The Art of Manliness - #557： Grow, Adapt, and Reinvent Yourself Through Ultralearning

00:00:00.000 Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. Now, many

00:00:11.460 of us want to learn a new skill or master a new area of expertise, either to further

00:00:15.840 our career or simply for the sake of personal fulfillment. But going deep in a subject seems

00:00:20.440 like it would take a lot of time and even require going back to school, something most

00:00:23.960 of us don't have the time, money, and desire to do so. My guests today say there's another

00:00:27.960 way. His name is Scott Young, and he's the author of Ultra Learning, Master Heart Skills,

00:00:31.840 Outsmart the Competition, and Accelerate Your Career. We begin our conversation with Scott's

00:00:35.720 successful experiment of doing all the coursework for a computer science degree from MIT in less

00:00:40.340 than a year and for free, and how this opened up Scott to the idea of ultra learning. We

00:00:44.720 then discuss the economic benefits of learning how to learn, as well as the personal benefits

00:00:48.640 that come from mastering new skills as adults. In the second half of our conversation, we

00:00:52.840 get into the practical techniques of the ultra learning method, including creating a plan

00:00:56.640 for your learning project, choosing active over passive learning, and drilling effectively.

00:01:01.180 Scott and I end our conversation with how to figure out what feedback to listen to and

00:01:05.080 what to ignore as you're learning a new project. After the show's over, check out our show notes

00:01:09.300 at aom.is slash ultra learning. Scott joins me now via clearcast.io.

00:01:13.900 All right, Scott Young, welcome to the show.

00:01:26.680 Oh, it's great to be here.

00:01:27.920 So I've been following your work on your blog about, and you've been writing about learning

00:01:32.840 how to become a better learner for, man, over 10 years now. So since 2006.

00:01:38.180 Yeah.

00:01:38.600 And you finally have taken all the stuff you've been writing about, researching about on your

00:01:42.820 own and put it into a book. It's called Ultra Learning, Master Hard Skills, Outsmart the

00:01:47.640 Competition and Accelerate Your Career. In the book, you start off describing a learning

00:01:52.860 project that you took on that was pretty ambitious. You decided to earn an MIT computer science degree

00:01:59.940 on your own in like less than a year. So tell us about this MIT challenge you set for yourself.

00:02:06.540 Sure. Yeah. So this is a project I took on in 2011, which so already a ways back. And I

00:02:12.660 just graduated from business school. And I was feeling at the time, like I'd kind of picked

00:02:17.680 the wrong thing to study. I don't know if anyone listening here has ever felt that where you

00:02:21.640 go spend a bunch of time in school, and then you're like, Oh, that's what I really should

00:02:25.220 have been doing. And the problem is that when you already have a degree going back to school

00:02:30.000 for another 40 years feels like maybe not the best use of your time and probably not the

00:02:35.660 best use of your money. And so I was sort of debating in my head, do I really want to do

00:02:39.500 this? Do I really want to extend out my length of time in the higher education system? And

00:02:45.120 around this time, I was sort of online just sort of fiddling around. And I found this class

00:02:49.480 that was posted by MIT online for free. So anyone can access these. These are MIT's open

00:02:54.700 courseware. And I took the class and I was really impressed. I was like, wow, you know,

00:02:58.660 this is a much better class than the classes I remember taking in school. And not only that,

00:03:04.360 you know, there wasn't just one class, there were many classes. And so this kind of got the

00:03:08.600 gears turning a little bit that I was thinking in my head, has anyone ever tried to use the

00:03:13.600 resources that MIT puts online for free to do something that approximates what an MIT student

00:03:18.520 would learn when they're doing an undergraduate degree. And so I put together a curriculum trying

00:03:23.840 to like mix and match to try to get as close as possible to what an MIT student would take.

