Ultralearning with Scott Young

Living a Life in Full is a conversation you always wanted to have with that person who gave an amazing TED Talk or the author of one of your favorite books, or that inspirational Olympian you always wanted to know more about. It's graduate level conversations with those making a difference in the world and in the lives of others. This show brings you new ideas and approaches so that you can live a life in full. I'm your host, Dr. Chris Stout and I hope you enjoy this episode. This episode of Living a Life in Full is brought to you by ATI Physical Therapy. If you need physical therapy, choose ati. ATI offers exceptional care, trusted expertise and remarkable outcomes customized to your needs. ATI has over 800 clinics coast to coast in 25 states. When want to start feeling better fast? ATI can help address chronic pain or recovery from an injury or surgery expertly, quickly and conveniently. ATI's first program uses a performance based methodology to safely return injured workers to their workplace. FIRST is designed to increase strength, endurance and cardiovascular functioning. ATI's sports medicine provides athletic training services to help athletes get back in the game. ATI has hundreds of professional collegiate, high school, middle school and club relationships nationwide. ATI also offers a variety of specialty services including home health, hand therapy and women's health. To Learn more about ATI's advances in evidence based practice, clinical outcomes and their innovative new smartphone app, please visit atipt. Welcome to another episode of Living a Life in Full. I'm your host, Dr. Chris Stout. I'm excited to have Scott Young on today. He's a writer, programmer, traveler and for more than a decade he's run a business focused on productivity, so I'm a big fan. This past August he published the Wall Street Journal bestseller Ultralearning Master Hard Skills, Outsmart the Competition and accelerate your Career, a book that details a strategy for aggressive, self directed learning. Scott is an avid learner and he's created some fascinating experiments such the MIT challenge where he attempted to learn MIT's four year computer science curriculum without taking classes. The Year Without English where he attempted to learn four languages in one year the 30 day portrait challenge to see how much improvement he could make in drawing faces and most recently and perhaps most fun, let's learn quantum mechanics. So in this episode we'll learn all about these challenges and other intellectual feats and what drives Scott and of course do a deep dive into his new book. Hey Scott, welcome to the show.

Oh, it's great to be here.

So I think I first learned about your book from Shane Parrish And I think it was just about before it was to be released. So it's really great to have you on the show and for me to get a chance to get to know you better. Let's maybe start with your origin story and the start of your company. In my research, I think I found, so correct me if this is wrong, that you started blogging at age 18, is that right?

Yeah, slightly before my 18th birthday and I was still 17. Yeah, it was my senior year of high school when I started writing and I was blogging and so it's really been with me for essentially my entire adult life writing and document what I am doing and things. So people who are interested in listening, I mean this is the 31 year old me talking right now. But you can go back and read articles that the 18 year old me wrote and see how my thoughts differ from that decade gap.

Right. You're probably very brave to have that kind of transparency. I really respect that. So I read somewhere else you referred to them as philosophical ramblings, is that correct?

Well, I think it's important not to take it too, too seriously. I think when we're talking about things like any kind of self improvement topic has this risk of, you know, getting the dramatic music and being a little bit overly serious. And I think it's important to just, you know, keep them in the proper perspective. I think it's important to think about these things deeply and clearly. Living better and having, you know, better results in our lives is something that's very important to many people. But at the same time I think it's important to just keep in perspective these are just my ideas.

So from that pre 18 blogger start, did that then evolve into, or tell us how did it evolve into your discussion of best ways to learn and what was that transformation and was there something originally?

Yeah, so that wasn't originally the topic that I wrote about. Even the first topic that I gained a little bit of popularity for was actually talking about habits, which is kind of ironic considering James Clear wrote the forward for my book that like, you know, 13 years ago the most popular articles that I was writing were about habits of all things. And so obviously I have a lot of affinity with that topic as well. But what happened was I was, you know, this is, this is part of the downside I guess of being a, you know, like a just basically a teenager when you're writing is that you don't have any life experience. So what are the things that you can write about with a little bit of authority and one of the things that interested me at the time was writing about how to learn more effectively, just in the context of, you know, I'm doing a lot of classes and classes are my full time job. And so being able to learn more effectively just essentially means I have more time for not only socializing and having fun and that kind of thing, but also for trying to get this business up off the ground, which was sort of my major goal, I would say throughout, you know, my early 20s, was trying to become self sufficient with having an online business. And so learning kind of factored into that because if I could, you know, get through school with a little bit less stress and need to study, then it would also be popular. And some of my early ideas about that also somehow just gained some popularity. And so that nudged me into that direction. So I had a sort of a natural interest, natural curiosity, and then, you know, you get positive feedback from people and so you keep writing about those topics. And so that kind of moved me in that direction and then, you know, we can talk about it. But sort of near the end of my university experience, and especially after I graduated, I was sort of took that in another slightly different direction with these big projects or these ultralearning projects as I call them, because of my introduction to this wonderful guy, Benny Lewis, who is really spectacular at learning languages. And he was a real first indicator for me that learning wasn't just about doing well in school. Learning wasn't just how do you get grades and pass exams? Which if you're not in school and you're listening to this right now, you might say to yourself, well, I don't really care about that because I just have a job to do, I have my life, I'm super busy, I don't have time to be learning a lot of things. But in reality, we're learning things all the time. And the way that you get better at things is by learning. I think for me, that was a bit of a twist because it took some of the same ideas of how do you get skills and how do you get knowledge, but then put it into the direction of not how do you do that so you can pass tests, but how do you do that so you get good at things that you actually really care about. And so this was sort of the focus of this book is not, you know, not just how do you get an A on a test, but how do you get really good at things that, that actually matter for your life. And often that is wildly different than what it takes to succeed in school.

