GA 285 | Learning Four Languages in One Year with Scott Young

Learning impacts every facet of our lives. Just the way that your lungs are about breathing air and your heart is about pumping blood, your brain is an organ of learning. Like that is what it does.

Today, I'm excited to welcome Scott Young to the show. Scott's the author of a book I highly recommend all continuous improvement practitioners read called Ultralearning. Now, I actually just finished the audiobook version of the book and I really enjoyed it. And while this, this isn't a traditional lean oriented book, I do believe the principles and lessons Scott shares in the book will add incredible value to the way we lean thinkers learn and deliberately practice. Now, early in the show, Scott does a great job of explaining what ultralearning is all about, so I'll let him do that. But to give you an idea of what this is all about, Scott used the principles he writes about to learn four languages in a single year. And if that isn't enough, in 2012, Scott decided to learn MIT's four year undergraduate computer science curriculum in 12 months without taking any classes. At MIT, he was successful in passing the final exams for 33 classes and completing the required programming projects. So make no mistake, Scott practices what he preaches. Show notes for this episode, which will include links to everything we discuss, can be found over@gembapodcast.com just look for episode 285. You can also check out Gemba Academy's Lean and Six Sigma learning library over@gembaacademy.com okay, enough for me. Let's get to the show. All right, Scott, well, welcome to the show. How's it going?

Oh, it's great to be here.

Yeah, awesome. Well, I, we were just chatting before I hit the record button that I just got done listening to you on the audiobook. So very, very well done with the, with the book Ultra Learning, Scott. So thank you for all the, the time and the research and I'm sure it was, you know, an ultra learning project in itself to complete that book, but you did a really, really good job. So thank you for that and thank you for coming onto the show.

Oh, thank you so much. And thank you for having me. And let me talk about the thing that I care about most in the world with some of the people who are listening right now.

Yeah, awesome. All right, well, Scott, tell us a little bit about your background. Tell us maybe how you got introduced to this whole concept of ultralearning, and I want to obviously jump into your personal experience with it, but just tell us about your background first.

Right. So I Grew up in Canada. I grew up in a small town in northern Manitoba and I went to school at just sort of a mid ranked university here in Canada, University of Manitoba. And I studied business of all things. And I got introduced to this idea of ultralearning which I'm sort of defining here is people who take on self directed learning projects. So it's not the typical go into a school and sit in a classroom. It's, you know, I want to get really good at X and then they get really good at X and that they also approach it with a certain intensity and a certain passion and obsession with doing it really well that I think goes well beyond what we could consider as normal. And so my sort of introduction to this actually came in a moment of frustration. So I was, I was doing an exchange in France, so I was doing my business school education in Manitoba, but I had the opportunity to study abroad for a year in France and I was really interested in learning French. I thought it would be really nice. You know, I'm gonna be there for a whole year, maybe I can come back and I can parle en francais or something like that. And so I, I was going there and you know, it's funny because before I went there I decided, you know, I'm gonna just like check with some of the people. So there was a, there was a meet and greet kind of thing with the incoming and outgoing students and the people who had been on exchange like the year before. And I, and I talked to some of them and I asked them, you know, because I was very interested in learning the language and I wanted to know what other people's experience were. And I was saying, you know, did you learn the language when you went there? And you know what was really funny? No one did. Which sounds really surprising, you know, like you kind of, your mindset of, well, you go on exchange and you know, you learn a language or you live in, you know, you live in Paris, of course you learn French or you go and live in this other country, of course you learn the language. And so this was very interesting for me because this was something I wanted to do and yet I was seeing clearly that most people were not successful with it. And it was only when I went to the country that I started to see why. And it's because the way that our exchange system worked is the classes were transferred back and they were university level classes. And so if you don't speak the language, what language are you going to study in? You're going to study in English, you're not going to study in this language that you've never studied before at university level classes. And then you form this bubble of English around you where everyone speaks to you in English and you try to practice the language, but you're constantly surrounded by people who are speaking your native language to you. And so it was around this time, and I'm really trying to learn French, I'm really trying to break out of this. I'm trying to practice a lot of things. And I'm kind of griping about this with a friend back from home and he says to me, have you ever heard of Benny Lewis? And I say, well, no, who's Benny Lewis? And so he told me about this guy and he had just started his blog right now. Now he's become a little bit famous, but at the time he had just started his blog, which was called Fluent in three Months, which, I mean, I'd been there for about four months at this point and I was nowhere close to fluent. So like most people, when you hear about someone, you know attempting something really audacious like this, your first reaction is, oh, that's bullshit. Like there's no way that you can do that. And I kind of pushed my skepticism aside just long enough to meet this guy. And he was incredible. He was learning these languages in a very short period of time. But it wasn't just because, you know, he was super smart or he was some kind of genius, but that his method was different. And his method was that instead of like the way I was thinking that, you know, I had to get ready to speak French to people. He was going, you know, off the plane with a phrase book and starting to talk to people from the very first day. And he was amassing huge amounts of practice where I was kind of sheepishly practicing at home. And so this sort of idea of meeting Benny Lewis was sort of my first introduction to this idea of ultralearning, of people taking on ambitious projects to learn hard skills like languages, but not restricted to that. Also business, public speaking, all sorts of things that I've encountered since, but directed at how do I get really good at things in an effective way. And so this was sort of my first introduction, but of course we can talk about it. I've done some of my own projects since and it's really been kind of the guiding thing of my life for the last 10 years.