00:03:28.660 And then I decided for simplicity's sake, to focus on trying to pass the final exams and do

00:03:35.200 the programming projects. And one of the things that I found going through this process, and as you

00:03:40.760 mentioned, I'd already been writing a little bit about learning online. So I'd already kind of had

00:03:44.760 this idea of, you know, learning efficiently and studying effectively for even before I started the

00:03:49.520 project. But when you have complete flexibility, you have the option to do some things that maybe a

00:03:55.860 normal student can do. So for instance, if you watch a lecture, I know people who listen to podcasts

00:04:00.780 are probably aware of this, you can listen to it at 1.5 times the speed. And because you can listen

00:04:05.840 to 1.5 times the speed, you can maybe take all the lectures in, you know, a couple of days instead

00:04:10.740 of spending four months. Or if you're working on assignments, normally you have to finish the whole

00:04:15.980 assignment, you get stuck on some problems, you don't know the answer, you leave them blank, you have

00:04:19.440 to hand them in. And then, you know, you wait a week or two, and then you get your answers back.

00:04:23.960 Whereas if you're doing it at home, you can do one at a time. And just when you get stuck,

00:04:27.620 you check the solution, you get that quick feedback. So you can learn in some cases more

00:04:32.160 effectively without having to go through school, even if you're using the same kinds of resources.

00:04:37.620 And so with these sorts of ideas in mind, plus quite a bit of work, if I'm being frank,

00:04:42.280 I decided I wanted to try to do it in 12 months. So this was sort of my first big

00:04:46.080 ultra learning project. But as I talk about in the book, there's a lot of people who have done,

00:04:50.560 I think, probably more impressive projects and more interesting projects. And so I wanted to write

00:04:54.940 this book to not just talk about people who try to learn facsimiles of a degree really quickly,

00:05:00.660 but rather, I wanted to focus on people who have mastered the art of learning hard skills. Because

00:05:06.680 even if you don't want to go back to school, even if you don't care about getting MIT classes and

00:05:11.020 learning math and computer science and that kind of thing, there's probably something that you want

00:05:15.200 to get good at, there's probably a skill that would improve your life, your career. And knowing the

00:05:21.120 essence of how to do that in the most effective way possible has been a big mission of mine in

00:05:26.380 writing on my blog, and then certainly in writing this book.

00:05:28.980 So did you successfully complete the MIT challenge? You get your computer science?

00:05:31.860 Yeah. Yes, I did. So I finished the last class just before the 12 month mark in the whole process.

00:05:39.160 So there was 33 classes in the degree. I did one class earlier as like a test class. I did 32 in that

00:05:45.280 12 month period of time.

00:05:46.460 And as you talk about in the book, as you started this MIT project, where you were taking these

00:05:51.540 courses and trying to finish them really fast, and you're studying going deep and being really

00:05:56.180 intense with your studies, you found other people, like you mentioned, who were doing the same thing,

00:06:00.600 who are mastering new skills and domains of knowledge in a short amount of time. I mean,

00:06:04.820 tell us about some of these folks that you've come across, you know, since the MIT project,

00:06:07.960 and since you started writing this book.

00:06:09.740 Yeah, so actually, my kind of inspiration for taking on this project was from meeting a fellow named

00:06:15.460 Benny Lewis. And so this is a couple of years before I did the MIT challenge, I was

00:06:19.240 a student, and I had the opportunity to study abroad for a year in France. And I thought it

00:06:23.960 would be so cool to come back speaking French, I thought, you know, I'd really like to spend this

00:06:28.780 year and come back and speak another language. And I was in France for a couple months, maybe three

00:06:33.920 or four months. And it was really difficult. I didn't feel like my French was progressing that

00:06:38.280 much. I didn't feel like I could have conversations with people. And I felt that most of the people

00:06:42.580 around me, you know, they just spoke in English, even if they could speak in French. And so I was

00:06:46.460 a little bit discouraged. And I was sort of chatting about this with a friend from home.