So Was the book sort of. And, well, I want to do a real deep dive on that. But was that sort of based upon some of the projects and learning that you did for the blog?

Well, yeah, the book is obviously kind of driven by a lot of my personal experiences. I think that's somewhat unavoidable as an author. I think even if you really try to make an objective kind of book, your own perspective creeps in in every facet. So for me, I wanted to write a book that would sort of document. I wouldn't call it my strategy, but this strategy, this ultralearning approach to learning things, which, as I said, I wasn't even the first, you know, I saw someone else doing it. And that's how kind of got picked up and sort of apprenticed a little bit in this craft. And in the book, I've document quite a few different people who have their own style for approaching it, but the thing that they share in common is that they got really good at difficult skills in kind of unconventional ways, sometimes either faster or much more deeply than people would expect. And so I think this sort of unique approach, I wanted to document it and then I also wanted to merge it with a lot of the prevailing cognitive science on how we learn better. Because there's a lot of misinformation about how to learn. Not only do we have a lot of intuitions about learning which turn out to just be wrong, so we can talk about some of that later, but then also there's a lot of, like, advice floating around about how to learn things better, that if you actually do the research, doesn't actually hold a lot of weight either. So for me, I wanted to really focus on a book that was not only based on practical experiences of, you know, this actually works for individuals who are trying to learn real skills. This isn't just some weird laboratory experiment, but also things that have been studied and so that they jive with what we understand about how the brain actually works.

That's great. So I want to. Let's talk about your challenges. When did you decide to do this? And how did you decide on what the challenges would be? How did you go about picking them? Right.

So I think that probably the best way to introduce this is even before I did any of my big learning projects. And this was. I went on exchange for a year when I was in university to France, and I was super excited to learn French. I thought that it would be really cool to go on exchange. And I was going for a whole year. Some people just went for A semester. So I don't know, I kind of had this idea in my head that maybe a year would be enough to like be able to speak some French after. And a really interesting thing is that. So we had this kind of like, it was this sort of like hanging out thing where you met the people who went on exchange the year before you. And so I'm in the new cohort, it's about to go on exchange. And because I have this idea in my head that I'm going to learn French, I decided, you know, I'm going to talk to people and ask them, you know, ask them where they went and then ask them, did you learn that language? So if you went to Mexico, did you learn Spanish, if you went to Germany, did you learn German, etc. And the thing that really blew me away is that nobody did. And this was so surprising to me because you'd think that, okay, you go travel and you live somewhere for a year on exchange, you'd learn the language, right? And I mean, this is partially particular to this program. So I don't want to say that, you know, there are people who do different types of exchanges that do learn the language a bit better, but it just happened to be in this particular program I was in that that wasn't happening. And the only people who were learning the language were like, yeah, I took three years of Spanish in university. And so, yeah, I picked up a bit when I was in Mexico. But like, I mean, not, not no one who said I didn't study it before came back saying, and this was very kind of surprising to me because, you know, you'd think that that was possibility. And it was only when I got to France that I really realized, oh, this is why this is. And the reason why is because this was for university credit. Our grades from our host schools were transferred back to our home schools. And so, you know, as a student, you don't want to get all Fs, right? So you pick, well, what language of what language should you have your university level classes in? Well, it's going to be in the only one you speak, right? You're going to pick English. And so I picked English classes because I didn't already speak French, which was essentially the universal choice by people who weren't, you know, already fairly proficient in French. And, and then also you meet tons of other exchange students and those become your social circle. And because they're also in classes with you, they also speak in English. And so you form this English bubble around yourself. And, and so I was really trying to learn French. I'm studying at home every day and I'm like, you know, whenever I'm meeting people, I'm trying to speak a little bit of French. But it was hard going and I didn't feel like I was progressing that rapidly, you know, even though I was working at it really hard. And so around this time I'm kind of griping about this to a friend back home about how difficult it is to learn French. And he says, well, have you heard of Benny Lewis? And I say, no, who's Benny Lewis? And he says, well, he has his website, very modestly titled Fluent in three Months. And I remember I'd been in France for about four months at this point. I was like, that's bullshit. There's no way you can learn. Which is three months to fluency. Like I'm like struggling with shopkeep conversation, nevermind, you know, fluency. And so he had just started his website and I will admit it wasn't his. I think this is a confusion. Bo many loses it's not his claim that he can become fluent in three months in any language, but that this was a challenge. So this was his goal that he had set for himself. But even with that discrepancy aside, I think it's still, you know, super ambitious to even just be attempting something like that. So I sent him a message and we actually met up in Paris and he kind of, I got to see sort of a little bit how he approached learning languages. And I realized that he was doing it completely differently than I was doing it. Not at the level of like, well, he's using mnemonics or something. And I'm not, not at that level. At more at the kind of philosophical level of how you approach learning that I'm in this English bubble. I'm mostly speaking in English. Sometimes I'm, you know, brave enough to have a little short conversation in French with someone, but most of the time it's in English and I just feel kind of stuck. Whereas he is landing in new countries where he doesn't speak the language and he just got a phrase book and he just starts, you know, trying to talk to people. And so what I realized in that moment was that there, yes, that we can talk about how do you learn better in the context of like, how do you optimize things in your little classroom environment. But there's this huge scope of spaces of possibilities that you could work on skills. They go far beyond the classroom environment. And that if you're really serious about doing Something well, the possibilities for doing it well are also seriously bigger. And so, you know, this actually even led this experience of not only trying to learn French, but struggling with it and recognizing how important. Making some key decisions in your approach early on were has actually led to the project that my friend and I called the Year Without English that we took on. This is actually several years after. So this wasn't immediately after my experience experience in France, but we went. Ended up going to four countries. We went to Spain, Brazil, China, and South Korea to learn Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin Chinese and Korean. And the sort of conceit of the project, or the idea of the project was that when we would land, we would not speak in English to each other or to anyone we'd meet, basically, to kind of be the antidote to the problem I had in France.