Yeah, well, okay, let's jump into your kind of personal story with ultralearning because you've done some mind blowing things.

Scott. I don't know how else to describe it.

I mean, come on, man. MIT challenge. Let's start there. MIT Challenge. What the heck, man? That was incredible.

Yeah, so as I mentioned, I'm studying business school, and now I've come back from exchange and I'm graduating. And I know that we were talking about a lot of business stuff. We were talking about how the people listening to this podcast are caring about, you know, kind of the stuff you might learn in business school. But I went through business school, and I left somewhat disillusioned because I kind of felt like I had spent a number of years in this and I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I wanted to be someone running my own business. And I felt like most of what I learned applied to being a middle manager in a large company. And so I was thinking, you know what? I might like to study something else. And when I was going into school, the other thing that really interested me was computer science. I'd done a little bit of programming in high school, I'd taken a programming class in high school, done one or two electives in my undergrad in programming, and this was something I really wanted to learn. But I just felt like I kind of. Maybe I made the wrong choice. Maybe I should have majored in computer science after all. You think of great entrepreneurs. You think of people like Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, people who had technical backgrounds, building companies, and yet here I've taken classes in HR and stuff like that. And so I'm trying to figure out what to do with this. Do you want to go back and study for another four years? I mean, most people don't. I don't really want to, you know, spend another four years, take out student loans, go through that whole route. And so around this time, looking online, and I find this class that is taught by MIT and put online for free. So they have this platform called MIT OpenCourseWare, where they just film classes and they take, you know, scans of the actual assignments and the solution keys and final exams, just put them online. And I took one of these classes, and I was like, wow, this is classes, like, actually better than most of the classes that I took in school. And as I was digging through it, it was clear that it wasn't just one class that they had done this for. It was many. And so kind of there was this little, like, light bulb moment. I'm like, I wonder, has anyone ever tried to, instead of going back to school to get a degree, has anyone ever tried to just do something similar to a degree, but just using free material like this. And so the kind of gears started turning and I also started thinking about Benny Lewis, this guy that I had been introduced to in France, and how he taken on these really ambitious projects and blogged about them. And I was sort of writing and blogging for a few years at the time. That was something I'd been doing throughout university. So this seemed like, you know, maybe I could do something like Benny Lewis does, where I can do some sort of project and take on this ultra learning challenge and blog about it. And so I decided to do something I called the MIT Challenge, which was to Try to learn MIT's four year computer science curriculum by passing the final exams and doing the programming projects, which is admittedly a simplification over all the requirements of a degree. But, you know, it's pretty close. You're doing the same kind of coverage of the material. And this sort of little, you know, I guess kind of ambitious flair on mine is that I wanted to try to see if I could do it in 12 months. So this was my sort of big first project and I worked really hard and yeah, I finished it. I started in October 2011 and I finished the last class in, in September 2012.

Why 12 months?

So, you know, it's one of those things. I don't know where the 12 months originally came from, but I think the original idea was that kind of recognizing I'd gone through school and I'd already been interested, not only from meeting Benny Lewis, but from just being interested in ways you can study more effectively. From my university days, I kind of had this background feeling when I was going through classes that I wonder how fast you could do it if you only had to do the final exams. So this was sort of my idea of like, if you just got rid of all the other requirements and the only requirement was that you had to score a passing grade on this final exam, you know, how much, how much could you approach it in a more efficient manner? This was sort of an idea that I'd been thinking about for a while. And so the original MIT Challenge definition was just passing the final exams and.