00:06:49.800 And he was like, Have you heard of Benny Lewis? And I was like, No, who's Benny Lewis. And so Benny

00:06:54.860 Lewis has a website very modestly titled fluent in three months. And it is about his quest to try to

00:07:00.500 become fluent in the language in his littlest three months. And so he would do these challenges where he

00:07:04.760 goes to a country where he only has three months, because that's how long his visa was,

00:07:08.680 and try to learn as much as possible. And sure enough, he's posting videos at the end of it of

00:07:13.680 him having like little conversations with people, which I was super impressed by, because I've been

00:07:18.720 in France for longer three months, and I couldn't do that. And so this was sort of the first time

00:07:23.000 someone had kind of pointed me out to the idea that there are rather unconventional ways to approach

00:07:28.240 learning that are often a lot faster or more effective than the ways that we're taught in school.

00:07:33.940 And, and so he was one example. Another example was another old school blogger was Steve Pavlina,

00:07:38.820 who did a computer science and math double major over three semesters. Again, this was through actual

00:07:44.680 school, it wasn't at a time when MIT OpenCourseWare was available, but he did it by allocating his

00:07:49.340 schedule and, you know, optimizing the aspects of studying and doing that kind of thing. So I'd

00:07:53.860 already had some of these indications that this kind of thing might be possible before I did my

00:07:58.040 challenge. But then after, of course, you meet, you know, once you do something, you say, Hey,

00:08:02.360 have you heard of so-and-so? Have you heard of so-and-so? So I I've gotten the chance to hear

00:08:06.060 like many fantastic stories, people like Eric Barone, who built a million dollar video game

00:08:11.960 business. He just learned all the aspects of video game design and built a bestselling game.

00:08:16.080 People like Roger Craig, who really like studied the process for getting good at trivia and won

00:08:21.680 hundreds of thousands of dollars in jeopardy, or people like Tristan De Montebello, who I even worked

00:08:25.620 with him on his project where over seven months, he went from having near zero experience public

00:08:30.660 speaking to being a finalist for the world championship of public speaking.

00:08:35.500 And with these people, I mean, did you start seeing how, were they doing things similar? Like

00:08:40.200 they were doing the same, like they, they've sort of cracked the code without knowing that there was

00:08:43.440 a code to learning things quickly.

00:08:45.760 Yeah. So some of them, I think we're quite aware of the learning principles involved. So Roger Craig,

00:08:51.160 for instance, was a computer science PhD student when he was doing his project. And he was like

00:08:57.460 already a really big fan of what are known as space repetition systems and spacing effects.

00:09:02.340 So he was aware of this kind of learning principles, the kind that I discuss in the book,

00:09:06.280 as in to say that most people do. I mean, I was never taught these subjects in school and it turns

00:09:10.180 out they're very important for learning well, but other people, I feel like they just kind of happen

00:09:15.880 upon the right combinations of principles by chance. And so, you know, even for me researching this book,

00:09:21.740 having done a number of projects that I document in the story, even when I started doing the

00:09:26.520 research, there were still new things that I was finding out. So I think it's kind of

00:09:29.760 difficult that a lot of times we don't even realize that we're doing things that work well

00:09:34.960 with how the brain learns things. And sometimes we're doing things that don't work well.

00:09:38.740 We don't realize it. We spend months and months, you know, banging our head against the wall,

00:09:42.440 so to speak. And then, you know, it's, it's, it's going through that process and that frustration.

00:09:47.500 No one ever says, Oh no, you needed to do it this way. If you actually wanted to,

00:09:51.240 to master this skill. And I think that's particularly true for the kinds of skills

00:09:55.280 they're outside of school. Like we have, you know, for most of us, at least 12 years of

00:10:00.740 experience going through the school system. And so we have some familiarity with like taking tests and,

00:10:06.080 you know, studying and that kind of thing. But if I plopped you down and say, okay,

00:10:09.440 you need to become a great writer or public speaker or, you know, programmer, even though you never

00:10:13.740 studied that before, how would you set up a project to do that? I think a lot of people would give you a

00:10:18.220 pretty blank stare. And so I think that exposing those principles of how it works was, was a big goal in my book

00:10:23.900 because yeah, they just don't teach you how to learn in school.