Right.

And the funny thing is. Well, there's two funny things about this little project. The first funny thing is that nobody, like when I tell people, okay, yeah, this works really well, you should do this. Nobody wants to do it because they just imagine how hard it is. But it actually is much easier than you'd think. I actually found it much easier, for instance, to learn Spanish than I did to learn French. And the reason why is that if you make certain strategic decisions early on in how you set up your learning project, then certain, like, the choice of doing this sort of immersive approach means that, well, then you start meeting people who know to speak to you in Spanish, and then that becomes your social circle. And then even if you were, let's say, tired of speaking Spanish and you wanted to speak English, now speaking English is kind of the weird choice because the people around you aren't used to it. And so there's all these little structural changes that happen. And it makes it so that not only do you progress way faster, Like, I mean, my Spanish was better after three months in Spain than after a year of, like, really trying to study in France. But also it was actually easier. It was a more comfortable experience, which I think is the really counterintuitive thing. Not, you know, not that immersion works, but that it actually was easier. And so, you know this. And we can also talk about some of my other projects I've done were really the inspiration of writing this book. Because I think for a lot of people, first of all, they haven't had their Benny Lewis moment. They haven't had their moment where someone says, hey, look, this is possible. You can actually do this if you're ser It. And second, they don't realize how Very subtle decisions about how they choose to go about learning things can make huge impacts in their eventual effectiveness to the point where they might say, oh, I'm just not good at learning, you know, whatever it is, math or drawing or languages. And I want to say, no, no, no, no. You just haven't been doing it the right way. And so I kind of wrote this book to try to tell some of those stories.

That's great. So in the context of doing that your year without English, how. How did you do, like, with Korean and Chinese? I mean, it's sort of like there's not even characters to be.

They're definitely harder.

Yeah.

So is it just all sort of

auditory or how like.

Like. No, so. Well, I did learn to read and write a little bit in Chinese, mostly using the keyboard. My handwriting with Chinese still remains terrible, so my reading has gotten much proficient even since then. But. But I would say, yeah, the Asian languages are harder. So if you are listening to this right now and you're anticipating a trip to Japan or to Vietnam or to China or something like that, my advice is generally that the overall strategy doesn't change very much. So the thing that worked in Spain also works in China. It's just that I found that the kind of, like, upfront difficulty is a lot harder. So if you are planning on doing no English in China, I usually recommend maybe putting in 50 to 100 hours of basic practice before you go. Just because you want to have a smooth transition. You don't want it to be so difficult that you don't make any friends for, like, two months. Right. So I think it's probably better to have built in some of those phrases, some of those core things, maybe, you know, like 100 characters, maybe, you know, like, you know, several dozen phrases, and you got those down. You know, kind of how the language is structured at the very basics, so that when you go in there and you start having a conversation with people, it isn't just like, oh, wow, this is just way too difficult. You break immediately. But. But otherwise, I found even in China, and China is like, the place that no one does this no English thing. Like, I met in Europe, I met a few people who did something similar. So they would say, oh, yeah. Well, you know, one person told me, okay, when she. When she went to Italy, she was living there, and she's. She did no, no English, and that was how she learned Italian. So that happened sometimes. But when I was in China, you know, other travelers were even sometimes hostile to me doing this because it was like, oh, what do you think? You're gonna. You're gonna go out and do this? Like, I've been living here for X years, and my Chinese sucks. And there was. There was a little bit of resentment almost that we were even attempting something like this. But I would say that in China, it definitely works. It definitely works. And. And so if you can stick to it, it works. I think there's. There's extra barriers, so it is a little bit more difficult in China, but. But Chinese is more difficult generally. So I don't have the strong contrast, like, how it would have been to learn Chinese if I hadn't done this. I imagine it would have been even worse than my situation in France.

So would people prep with something like a Duolingo or a Rosetta or a Berlitz?

Oh, yeah, don't use Duolingo. I haven't used Rosetta Stone. But what I understand about how it works. I also don't recommend Rosetta Stone. Duolingo is terrible. Duolingo is. I hit on Duolingo because it's the most popular one. I mean, there's lots of other terrible ones, but duolingo is bad. It makes you feel like you're making progress. This is the thing I don't like about it. It makes you feel like you're making progress, but you're not.

Wow.