Passing by what grade was passing?

Well, so by default it was 50%, which is admittedly, like some people are, like, why not 90%? The truth is that it depends. So when there was a grading rubric of this is a passing grade, I went with that rubric. 50%, I think is usually pretty fair. There would be maybe some classes where I don't know whether there might have been a higher grade, but it's Funny, I've been told by some people that oh no, no, 80% is a passing grade. And then I talked to like one of my friends, Cal Newport, who's actually a professor of computer science, said, oh yeah, one of his final exams, the passing grade was 35% just because it was a really long exam and most people weren't able to finish all of it. So 50% was a bit of a compromise. It was just to sort of say, you know, and we're talking about this doesn't mean, you know, 50% of the material because these are like multi step questions. So if you, if you only know like 50% of the material, you usually would score 0% on these exams.

Okay, got it.

So they're like, you know, it's, it's like write a program to do this and then, you know, did you get it perfect? That kind of thing?

Yeah, got it.

So I mean, the grading percentage is a little bit of a complication. But I mean, the goal was to try to get as close to how MIT students would grade it. There are some subjectivities and some like quirks of that. But I think, you know, if you look at the kinds of stuff that you do in a calculus exam, I mean, it is that kind of thing that you, you kind of know it or you don't. And the 50% is, is a sort of a rough benchmark for measuring that. And so, so for me, the kind of the starting point I think was just, just doing the exams. That was the original conception, was just the exams. And it was very early on that I realized that, you know, no, I should do the programming projects too, because if you're studying computer science and you just did pencil and paper exams, that's maybe missing that really essential component. And the programming exams actually weren't too much additional work because a lot of the classes are math classes and a lot of the classes are not going to be involving tons and tons of programming, at least the MIT curriculum. And then the ones that do, I was fairly comfortable doing those as well. But that was sort of the original idea is just sort of not only to see if you could do this on your own, but also to kind of like, you know, just explore the limits of if you're doing this on your own, if you're doing this in an unconventional way, what things might you be able to do a bit faster? So, you know, we were having a conversation about how you were listening to some of my book at a bit faster speed near the end. But like, that's one of the things you can do with a recording that you can't do in real life. So that was one of the tools. Tools that I used to get through the lecture videos faster or things like doing feedback off of each question so that you quickly learn the material rather than waiting a week for your assignment to come back and these kinds of things. So there was a number of different little strategies there, but it was more kind of like, could this be done? Is this something that could be done? And that kind of excited me in the beginning.

Yeah. Talk a little bit about the. Oh, I want to say the feeling, like, what was it like when you finished at the end? How did you feel? Did you feel more accomplished than, say, when you got your bachelor's degree or. You know what I mean?

Like, I definitely learned more in that one year than I did in my. Under. My actual undergrad. A big part of that is just mit, like, the cases, they have more rigor and they teach more stuff. But if we were to talk about, like, things that I've learned from my education, I definitely recall more things from that year than the actual undergrad I did at the pace that I normally did it. And I don't know whether that's because of the things that were taught or just because MIT is like a fantastic school, or whether it was just either the way I did it, too. I was more attentive into how do I optimize the learning process? And then that somewhat leads to learning more deeply than if you're just, wow, I gotta get through these classes. But I think for me, the feeling. So it's funny when talking about it, because obviously it was a lot of work. And so when I talk about doing it, some people, the idea they have is, you know, they think about their experiences studying, and then they sort of like, multiply that by five. And so whatever pain they experienced in school, it must be like five times that what I was going through. And it was work. So I don't want to give the impression that I was just, like, breezing through it or something. Like, I was. I was devoting quite a few hours to this. But the feeling that I had going through this was. Was not that at all. It wasn't pain at all. It was very much. You know, how often in life do you get to be the first person to do something? And I'm not saying that no one has ever done anything like this before, but when I was designing this project, it was, you know, I don't know anyone who's ever tried to do Anything like this. And so there was a real sense of adventure and kind of a pioneering spirit of, you know, is this even possible? And so it's funny to talk about it now, you know, where I have had some people like, you know, discuss some of the finer points. And it's just for me, like just the idea that this was even a possibility, just the possibility that you could get the knowledge that reasonably approximates a four year degree without ever setting foot in a classroom, I think is just such an amazing opportunity that people overlook. And especially when we're talking about something like computer science that, I mean, if you're good at programming, if you understand how computers work, that's an immensely valuable skill whether you have a piece of paper or not.