00:10:27.280 Right. And so you call this strategy of learning things and not even just learning. So we're talking

00:10:30.900 about like mastery here. It's like, it's not just, you listened to all the MIT courses. Now you

00:10:34.820 actually took the test to show that you, you, you learned what you were supposed to learn.

00:10:39.480 Yeah.

00:10:39.760 You got to be able to have a conversation at the end of three months. So it's mastery,

00:10:43.700 but you do in a quick amount of time, you call this ultra learning. Why do you think this ability

00:10:48.360 to learn things is such an important skill to have, especially in the 21st century?

00:10:52.800 Right. So I think we're seeing a lot of different trends that are all coming together

00:10:56.500 that are pointing on the direction of being able to take charge of your own

00:11:00.460 mastery is if we could say your, your own ability to learn things is going to become increasingly

00:11:05.100 important. So one of the trends is just simply in the economy itself. We're noticing something that

00:11:10.540 the MIT economist David Autor calls skill polarization. And basically what this means is that we all kind

00:11:16.960 of hear in the background of the news that income inequality is rising and this is creating all these

00:11:21.500 problems. But there's actually a little bit more nuanced picture that it's not simply that,

00:11:26.260 you know, the income spectrum is just getting stretched out. It's actually getting stretched

00:11:30.460 out at the top, but compressed at the bottom. So the way to visualize this is if you imagine

00:11:35.380 this sort of line of all the people earning different incomes, it's a little bit like the

00:11:38.820 middle class, the people in the middle are getting squeezed to the two extremes. So some of them are

00:11:43.060 becoming richer, but some of them are getting pushed back down and they're getting compressed

00:11:47.220 into the bottom. And so because of this effect and what's happening, it seems to be that the reason

00:11:54.780 for this is due to the fact that computers automation and indeed also things like outsourcing and moving

00:12:01.100 jobs overseas has created an effect where a lot of the jobs that you could have done, you know,

00:12:06.860 in your parents' age, maybe your grandfather's age, that you could have just stuck your nose to the

00:12:11.240 grindstone, done that job your whole life, gotten a decent salary, had a nice house, had a car,

00:12:15.720 you know, lived well on that salary. A lot of those jobs are disappearing. And what they're

00:12:20.980 being replaced with are jobs that are more difficult, require more skill and often more

00:12:25.660 education. And this is also the thing that's driving the second trend, which is that education,

00:12:30.860 everyone is getting more degrees now. So at the same time, they're becoming kind of less valuable.

00:12:36.020 We all know that, you know, it used to be the case that you could have maybe a two years degree

00:12:39.640 and then you could get a good job and then you need to have a full bachelor degree. And now a lot of

00:12:43.880 people are saying you basically need a master's to do sort of serious professional work.

00:12:48.440 And so this kind of credential inflation is just because people recognize that you need to have

00:12:53.400 education and there's more people going into it. And so in the rush of all these new people coming in,

00:12:58.760 how have schools responded? Well, they've jacked up tuition prices and college now costs way,

00:13:03.880 way more than it used to. So in addition to being somewhat less valuable for getting a good career,

00:13:08.800 college is now more and more expensive in obtaining it. So I think the combination of

00:13:14.000 these things means that we live in a world where you need to have good skills, you need to be good

00:13:18.620 at things for your career to be successful. But at the same time, a lot of the traditional options for

00:13:24.700 acquiring that kind of knowledge, they're not really cutting it, they're not really making the

00:13:29.080 grades. So I think that being able to take control and learn skills on your own, whether that's to

00:13:34.000 improve your current career or switch careers, or, you know, even just to add an additional skill that

00:13:39.240 you want to learn. I think that's going to be incredibly important. And companies have also

00:13:43.000 responded to this changing environment. You know, before, like you said, to get a job at a good

00:13:47.000 company, you'd have to have a degree to show, right? And like, that's how it is mostly, but

00:13:50.460 there's some companies like Google, they don't even, sometimes they don't even care if you have a

00:13:54.120 degree, they just want to see, do you have the skill? And so if you can show them a learning

00:13:58.060 project where you're like, Hey, I did this thing, I made a video game, they'll take you on.