And I even talk about it in my book that one of the principles that I talk about of this ultra learning, which I call directness, is based on the idea that people are much worse at transferring knowledge into situations that don't superficially resemble each other. And this. There's tons of research basically going back a century to back this up. And what duolingo does often is that it'll give you some activity that feels like you're learning a language, but is actually quite dissimilar to what you have to do when you're actually speaking. So the example will be, like, they'll give you a sentence in English and then give you, like, a word bank of, like, 15 words, and you have to pick, like, the seven or eight that make up the sentence in the right order. And I mean, I guess that's testing a little bit of recognition of some words. But when you actually speak to someone, you're never doing this. You're never having to pick a list of 15 words to make your sentence. You have to translate every word. You have to recall them from memory. You have to recall exactly how they're pronounced. Because keep in mind, like, we're especially. We're Talking about a language like Chinese, if your pronunciation is not dead on, people just won't understand what you're saying at all. You know, if you, you know, when people start speaking Chinese, and I can sympathize with this because even having learned Chinese now, I'll hear people who. Their. Their pronunciation isn't very good and they think they're saying the right thing, but they're saying something completely different. And so I think that for me, if I recommend a starting program, and the unfortunate thing is it does cost a little bit of money, but if you're going to actually be serious about learning a language, the best resource to start very, like, right off the bat is Pimsleur. I usually recommend one month of Pimsleur. I don't usually recommend more than one month just because I feel like after a month it just. You're just kind of learning more simple phrases. Some people really like Pimsleur. They'll do a couple months, but Pimsleur is usually pretty good because they force you to do actual active recall. So they'll say things like, you know, I can still remember my Spanish one. It would be like, you know, now ask where is the, you know, Bolivar restaurant? And you say, donde estel restaurante Bolivar? Or something like this, right? And so you're. They're kind of a little bit stereotyped phrases, so they're not exactly, exactly what you would say in a natural conversation, but you get the basic phrase patterns drilled into memory enough so that when you go there, you know how to say donda esta la? Or, you know, you know how to say, you know, where is this? Who are you? My name is this. You learn all of those things sufficiently that you can kind of get by, I see, for very simple things. And that usually becomes a kernel that's large enough to build off of. I didn't find it was. It has diminishing returns. So I think after doing a month, it's probably not worth the extra money. And I would rather shift into doing some kind of light conversation practice with a tutor on something like italki.com, which is italki.com, which Is a website that you can get language exchange partners and tutors. But yeah, for Chinese or for Korean or for the Asian languages, I definitely found that it just takes a little bit longer to get up to speed and a little bit longer before picking up new words and vocabulary is the same amount of effort as picking up new vocabulary in. In a language like Spanish, that's great.

That's really helpful. So thank you. Thanks for deconstructing that and poking some holes in some technology sacred cows, too. I saw your TED Talk on the MIT Challenge. So for those that haven't seen it or aren't aware of it, could you maybe step us through that? How'd you come up with that and how'd you do it?

Yeah, so this was after I graduated from university, so just to, like, set the setting right, because this is before I did this language learning project. I had seen. Seen Benny Lewis doing this approach to things. And so it intrigued me kind of on two levels. One, it intrigued me just because I really liked this, you know, not having to do things through the normal school system approach of learning. I really liked his style there. And then I also liked that he did these sort of ambitious projects. And I was blogging at the time and I thought, oh, that's so cool. I'd like to do something like that. Where, you know, he's like, I'm gonna go to the Czech Republic for three months. And then he's posting update videos and stuff. And I'm like, this is so cool that you're. You're picking a target, you're trying to learn something really hard, but then you're also showing what you're doing as you're doing it. And so when I graduated, this sort of thing was in the back of my head. And then the other thing that was in the back of my head was that I kind of wanted to study computer science in university, and I had ended up studying business. So, like a lot of students, I went in my first year and I was kind of undecided between both. And I'd figured, well, I should go in and study business because I want to be an entrepreneur, so I should study business for business school. And it turns out that business school actually mostly isn't about teaching you how to be an entrepreneur. It's mostly about how do you be a middle manager in a large company. So you learn things like HR and like, organizational behavior. A lot of classes that I regret taking now. And so I had this kind of feeling of I kind of wish I could go back and redo my degree and do it in computer science instead. And so I was even looking online at like, well, what would it be like to go back and do another degree? And this was sort of floating around, but you know how it is. If you've already done a bachelor and you've just graduated, it feels pretty unappealing to go back to school for another four Years and to, you know, get out student loans and go back and live in a dorm room and you know, be broke and this kind of thing. And so I was thinking about it, but it was also at the time like, ah, you know, I don't really need the extra degree. I kind of just wanted to learn to program. I kind of wanted to learn computer science. I wanted to learn this subject that had interested me. I'd been doing a little bit of programming just sort of casually. But it's that kind of insecurity you have when you're a little bit self taught that you're like, no, but I want to really know how to program, you know. And so, and so around this time I'm googling around. I don't know how I found it exactly, but I found this class that was taught by MIT and just post it online for free. So they had like recorded the lecture videos and there was assignments with the solution keys and like the actual final exam the students took with the solutions. And I remember doing, you know, substantial part of that class and I was sort of blown away because the quality of instruction, you know, obviously this is one of the best schools in the world. So it was much better than the classes that I good money for to attend in school. And so this really kind of got the gears turning a little bit. And I thought, you know, I'm looking online and I'm seeing that it's not just one class. Like they have hundreds of classes on this platform. You can go check it out right now. MIT OpenCourseWare. They have hundreds and hundreds of classes. Some of the classes have everything. Like they have lectures and the assignments. Some of them, it's a little bit more, you know, do it yourself. Like, like they give like they'll give like lecture notes but there's no lectures and you got to use the textbook or something. Oh, but I was going through, I was going through the material and I was thinking, has anyone ever tried to do something like a degree before? Like I figured that you could try to learn a class, but has anyone ever tried to be like, okay, well what does an MIT student learn at mit? And how many of these classes can I pair up with other resources they have online? And so I'm looking around and I haven't seen anyone do this before. So already this was getting me kind of excited because I mean, how often in life do you get to be the first person to do something? So I was super excited about that. And then the more I was digging into it, I was realizing this might be a good thing stage to try out some of the kind of learning stuff that I had been experimenting with in university, but really take to the next level, because obviously in school there's so many constraints, like, you kind of have to do things the way they want you to do them. There's some flexibility. I mean, you can choose how you study in your off time, but you still got to attend the classes, still got to read the assigned readings, you still got to do the assignments and hand them in on the due dates. And so they don't give you a lot of flexibility with how you pursue your studies in university. But if I was doing it this way, I'd already decided that instead of trying to do everything an MIT student would do, which was probably impossible given the resources they had, I figured, what if I just tried to do the final exams? And so. And later I added doing the programming projects. But, like, if you just reduce to degree to, could you just pass the final exams? All of a sudden? There were a lot of options that, you know, I could do that an MIT student couldn't do, or any student could do who's normally attending university couldn't do things like, you know, you normally. You have to attend the lectures and just sit through them, even if there's boring parts or professors fiddling with power and stuff. This one, you know, the lecture starts, I watch it on my computer, and I can turn up the speed to 1.5 times the speed or 2 times the speed if the lecture talks kind of slowly. And you know, that sounds really difficult, but if you get confused, you just pause it, just rewind a couple minutes.