Yeah. Have you ever interacted with folks from MIT since you've done this?

I have. So informally I've talked to some people who were attending MIT and this kind of thing. I did have an interview with a guy who works for OpenCourseWare, so that's the platform I was using. And he kind of interviewed me about the project after it finished and we talked about it. And so I have had some discussions with mit. Some people said, oh, have you thought about writing to them and getting a degree? Which to me just reveals like, you know. No, no, no, MIT doesn't award degrees because, you know, the stuff, they award degrees to a very few select people that they handpick and go through their classes and stuff. So I think there's probably definitely a variety of opinions. I've definitely talked to some people that, you know, they are staunch traditionalists and they're kind of like, any deviation from what is taught in school is a necessary weakness. And then I've talked to other people that are really excited about it. And so for me, I think there's definitely trade offs with doing this versus an actual degree. So some people have made the comment about like, well, what if you don't have a degree? Won't people not take you seriously? And I say, well, yeah, that might be the case for some jobs and for some situations and certainly for some professions. Educating yourself this way may have some drawbacks, but there's definitely also situations where you go to school, you spend $100,000, you get tons of debt, and then you have some piece of paper that's worthless. So I think for me, and we're talking about the education system here, but I think ultralearning goes well beyond that. Like we were talking about languages, we're talking about all sorts of things. And so for me, it's really about how do you acquire skills that matter. And sometimes that's going to be through a skill where you get some credentials, through a school where you get some. Some credentials. But other times it's just going to be how do I get really good at something I care about? And I know that's something that you talk about a lot with your listeners.

Yeah, no, for sure, for sure. Well, I mean, I know you did. You did some more amazing things. You learned, what was it, four languages in one year. I guess you know, by not. I just want to. I do have to ask on that. And I want people truly to. I listen to the book Audible, and we'll put a link in the show notes for that if people want to get one. But I want to read the book next. I'm going to buy the book, I'm going to read it, because I often do that. Books that I like, I listen to first, and then if I like it, then I read it. So, but talk about that year and correct me if I get it wrong, but as I remember it, the rule was that you and a colleague, a friend, could not speak English at all.

We even called the project the Year Without English. And so the idea of the project was we went to four countries, very much emulating my kind of first mentor in ultra learning. Benny Lewis went to four countries. Spain, Brazil, China to learn Mandarin Chinese and Korea to learn those languages. And the approach that we used. So we had about three months each in each country, very much again paralleling Benny Lewis and sort of this first guy that I encountered here. And the idea, the sort of conceit of the project or the way that we were organizing it is this no English rule. And the no English rule was that we weren't allowed to speak any English to each other or to anyone we'd meet. And for Spain, we were damn near perfect in applying that rule. We were. You know, I think the only time I ever spoke English was like in calls home to my parents or something like that. When I was there, like, I was. I was speaking in Spanish pretty much exclusively. And I think in Asia, we did have a few more cracks. I think Korea had a few more cracks just because it was the last part of our trip and we were exhausted. And not to mention we had like, already kind of demonstrated that the technique had worked in some earlier countries. But yeah, the idea was to sort of invert the struggle that I had in France, where I was in this English bubble. And every time I wanted to practice, it was Always this deliberate, conscious effort. It was, what if you, from the very first day, created an environment where you were guaranteed to learn this skill really well. And that environment was, everyone you meet knows that you're speaking this language you're trying to learn, and that's kind of the conditions by which they meet you. And the funny thing is that we got very little pushback from that. I was imagining we're gonna have to really struggle to get people to accept us speaking these languages we can barely speak. But for the most part, people were really supportive. As soon as you tell people, oh, you know, you learn a phrase, for instance, in Spanish, like, I have a project to learn Spanish, and I'm not speaking English. That's the project. And you say this to people, and then all of a sudden, people, they're smile. Maybe they would be resistant to. Maybe they'd be resistant to you speaking in Spanish. They'd be like, oh, my English is better than yours, or what have you. But as soon as you tell it to them, and particularly Spanish people, they're kind of like, oh, yeah, that's a really good idea. Oh, yeah, you should do that. And we would talk to, you know, people who were non native speakers, who were living in Spain or who were also learning Spanish, and they were also kind of like, oh, yeah, that's a good. I should have done that when I came here, like, two years ago, this kind of thing. And the funny thing about that project is that it really is. You know, it was funny to see the other side of the equation, because when I was in France, I was struggling. I was really putting in a lot of effort to learn French, but I was making progress at kind of a snail's pace. Whereas when I was in Spain, it wasn't just that this no English rule worked, which I don't think is too surprising to people listening, that doing immersion works, but that it was easier, that this was actually easier than what I did. So this was another big lesson of this ultralearning idea that it's not just that, okay, well, you've got to do this thing, and it's super difficult, and no one can do it, and that's really hard. But that if you choose the right approach, if you choose the right and most effective approach, and you really care about doing it right, it's not just that you get better results, that you often go down a path that is actually less difficult than you would if you're doing the kind of traditional approach which has so much starts and stops and stutters and Difficulties. Right.

