems to be more beneficial is where there is a lot of
00:46:52.680
information in it. And one way of calibrating information is how much you can expect the
00:46:58.020
feedback. So if you know you're going to get good feedback, then when you get it, it's not actually
00:47:03.220
telling you something new. If you know that you're going to have failed something and someone tells
00:47:07.160
you you've failed it, again, it's not really telling you something new. Where the kind of sweet
00:47:11.100
spot is, is when you're not sure what the feedback is going to be. You're not sure what, whether it's going
00:47:16.560
to be a positive result or a negative result. You're not sure what someone is going to say about what
00:47:21.280
you ought to improve about your performance. And so I think that trying to get that right
00:47:25.380
difficulty zone is a big part of what ultra learners do when they're seeking the right
00:47:29.340
feedback environment. And often you can adjust little dials in your kind of approach to things
00:47:34.700
so that you can get into that sweet zone. So one of the examples that I use in that particular
00:47:38.980
chapter was Chris Rock, who he goes to these small comedy clubs to work on his comedy. Now, he's a
00:47:45.000
famous comedian. So, you know, just him being there is such a treat for the audience that he doesn't
00:47:50.000
actually have to be that funny to impress them. And so what he does is he deliberately tones down
00:47:55.500
his performance. He deliberately, you know, delivers the jokes a little bit worse than he
00:48:00.240
would on stage. He doesn't have the same, you know, punch and the same kind of delivery style
00:48:05.440
that he's famous for, because he knows that if he delivers it in a Chris Rock way, he can kind of
00:48:10.520
make anything funny. And what he wants to know is, is the material on its own funny? So you can see him
00:48:15.700
kind of tweaking that dial so that he actually has the possibility of failing as the possibility of
00:48:20.540
having a joke. He say, you know, no one laughs at it. And so I think that's something that is very
00:48:25.920
important with your own feedback is learning to tweak and find that sweet spot. And it's also useful
00:48:30.660
when you think about think feedback is figuring out is the person I'm getting feedback from actually
00:48:35.800
useful person to go to get feedback from. Sometimes you might go ask your, your parents or your wife,
00:48:40.820
they might not give you the best feedback. Yeah. Yeah. Your best friend. What do you think
00:48:45.240
of my business idea? I think that another thing that's super important with feedback is to recognize
00:48:50.180
that it's kind of a, it's kind of a twin problem that on the one hand, a lot of us don't get any
00:48:55.300
feedback. And so we need to be probably getting more feedback than we're getting right now.
00:49:00.600
But on the other side, and this is sort of the hard part when communicating this idea is that we
00:49:05.700
actually need to filter more of our feedback as well. So we need to kind of get more feedback in the sort
00:49:10.660
of front part of the funnel, but we also actually need to narrow the funnel because a lot of people
00:49:15.880
get very little feedback, but they respond to all of it, which is sort of a bad combination because
00:49:21.140
a lot of feedback just isn't that informative. So for instance, when I'm, you know, we're both
00:49:26.180
writers and when I write an article, if I ask for feedback on it, I'm sure that like, you know,
00:49:31.260
handful of the comments, they're going to talk about things that are not really that relevant to
00:49:35.460
making that article better. It's that person's opinion, you know, this particular idea didn't
00:49:39.780
appeal to me personally, and that doesn't matter, right? But at the same time, if you are not getting
00:49:46.520
any feedback on your writing, you're not going to improve. But if you also overreact, you know,
00:49:50.580
you wrote one article, and then it got really popular on some website. Okay, so now that's the
00:49:55.320
template for all my articles in the future. That's also a bad idea. So we need to not only get more
00:50:01.000
feedback, but also filter it and process it so that we're not overreacting to information,
00:50:05.560
or at least more than we can actually gain from the information at hand.
00:50:08.460
So there's other principles that you highlight in the book, but let's talk about like, let's say,
00:50:13.300
based on the stuff we've talked about, someone's listening to this, and they're like, I want to
00:50:17.040
start an ultra learning project. Are there projects that you think are, you know, good for getting
00:50:21.280
your feet wet with this? I think the best project to start is the one that has been kind of eating
00:50:25.800
you up inside your whole life. And I think if you really reflect on it deeply, we all have one of
00:50:31.020
those projects. We all have that thing that like, I really wanted to do X, but I just never did it.
00:50:37.040
You know, and that could be learning a language. It could be playing an instrument. It could even
00:50:41.780
be doing something for your career. You know, you like, you know what, I hate giving speeches.
00:50:46.960
Every time I have to stand up and give a speech, I, you know, have almost a nervous breakdown.
00:50:51.260
I wish I could just confidently come up there and just dazzle people on the stage. Or,
00:50:55.460
you know what, I always wanted to do this, but I never did. And so for me, I think the most
00:51:00.620
important factor is picking that project that you're really excited about. That it's something that when
00:51:05.620
you articulate and describe it, it's, wow, wouldn't that be cool? Wouldn't that be exciting?
00:51:10.640
Because, you know, if I just tell you, hey, you know, learning math is important. You should learn
00:51:14.820
math, but you're not excited to learn math. It's going to be a real struggle. It's going to be a
00:51:18.320
struggle to do things like direct practice and retrieval because they're going to involve some
00:51:22.300
discomfort. And so I think picking a project that really gets you excited and something that you
00:51:26.620
can sort of start getting obsessed over, that's the real key starting point. So it is going to be
00:51:31.060
different for every person. And I wouldn't want to say that there's a right or a wrong project to
00:51:35.640
start with, but I think the wrong project to start with is the one you're like, oh, yeah,
00:51:39.560
I guess I'll do this. Well, Scott, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn
00:51:44.160
more about the book and your work? Yeah. So you can go to my website at scotthyoung.com. That's
00:51:49.100
S-C-O-T-T-H-Y-O-U-N-G.com. And you can also check out the book. It's on Amazon, Barnes & Noble.
00:51:55.300
If you prefer listening to audio books, which I know many people do, it's also narrated by me on
00:51:59.700
Audible. So you can listen to it there as well. And you can listen to it at 1.5 times the speed.
00:52:04.540
Yeah. Yeah. You can just rip through it. Right. Well, Scott Young, thanks for your time. It's
00:52:08.460
been a pleasure. Oh, thanks so much for having me. My guest today was Scott Young. He is the author
00:52:12.840
of the book, Ultra Learning. It's available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find
00:52:17.100
more information about his work at his website, scotthyoung.com. Also check out our show notes at
00:52:22.140
aom.is slash ultra learning. You can find links to resources. We can delve deeper into this topic.
00:52:29.700
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Check out our website at
00:52:37.700
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