That's brilliant.

Or things like assignments. You can do an assignment one question at a time. So you do a question, you're like, oh, my God, I have no idea how to answer this. All right? Then you look at the solution. You're like, oh, okay, okay. And then you try the second question with what you learned from the first question, so you get these tighter feedback loops and you can improve a bit faster. And so using this and some other things that I kind of picked up as well as a lot of work, I want to make that clear. I decided I wanted to try to tackle the project instead of doing it over four years, which is what a normal student would probably do, I wanted to try to do it in 12 months. So this was this MIT challenge, and this is my first big project, and it was a lot of work, especially in the beginning. I was putting in probably like maybe nine to 10 hours Monday to Friday, you know, nine, 10 hours per day, Monday to Friday to work on this. And I was going through classes at a pretty aggressive pace. And I mean, I think there are drawbacks to doing things this way. I definitely don't want to say this is the universal solution for everyone in their education, but for me, it was just, could this be done? Is this something that's possible? Similarly to how Benny Lewis was trying to explore, you know, if you were really serious, how quickly could you learn, you know, some proficiency in a language? And so I was really interested in this and I worked on this project. And then once this project finished, which I did finish it, I finished it on time. I started in October 2011, and I ended in September 2012. So a little while ago already now. But after I finished it, I was just so excited by the possibility of. I'd spent my entire life going through things in school, and it was kind of, eh, it's all right. But I mean, it definitely had its drawbacks, and I was super excited to. What else could you learn? So we did this language learning project, did the portrait drawing challenge. And so now writing this book for me is to try to hopefully give people their, what I'll call their Benny Lewis moment, or their moment where you say, oh, this is an option. I didn't know that people did this.

Well, it sounds like you really kind of optimized. I mean, I like how you, you know, would be able to have, you know, you got stuck on a question. You could then see how the question was answered and then immediately start to, you know, iterate and apply it to, you know, the next questions or what the topic was. So you didn't do, like, 10 hours a day for two years or for a year with it, did you? How?

No, I think in the beginning I was going really hard because my idea was I want to make enough progress in it that I can convince myself I can finish it. So this was sort of my that's Good Psychology too project was that. Well, also, I was doing this publicly, right? So there was a lot of, like, skepticism and not. Not a shortage, not a shortage of. Of angry emails from MIT students when I announced this project. Because there was a lot of, like, no effing way. There's no way you're gonna be able to do that. You're a brave man. And so for me, I was also felt like, no, no, no, I have to rack up, like, some classes finished early on, just not only to prove to myself, but also to, like, okay, simmer down. Like, I'M actually doing it kind of thing. So the first three to four months, I was pretty much maxed out. That was the maximum I could put in for my schedule. And then after that, I ended up the project kind of slowed down a little bit so that I was doing more like 30 to 40 hours. So it was still quite a bit of work, but it wasn't. And, I mean, even when I was doing the kind of intense schedule, I still had evenings off and I still took one day off a week. So it wasn't, you know, it was difficult, but it wasn't like the way that I like to phrase it, because sometimes people say, oh, yeah, it must have been, you know, so much work. But, I mean, the typical medical student puts in more hours than I do. So I think the difference is that I'm doing something weird that people don't normally do. Not that I worked, like, an inhuman amount of hours. Like, I did work hard, but I think. Or even that I'm humanly intelligent either. Like, I think I did all right for going through that progress. But, I mean, I think that the typical students who go through MIT are probably smarter than I am just because these are the top of the top going to their classes and stuff. So I did work hard, and I do think I'm decently clever. But I think that the reason it was successful was just because no one else does this. This is not a thing that people normally do. And so the assumptions that you have about how it should be done are often based on certain constraints that I wasn't applying to myself. And. And if you were interested in doing something similar, if you were willing to work hard, you might be able to get, you know, maybe not the same result, but you might be able to do better than you might imagine would be if your only experience doing things like this comes from taking regular classes.

I think I appreciate that what you do is hard. I mean, it's even in the, you know, in your book. I mean, you. It's not like there's hacks. It's not like there's, you know, shortcuts in a cheaty kind of way. I mean, it's sort of like your language, you know, asking. And this MIT challenge is that it's optimized. You use certain kinds of things that are able to maybe be a time saver, but that are still, you know, take effort and are not, you know, it's not, you know, do the MIT challenge while you sleepwalk through it or something. So I think that's.