So throughout the book, you cover nine principles. And I'm not going to just run through the nine principles. People need to get the book and read. We don't have enough time. We'd be here for, well, how long was the audiobook? Right. But I'm curious if you can maybe pick one or two of the principles and talk a little bit about how you applied those principles to either the MIT challenge or to this language challenge, or I know you've done a number of other ones, learning how to draw portrait and so forth. So talk a little bit about how you've. How you yourself have applied these principles.

Right. So two of the principles that I really like are. And I think that they're important because they're often counterintuitive and that people don't apply them in their learning efforts, either at school or outside of it. And as a result, they achieve much worse results with their learning efforts than they would like. And so the first one I will say is directness. And so directness is this idea that we are bad at what psychologists call transfer. So transfer is when you learn something in one context and you want to apply it in another context. So you learn something in a classroom or from a book or from, let's say, listening to this podcast right now, and then you want to go off in real life and put it to work. And it turns out that people tend to be quite bad at this, that there are studies going back decades and decades showing where you spend a lot of time teaching someone something, and then you go to a real situation and they don't apply it at all, and they should. And so it can be very frustrating as an educator to experience this. And directness is sort of the inversion of this weakness. That directness is that if you want to be able to apply something that you should think about, how am I going to use what I'm learning at the very beginning? Like, what is the goal of this knowledge? What am I trying to accomplish? And then integrating that into your learning efforts from the very beginning. So with language learning, the very obvious situation is if you want to learn a language to have conversations with people, which is why most people want to learn a language, then you need to have conversations with people, and you need to do that very early on. And it doesn't mean that you need to be able to have fluent conversations. It doesn't mean that you need to have, like, no recourse to a dictionary or Google Translate or anything like that. It just means you need to start doing that very early, whereas most people, they're playing on duolingo for six to eight months before they try to have a two sentence back and forth with someone. And then they realize in that two sentence back and forth that, oh, that six to eight months, it didn't actually amount to that much because this is still super difficult. And so this is very important for language learning. When we're talking about learning in school, I mean, one of the main goals that students have is to pass their final exams. And one of the main ways that you can apply this principle, that is to do questions that are, are the same kinds of questions you'll get on the final exam. And this is very important in a school setting, not only to pass exams in school. So this was a major part of how I was doing the MIT challenge, but also if you are going to apply what you learn in school, then you should try to do projects that will be the kinds of things that will apply it. So, you know, obviously with the computer science, I was doing the MIT challenge, applying these in projects was important. But then also for you, if you are listening to this right now and you are, are doing an MBA or you're reading a business book, thinking about how you can actually practice what you're learning in a real environment that's similar to where you want to use it, is a very important sort of starting ingredient. So the other principle that I talk about a lot, because I think it's important and often missed, is called retrieval. So retrieval is this idea that if you recall things from memory, you will be better at remembering them than if you just review them or look at them. And so the best example I can have is there's this great study that I talk about in the book that's done by Jeffrey Karpicki and Janelle Blunt, I believe at the University of Purdue. And they separate these students into different groups. One of the groups, they say, okay, you're gonna do what we call repeated review, where you just have some text and you just read it over and over and over and over again. And then the other group you're gonna do, read it once, shut the book, and then try to recall everything that you can remember from the text. And right after they get them to do this study, they ask the students, how well have you learned the material? And those who do repeated review give themselves really high marks. They say, you know what? I really know this material. I know it down, I'll do really well on the test. Whereas those who do free recall, they give themselves bad marks. They're like, oh, wow, I've forgotten everything, I don't remember anything, my memory is so bad, etc. Etc. And they give themselves low scores. However, when you actually test them, these, these things invert so those who do free recall score better than those who do repeated review. And there was another test, another study that I thought was very interesting following up on this, that if you give the students the ability to choose which way to study, which in this particular study that we just talked about, they were just told how to study and then evaluated how well they thought they would do. In this other study, they were given the choice of how to study. And what they found is that poor performing students, so students who were not doing it as well, tend to elect this kind of repeated review because they don't feel ready to do free recall. However, if you change the experimental conditions to force those same people into doing free recall study, they do better on the test. And so this shows us that this approach to learning things of shut the book and actually try to recall what you learned, or if you're listening to this podcast right now, press pause and see what you can remember. From what we've been discussing, if you do this approach, the truth is that not only do you recall more, but you actually are able to use that information better. So this is something that I think is really important, principles for learning, not only in the classroom, obviously, but in real life. Because how often do we read books and not remember what we read in the book? Or how often do we, you know, someone gives us some advice and then we don't apply it or we don't remember it. And so these ideas of directness and retrieval, I mean, they're just two of the principles, but I think that they're very important. And if you can align the efforts you're spending to get good at things with these principles, you'll do very well. And if you don't, then you're going to struggle.