00:14:02.700 Yeah, you know, and I think the right way to think about it is a lot of people talk about,

00:14:07.280 they want to talk about it either or they want to say, you know, going to college versus not going

00:14:11.240 to college. But I mean, I mean, a lot of the people I think who are listening to this podcast

00:14:15.240 right now, you've already been through school, you've kind of already done what you were going

00:14:19.140 to do in the education system. Maybe you've got some idea in the back of your head that maybe

00:14:23.040 you'll go back to getting a master's or an MBA or something. But you've already done whatever

00:14:27.540 school you're going to do, you're already working if you're in that situation. And if you're in that

00:14:30.820 situation, you know, for a lot of people, the idea of going back to school doesn't really make a lot

00:14:35.500 of sense. It's going to be, you know, take off years of your life, you're going to lose a lot

00:14:38.980 of money, you're going to lose a lot of opportunities, and maybe not even increase your job opportunities

00:14:43.300 that much when you're done after you've been saddled with a lot of debt. And so for people in

00:14:47.560 this situation, I think it makes way more sense before you first plan out, you know, which school

00:14:52.800 you're going to attend to figure out, is there a way that I can get the skills that will get me hired

00:14:57.360 or promoted, or get me on the kind of work that I want on my own. And so I even documented people

00:15:02.980 in the book that have done things like this, that have transitioned in new careers or advanced their

00:15:06.960 careers, or accelerated them by taking on these kinds of learning projects.

00:15:11.600 And besides the economic benefit, right, it makes you, you know, being able to learn things quickly,

00:15:15.900 master things quickly, definitely makes you more marketable in the job place. But have you found

00:15:20.260 other benefits that come from, you know, having the ability to learn things quickly?

00:15:23.800 Well, so the funny thing is, is when I've talked to people who've done projects like this,

00:15:28.860 the economic benefits are rarely the things that they harp on, even though obviously to,

00:15:33.420 you know, a lot of ordinary people, that would be the thing that really matters that you got a

00:15:36.800 big raise, or you, you know, got a better career, or you launched a business. But when I talk to people

00:15:43.700 about it, I think the thing that strikes people who really dive deep into this is that you feel like

00:15:50.020 there's a lot more possibilities for your life. So for a lot of us, I think we have this feeling of

00:15:54.900 being stuck of being kind of straightjacketed into the roles that we're in the skills that people

00:16:01.000 think we have what they think we're good at. And sometimes, you know, that's great, you love your

00:16:06.380 job, and people think you're good at that job. And that that's a perfect fit. But other times,

00:16:10.200 you feel like, ah, you know, maybe I wish I did study something different. Maybe I wish I could do

00:16:14.820 something different. Maybe I wish that, you know, I could speak another language or play an

00:16:18.780 instrument or know how to program or, you know, paint or any of those skills. But we just don't

00:16:25.220 really know the right way to get good at it. And so when people do these kinds of projects, where

00:16:29.640 they see progress in a relatively short period of time, and they see what it really takes to learn

00:16:34.180 something well, I feel like the world kind of opens up a little bit. And there's so many more

00:16:38.280 options than were there before. So this MIT project was your first one. And this sort of opened

00:16:42.220 your eyes like, yeah, this is possible to master a skill quickly. Did that catapult you to go after

00:16:48.000 and master other skills?