That's no, that's an important lesson, an expression. The way I like to approach it is that life doesn't have shortcuts, but there are dead ends. So the way I like to think about it is that, no, there isn't a simple. You know, like, there isn't one, you know. You know, language learners hate him. You know, it's not like the sort of like those little Facebook ads that you get that show that, oh, well, if you just do this one really easy thing, then all of a sudden you're gonna be brilliant at xyz. I'm not trying to pitch that. And the things that I'm advocating, they work almost because they're hard. Right. And there's a large section of stuff in the chapter that. The reason that this is seldomly applied is because it is more difficult. It doesn't mean that it's impossible, and it doesn't mean difficult in the sense that, well, most people couldn't do that. Difficult in the sense that it's not going to be your default choice and you're going to have a little bit of resistance when you start using it. But at the same time, I'm also a big believer that life has tons of bad approaches. So even if there isn't some quick shortcut that's going to fix everything, there are lots of dead ends. There's lots of things that you can do this for years and it won't work very well.

Yeah.

And so, you know, I remember talking with someone, and I think they were, you know what? This is apocryphal. So maybe. Maybe take it with a grain of salt. But someone was telling me that it was some person who was some higher up at duolingo, had been doing duolingo Spanish. So he works for the company doing those duolingo Spanish for, like seven or eight months. And the person said to him, oh, hablas man. And the guy thought for like 10 seconds and said, sorry, can you repeat that?

Oh, no.

I mean, that's a little. It's a little cruel to pick on him, but at the same time, I think there's a lot of us that there's things that we've wanted to get good at, and we either don't know how to get good at it, we don't know how to learn another language, we don't know how to learn math, we don't know how to learn art, we don't know how to learn dancing, we don't know how to learn, et cetera, et cetera, or we've been trying it for a while and we feel stuck. So we, you know, we've been stuck in the same career that we've been in at for five, 10 years. We've been stuck in the same, you know, studies. We've been banging our head against a wall. And so I'm not too here to say that there is some easy fix that will miraculously cure all your problems. But I think if you go through and understand how learning works and understand what are the common pitfalls, then sometimes you'll see yourself in those stories and you'll see like, ah, yeah, this is why I was getting off track. And you might also be able to figure out why you have sometimes been successful in the past too. So it goes both ways that you'll look at some project and be like, ah, this is what I was doing when I got good at, you know, dancing or when I got good at photography. This is what I was doing. And once you understand what the principles are, you can hopefully try to generalize them to the things that maybe you find more challenging.

That's good. And you make you use the word principle. So I want to use that as a segue into, let's doing a little bit deeper dive into your book. So I have to start off with some of your endorsements because these are all kind of the superstars in this area. So first of all, James clear of atomic habits, fame, you were able to have write your forward, which is really impressive. And he said, Ultralearning is a fascinating and inspiring read. Scott has compiled a gold mine of actionable strategies for learning anything faster. Chris Gillebo said, this book is an invaluable tool to help you master complicated skills in a short period of time. Read Ultralearning and level up your life. Cal Newport said, Ultralearning is like a superpower in our competitive economy. Read this book, it will change your life. And Derek Sievers said, a truly great book about learning. Riveting, useful, practical and applicable to anyone. All ready to learn anything at their own pace. Ultralearning shows you how exactly to learn better than you thought possible. And I'm sure listeners to this show recognize those names, that all of them are heavy hitters in your area of expertise. So these are, you know, really high praise. And, and I, I know Chris and Derek pretty well and I know they don't get frivolous endorsements. So congrats again. So.

Oh, thank you.

So what was the spur to, to take all this and to actually then make it into a book? What because books are no easy thing to do, and they take a lot of time. And they can be, you know, this. You've got best seller status, but they can also, you know, be, you know, people can fuss about them and, you know, give bad criticisms, which yours doesn't have. So tell us about that path.

Well, I think for me, I had been thinking about writing a book about learning even while I was doing the MIT challenge. I thought, oh, maybe, you know, maybe I could write about this in a book or something. And I'm kind of glad that I waited. I didn't do it right then, but at the same time, it took me a really long time to find the right framing for a book like this. I think one of the things I struggled with is that I really wanted to talk about science of learning, but I'm not an academic expert. So, you know, if you're going to read a book that's the science of learning, you know, I would want to read it from someone who's got their PhD from Harvard or this kind of thing. I don't want to read it from some kid. And so I was struggling with that a little bit in the beginning, not only just because I felt like being able to speak authoritatively on a body of science that you don't have credentials in is challenging, but then also just because I wanted to find a framing of the book that I thought would kind of highlight what I wanted to do. And the other kind of book that I didn't really want to write either was a Look at Me book. And then the whole thing is just me talking about myself and my stories. And so even though I do talk about some of my projects, kind of almost necessarily so in the book, I really wanted to try to seek out other examples and other people, and really not only just for writing the book, but for my own benefit, because I have my ways of doing things. I have my strengths and weaknesses, the ways that I like to tackle learning problems. But I also wanted to see how other people approached it, and particularly other people who, you know, they're not bloggers who write about learning that people who, you know, they're just trying to do better in their lives or their jobs or this kind of thing. And so I was able to find a lot of those stories in the book. So people like Eric Barone, who has made tens of millions of dollars by painstakingly developing all the skills to create his own video game, or people like Roger Craig, who built software to test himself on trivia and then won hundreds of thousands of dollars from Jeopardy. Or people like Tristan Amontebello, who I actually had the privilege of working with while he was working on his project, where he went in seven months from having relatively little experience, almost zero experience public speaking, to being a finalist for the world champion of public speaking, you know, just a short seven months later. And so I think there's a lot of really good examples in the book of people learning skills that are quite different even from the things that I've had the experience to master in my own life. And I wanted to try to bring all these things together so that, you know, maybe you don't like my MIT challenge project, maybe you don't like me or the way I approach things, But I'm hoping there's going to be something for you in this book that will give you a different perspective of how you might want to approach learning, either in the big dramatic stories or even just simple things. Like Diana Fazenfeld, who was a librarian kind of approaching retirement and decided, you know what, she's going to upgrade her skills the 21st century. And she ends up learning statistical programming and data visualization to basically take all of the archives and records that exist in the public library system and turn those into data that will actually be useful in her career. And it was a real pivotal moment. And I mean, it's not a huge story, but it's also something that I think we can all relate to of feeling stuck and wanting to find some way to improve past it.