Yeah, one of my daughters was struggling with her science homework recently. And the answers aren't in the book or something like that. Of course they were right there. But after listening to your book, I said, you know what? I want you to do this next chapter, go to the end, read the questions that they're gonna ask you, read them. And really, I know you don't know the answers, but really try to commit to your mind what they're gonna be asking you about and then go back and then read a lesson. And she reported back later that it was much, much better doing it that way. And so I think it's exactly what you're talking about here.

Well, this is also related to what you're talking about, the forward testing effect, which is basically that if you give people tests, it somehow potentiates their ability to recall future things better. Even the tests are happening before you do the memory. So there's a lot of really interesting stuff about retrieval here in the scientific literature. And obviously, it has a real impractical importance. But I think it's just. It's one of these things that if you are not aware of this principle and you're not aware of, like, how much support it has in research, it's very easy to fall into studying techniques that are kind of fun. They feel like you're doing something, but they're not actually that important. So common example of, like, you'll see students in the library, and they will just read over their notes again and again. And maybe once they've done reading over their notes, because they've done that too many times, maybe they'll recopy their notes or they'll get some highlighters or pens or circle stuff. None of this is practicing retrieval. So in none of these situations are you actually doing what you need to do on the test, which is to have some prompt, or maybe not even have a prompt. Just have some blank page and try to recall from within the things that you need to remember. And the rule that I like to think of it is that our brains are kind of lazy. And so if your brain is not forced to remember something because you've never been in a situation where you've needed to remember it, you don't remember it. And so one of my favorite little examples of this, which is not really a studying example, but I think is kind of illustrative of this cognitive principle, is I was on a plane. This is during this year without English project and my friend. And, you know, when you go to new countries and you have to, like, fill out. You gotta fill out all these, like, immigration things, like, what's your passport number? And, like, why are you here? And this kind of thing. And so when we were going to these new countries, you gotta fill these out in each of the countries. And I'm like, you know, pulling out my passport and copying down the number and all these things. And he just fills it out, and he doesn't bring anything out. And I'm like, how do you know all this stuff? And the thing was, is that, you know, normally I think a person would say, oh, man, your memory must just be so Good that you can just remember it. And I found out it's not just passports. He also knows all his credit card numbers, phone numbers. He knows all these things. And I'm like, how does he know all these things? And the reason why I realized is that when he gets a new passport, he's actually trying to do retrieval practice. So he doesn't just open it up and copy it. He just, he tries to remember it and then he know, then he looks, looks at it and he does this a couple times. Oh, did I get it right? And then like look does it a couple. Then he remembers it. And so it's funny because if you think back to the old days when we had to remember phone numbers, when people didn't actually have them in their phone, we remembered a lot more phone numbers. You'd remember phone numbers because you actually had to retrieve them. Now I barely know my own phone number because it's stored somewhere and I can always look at it if I need it. Now this isn't to say that you need to retrieve everything, but it is to say if you do need to remember something, you need to practice retrieval and not simply look at it a bunch of times. And I mean, this is a simple thing to do with memory, but there are so many of these principles, and so I talk about nine of them in the book, that if you can just even think about simple tasks that you have to do and align them with these principles, you'll get much better results.