00:16:49.740 Yeah, so the I after I finished that project, I was super excited and not so much even just about

00:16:55.760 like, computer science and doing things the kind of way of like trying to simulate what they teach

00:17:01.640 in school. Although obviously, I think that was very exciting as well. But just the idea of if you

00:17:06.980 could apply this mindset and the strategies and the tools that I was using to other subjects,

00:17:11.120 other things you were trying to learn. And so my next project I was doing was actually kind of

00:17:15.060 going back to my first initial exposure to these sorts of ideas. And so Benny Lewis, who was doing

00:17:21.620 these projects where he was learning languages in a short period of time, I started thinking about

00:17:25.780 what he was doing. And I started thinking about my own experience trying to learn French. And after

00:17:30.660 that year of working there and following some of Benny Lewis advice, I was able to get to a point where I

00:17:34.640 could have conversations. But I recognized that, you know, there much more was possible that if I had

00:17:41.000 structured the project in the right way from the beginning, I might have gotten better a lot faster

00:17:46.620 than it actually took me to learn French. And so I discussed with a friend, and we decided to do a

00:17:50.800 project after much discussion that I called the year without English. So we went to four countries,

00:17:56.140 Spain, Brazil, China and South Korea to learn Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Chinese and Korean.

00:18:01.940 And the idea of the project is that and when we arrived in each country, we got off the plane,

00:18:06.840 we would not speak in English to each other, or to anyone that we would meet. And so as a result,

00:18:12.260 we would only be speaking the language that we're trying to learn. So that meant that not only we

00:18:15.700 were getting lots of practice time, so we were actually going to accelerate the ability to learn

00:18:20.460 these languages. But at the same time, whenever we would meet people, they would know to speak to us

00:18:24.480 in that language. Because one of the big disadvantages of learning a new language when you already know

00:18:28.960 one is that it's almost always easier to use your native language. And so that becomes a big obstacle,

00:18:33.800 not only to practicing the language you're trying to learn, but indeed, even making friends with

00:18:37.860 people who speak that language. Because, you know, a lot of people go overseas, and they make friends

00:18:42.380 with a bunch of expats who all speak English. And so we did this process. And I would say that for

00:18:47.800 me personally, I mean, you can go to my website and judge the results for yourself. But for me,

00:18:52.440 personally, I was blown away that I didn't even think that we would be able to approach the level

00:18:58.440 that we did. So I was thinking, okay, well, maybe it'll be a struggle. And after like three months,

00:19:03.080 we'll be finally getting to a point where we can have like real conversations and interactions with

00:19:07.240 people. But, you know, it'll be maybe a difficult grind. And I found that in Spain, at the very

00:19:12.920 least, we were, you know, having friends going on dates, really living our lives in even a much

00:19:18.920 shorter time than that, about a month, month and a half. And so for me, I would say that that was

00:19:23.240 another eye opening experience that, you know, the way we typically think about learning languages,

00:19:27.220 where it takes years and years in school, is probably far from the most efficient approach.

00:19:31.460 Well, let's talk about the time factor in this before we get into like the principles.

00:19:35.700 So you're in your experiences, you've had, you were able to take on these learning projects when

00:19:39.480 you're in those sort of transitory periods in your young life, right after college, and you had some

00:19:43.320 free time. So you're able to go deep, right? Did you find people who, you know, had jobs,

00:19:49.380 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 0.77

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

00:24:39.400 for getting good at this thing.

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

00:25:04.180 actually learn to do X thing.

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

00:26:30.020 direct your learning even more.

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

00:34:24.980 make drilling more effective and efficient?

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.

00:37:56.140 Absolutely.

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, 0.67

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

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00:53:12.320 thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay, reminding you not only

00:53:15.600 to listen to the AOM podcast, but put what you've heard into action.

The Art of Manliness - November 04, 2019

#557： Grow, Adapt, and Reinvent Yourself Through Ultralearning

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