That's great. Well, you. To quote you from the book, you say ultralearning isn't easy, just the opposite. Not only is it hard, it's frustrating and requires stretching outside the limits of where you feel comfortable. However, these things, however the things that you can accomplish are worth the effort. And it, again, I think it speaks to the examples that you've got, the case studies in the book and also yourself. And one of the things I also liked about the book is that rather than having, like, follow these three steps or seven quick ways to do whatever, you have principles. Can you talk about why you decided on principles and maybe just briefly unpack what those principles.

Right. So here's the thing, and this is, this is kind of was a challenge in writing the book because I know a lot of people, they want the recipe, they want step one, add an egg, step two, add this. And the problem is that the kind of the very heart and soul of what I'm talking about here, which is this sort of idiosyncratic and unconventional approaches to mastering hard skills is that they do not break down to a step by step formula that, you know, if they did break down to a step by step formula, someone would put a building around it, call it a school, and then that would be a new school.

Right?

And so in some ways I was challenged with that difficulty that none of the people who were doing this were following a recipe. They all knew how to taste, they all knew how to, you know, combine the ingredients together successfully to produce something good, but they're not following a recipe. And so I was struggling with that because as I said, people like recipes, they want the step by step. And I do even have some kind of a brief outline of like a possible recipe that you can kind of use in the back. So I was even not able to avoid it entirely in my own book. But I wanted to focus on principles because I think principles are really how you approach this kind of problem, that if you have the right high level concepts and you really deeply understand them, which admittedly is not something that easily comes just from reading a book. It comes from reading a book and then doing some things in the real world and then going back and like rereading that chapter that you read and then trying something different, being like, oh, wait, this is, you know, so there's a lot of work that goes involved into learning the principles. It's not something you just, you know, learn these steps. And then I think that's why people like step by step is because it's easier to just get it the first time you read it. But principles, I think, are the way to think about it, because if you understand the basic ingredients that go into learning things successfully, then you automatically spot why this thing won't work or why this is the right way to learn this. You don't have to do tons and tons of trial and error. You know that X is going to work and Y isn't going to work because you understand what goes into something being successful. So some of these ingredients, for instance, are things like directness, which I touched on briefly here. But the idea of directness is that a lot of people learn things by doing something that's very different from the thing they actually want to get good at. And the people who are successful learning know that transfer, which means learning something in one context, let's say, in a classroom, and then applying it in a different context, let's say in real life, is often difficult. And so what you should do instead is try to do something that is very similar to what you actually want to eventually get good at. Very early on. So the language learning example is have conversations early on with people. Don't just sit at home and play it in duolingo. The computer programming example. Programming example. If you want to do the kind of programming that will be good for your job, do little programming projects, work on open source projects, work on things that are similar to the kind of programming you want to get good at. Don't just, you know, read some book about it. Now, this isn't to say that books or videos or classes are bad. They often aren't. But I think what happens is that we often forget that the doing is where a lot of the learning takes place. So there's nothing wrong with reading a book or taking a class, provided, you know, you got some homework, you've got some assignments, you've got some exercises that are actually going to be related to the thing you want to get good at. So that's just one of the principles. But you can see how across many, many, many different domains of learning, this little problem might manifest itself. So you might have a situation where increasing the directness or increasing the percentage of time you have in direct practice will just straightforwardly make you learn faster. Language learning is like the classic example where people choose really indirect approaches to learning a language. Whereas if you could just through some little fix, increase the proportion of the time you spend studying actually having conversations with people, you will get better at conversations much, much more quickly. And it's that simple. And so that's not easy to do, obviously, but it's something that if you're aware of, you can also spot, oh, this is why this effort to improve AT X isn't going to work, because it's very indirect. And so that's one of the nine principles. But I think once you see these principles, you can start seeing them again and again in your life. Not even, not even in big things, not even in giant learning projects. Like, one of the principles I have is retrieval. So retrieval is based on tons and tons of studies which show that if you want to be able to remember something, you need to practice recalling it from memory and not reviewing it. And yet what most students do when they're studying is they pull the book open and they just look over and over it. They take their notes and they look over and again. Maybe once they've done that too many times and that gets boring, they start, you know, transcribing it somewhere else and write it somewhere else. This doesn't work very well. We have tons of studies showing that this doesn't work. Very well, even though it makes students overly confident that they actually have learned the information, which is an interesting little aside.

Right.

But this doesn't even just impact, okay, a student studying for a test. Even think about, you know, if you have to give a presentation at work. What do most people do when they're practicing a presentation? They get some note cards out, they write out their speech, then they look at the note cards and just sort of do a version of their speech, looking at their note cards over and over again. This doesn't work. If you want to memorize your speech, you got to put the note cards away, try to say your point, and then if you forget it, then look at the note card. You need to actually practice recalling it. You can't just look at your notes. And so there's all these little ways. These principles don't just manifest themselves in the big things that we do, the exams we're trying to pass, the major skills we're trying to accomplish, the languages we're trying to learn, but even the little everyday moments where we're trying to do things that are intellectual in some way of reading a business book or practicing a presentation or doing a better job at some task that you have, where these principles apply themselves. So I think once you learn to spot the principles, you see them everywhere, and you see little micro decisions you're making that either move you on the track of better learning or move you away from it.