Yeah. Yeah. Fantastic. My gosh. You, you, you talked about so many good examples in the book. Roger Craig to Jeopardy Guru and how he, how he applied ultra learning principles to dominate the way he dominated. But the story at the very end is the one I think that that moved me the most or just intrigued me the most, was of the Polgar sisters. Can you maybe just give us a high level summary of what that story is all about and how the principles of ultra learning. Because it was actually a bit of a twist, right, because the father went about it a little bit differently, but, but many of the underlying principles seem to be there.

Yeah. So this is a very fascinating story because this guy, Laszlo Polgar, Hungarian guy, just decides he doesn't have, he doesn't even have a wife at this point. He just decides, I'm going to raise genius children. And this is like the most crackpot thing you can say, except that he actually did it. So it's sort of, it's sort of incredible. Now, I'm not saying that when I bring up his story in the book. And when I'm talking about it now, my point isn't to say, ah, everyone should raise their children this way, because clearly it was sort of an unusual approach to child rearing. So, you know, I'm not here to weigh in on whether what you should do as a parent, but just that this is a thing that you can do. Like, this was just something that was sort of interesting to me as showing the possibilities similarly to how, you know, when I'm talking about the MIT challenge, most people listening to this are never going to need to do that or want to do that. But I think it's sort of interesting to share some of these examples, to think of what you might want to do, even if it, it's not so extreme. And so he decides that he's gonna raise genius children. He has three girls and he decides he is going to make them into chess prodigies. This was sort of chosen not only because he wanted to pick the same subject so he'd have. He didn't have to do different resources for each of his children. But then also, you know, we have to think about when this is taking place. This is like cold, Cold War era. Hungary is like Warsaw Pact country, like socialist countries. Back then, chess was sort of the intellectual pinnacle of life. So, you know, it's not totally arbitrary. This was something that, you know, is revered as an intellectual skill. And so he starts his girls off super young, as young as three, getting them to just, you know, do very basic stuff like, okay, can you name the squares? And this is how the king moves, and this is how this piece moves. And sure enough, by the age of about four or five, these girls are being going to like smoke filled Budapest bars practicing chess. And one of his daughters, Judit Polgar, the youngest, ends up becoming what is probably the most proficient female chess player of all time. And certainly she was one of the finalists for one of the world champions of chess. And she was dominant player, ranked definitely in the top 100 in the world. Very, very strong player. And her other sisters also became one of them. Zofia became an international master and Zuzanna became a Grandmaster. And Grandmaster and International Master are titles that if you devoted your life to chess, you might reach them. You know, like, these are extreme things. So the fact that all three of them became so proficient, and not only that they became proficient, but it seems that, you know, his daughters had an okay childhood like that. They were, you know, there's this sort of stereotype, I think, particularly in Western countries that, you know, if you want to make your kids excel, that they're going to just be miserable children. Right. And it was sort of interesting to see his approach that he very much, you know, chess is a game, but he made it into a game. He made it into something where he's really trying to give them positive feedback. And, like, he talks about, you know, if the child decides to, like, wander around and daydream in the middle of a chess game, don't. Don't yell at them and tell them to sit at the table. Just let them mind wander and they'll come back and they'll play a move. And, you know, when they were starting out and they were young, he was trying to let them win some of the games so they could build their confidence. And then as they got older, of course, they were better than him very soon, so he has to actually get tutors and take them to chess tournaments. But for me, it was just sort of this beautiful story about how, you know, rethinking the process of education, rethinking the process of learning. And, I mean, it's illustrative. It's not, like, definitive. That is the right way to raise your kids. But I think there's so many of us, when we are thinking about raising our own children, we want them to succeed academically, we want them to be learners, we want them to be smart. We want them to, you know, face challenges in life with ingenuity and creativity. And it's so unfortunate that often the way that we approach things in the school system is based on this idea of, you know, grind and forcing people to do things, but also at the same time, you know, the opposite of that, of, you know, no intellectual stimulation, no challenge, not treating, you know, your children as if they're autonomous intellectual agents and, you know, little people that can actually do things. So I think it was just a very interesting story for me to show kind of a different side of education, especially with young children, since the majority of the book is dealing with adult learners or with people who are taking on their own projects for learning.

Yeah. So in summary, Scott, folks are listening to this right now, and perhaps they're.

They're.

Many of the people listening to this are genuinely interested in learning. You know, the lean movement is all about learning, and deliberate practice is a big part of what we do. I know you talk a lot about that in the book. What message do you have for the person who just wants to get better at learning? Perhaps, like you said, they're not interested in doing the MIT challenge, or maybe they don't even care to learn, you know, Mandarin in three months. Maybe they're okay with it being a year or two or something like that, but this is in a day to.

Day life, still be very good, I think.

Yeah, right, exactly. But just in a day to day life, how can folks read this book and benefit from it, even if they don't aspire to be, you know, Scott Young and these amazing feats.

Well, I'll take that as a compliment. But I think, I think the point. I want to leave people here and I think very easy. When we're talking about learning and cognitive science and all this lofty intellectual stuff, it's very easy to say, this has nothing to do with me. It's very easy to say, you know what? I'm living my life. I'm just trying to get through my day learning. Yeah, I care about learning, but this is low down the list of my priorities. And the way I like to think about it is that that is just nonsense. That learning impacts every facet of our lives. Just the way that your lungs are about breathing air and your heart is about pumping blood, your brain is an organ of learning. Like, that is what it does. And so there are so many little things that we're doing that we're learning constantly in our life. You know, I was having a conversation with someone and we were in a restaurant and we were like, dealing with the kind of the check process of like the waitress coming and bringing the check and then deciding who's gonna pay and then like all this kind of stuff. And I was saying, at some point you learned this. You know, I'm saying this, Stan, I had some point you learned this. You didn't think, oh, I'm learning how to deal with this complicated social situation. It was just part of your life. And so the thing I want to leave people is that some people say, you know what? I'm not a good learner, or, you know, I'm not. I don't have a good memory, or I'm not good at things. And I want to say the opposite, that you are born to do this. That this is something that you're actually very good at it. And so what I hope to do with my book is to not, you know, say that this is some rare thing to, you know, rare geniuses are doing this and you need to do this. Rather, I want you to start thinking about how much learning impacts everything in your life, from your habits to your relationships to your work to your career. And if you can understand a little bit of that process, you can make some small adjustments to improve that process. And sometimes those process improvements are going to just be getting a little bit better at something that you already care about. Or maybe it can be something about getting unstuck and, you know, maybe there's something that you've really wanted to do for a long time, but you felt stuck and you haven't noticed how to start. And so I'm hoping that this book can give a little bit of inspiration. And, yeah, some of the stories are a little bit dramatic, but I'm hoping that they will encourage people to just rethink a little bit the ways that they approach things.

Yeah. Well, as I mentioned to you before we started recording, you really did a great job with the book. Well, I can only speak for the audiobook right now. I haven't written, but you did a great job reading it.

Thank you.

And I really, really enjoyed it. So, yeah, highly encourage folks to go check out Ultra Learning. What's the sub subtitle here? Master hard skills, outsmart the competition and accelerate your career. Really, really, really highly recommended. So, so, Scott, thank you so much. Yeah, thank you for coming on. How can people best connect with you?

So if you want to check out my website, my website is at scotthyoung.com that's S-C-O-T-T H Y L U N G.com and there I've got links to the book. The book's published by Harper Business. You can get it in Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or as you mentioned, Audible, where I'm narrating it. So if you're not sick of listening to my voice by now, you can get the audiobook and listen to me on your car ride. And if you are also interested on my website, I've got over a thousand free articles on subjects of improvement and learning and mastery and goal setting and all sorts of useful ideas. So you can also check that out as well.

Fantastic. You have any more ideas for some more books down the road?

Oh, I'm sure I do. I'm sure I do. But this one took me about 10 years to get out, so we'll see. Hopefully the next one won't take so long, but it's definitely been something that I've been thinking about for a long time.

Got it. All right, well, thanks again, Scott. It's really, really been fun to chat with you. Keep up the great work and thanks for all you do.

Oh, thank you so much.

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