I really like that. The generalization of that. The generalization of that is really, I think, spot on. And James Clear in the forward that he wrote for the book, talks about how, I thought this was just elegant and great. Passive learning is how a person gets knowledge, and active practice is how a person develops a skill. And I think that's just to your point just now to be able to actually do these things. I think once you say it, it's sort of. It's like the emperor has no clothes. But before you say it, it seems so counterintuitive, like, well, of course I need to review my notes. Of course I need to look at my note cards before I do my talk or whatever. So it's nice to see that. And then I think that helps insinuate itself into people's lifestyles if they start to have an awareness of how these principles occurred. Not necessarily all of them every day, but how they are part of life, a part of a person's living and getting around in the world.

Absolutely.

I want to talk about your last chapter. You share a story about. I'm probably going to mispronounce this, but Judit Polgar and Garry Kasparov, for those folks that have.

Thank you.

So tell us about that. I think that's got a variety of really kind of cool points, and I can't do it justice. But tell us why you included that.

Well, I included it because, first of all, Judith Polgar is one of the, the. And she's now been written about in many books. So it's not my book is just the latest one to feature her kind of incredible story. But essentially she was raised from about age 3. Her and her sisters were raised to be chess prodigies. And so I find it to be a very unique case study in what are the limits of kind of unconventional education. Not because I think you should necessarily raise your kids to be chess produce. Let me be clear about that. First of all, I'm not going to be raising my kids to be chess prizes. But, but I think it's very interesting because on the one hand, they achieved like, eminent levels of chess proficiency. Judith Polgar is quite probably the most proficient female chess player of all time, which is no, no shortage of a compliment because I think especially in the early days when she was practicing chess, there were a lot of structural barriers that made it harder for women to really compete level playing field with men. And so she's just sort of a fascinating example of this, but also because, you know, in contrast to the stereotype of the kind of tiger parent where the child succeeds in intellectual tasks but they're kind of made miserable as a result, that doesn't seem to be the case with the Polgars. Now, I don't know whether that has a quirk to do with their personality or whether it's the style or even, you know, in depth, what their childhood was like. But I think it is very interesting because it does show that these kind of feats of intellectual things might even have something to say about how we, how we raise and educate our children. But I also included this story because I thought, well, Garry Kasparov, so speaking of eminent chess players, is perhaps he has been called by many people the best chess player of all time, which is, you know, there's no shortage of excellent people in that category. You know, Bobby Fischer and Cabo Blanca and like, you know, all these people who were just excellent chess players. He is considered by many to be the best of the best. And I thought it was interesting because he is a little bit of a bristly personality at times, and he was quite skeptical about Polgar and the Polgar sisters and even said some things that were not so nice about them in the beginning days. And he had a very controversial matchup against Yudit, which I just thought just, like, really highlighted this drama that, you know, she's a young girl and he's an experienced player. And, you know, there's some controversy over whether he left his. You know, he made his move and then he changed his mind kind of illegally. And there was some sort of squabbles about that. And I kind of take the side that he probably did do that. Whether he was intentionally doing that, I don't know. But it was sort of a. Sort of an interesting little. Little bit of drama to add to that story. But in the end of that story, he also came around because Udit has performed so well that, you know, he revised his whole opinion about women's success in chess on the result of having met her, too. So there is a kind of happy ending to that story. But I think it was a very interesting example. Not. Not really. Again, like, none of the stories that I'm putting forth are that, oh, you should go do exactly this, but just, again, the same way that I felt about Benny Lewis, how he influenced my language learning that, you know, sometimes you need to see things that are a little bit extreme, a little bit outside the ordinary to just question your assumptions. Because throughout our lives, we just have so many experiences of people doing things inside this very little narrow box of the education system that we often have just never heard of. People who are doing things that are really incredible and the Polgar certainly are qualify for that label.

Yeah, it's a great story. And it's a wonderful way to wrap up your book, I think, as well, too. And you start that chapter with the quote, I'm a psychologist, so I know of John Watson's work, you know. Quite so. And it reminds me of the Trading Places movie, you know, with Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd, of, you know, the nature, nature kind of thing. And it just sort of raises. Your second book should be, like, on parenting and education or something, I think, because it really let me have some

kids for a second. Yeah. I'm sort of agnostic about the whole nature, nurture thing. So I wouldn't go as far as John Watson, that he can, you know, create child.

Yeah.

Even a bigger man or thief, I think, is the end of that.

Yep.

But I think I. I don't go as far as that. And even in the book, when I'm talking about talent, I personally believe that there is A such a thing as an innate talent and innate intelligence that is heritable and not, you know, not entirely due to nurture, but at the same time, and this is maybe just me trying to like, you know, throw some, some rocks at the edifice that is the established thinking. At the same time, I think part of the challenge is that our culture is itself so constrained in the ways that we think about it that by and large we're so conformist in our approaches to things that, that I don't wonder, you know, why when we, when we narrowly limit the range of options people have so, so heavily, then it does often look like genetics term determines the large difference. Like if you get two people and you put them in exactly the same class, exactly the same curriculum, exactly the same approach, you know, it would make sense that the person who has more talent is the one who does better at the end of the day. But if we talk about the real world, there's so many different ways you could approach things that I think that, that that kind of artificially constrains the range at which you could apply things so that, you know, I like to say the person who fails at learning a language isn't the person who didn't have enough language learning talent. It's the person who never even tried to learn a language. Right. It's the person who never even took up the serious effort. And so I like to put it that way just because I think for many of us, you know, we're artificially constraining our possibilities. And so I prefer to be not the person who says you can do anything if you believe it, but rather you have no idea what you can do and to be agnostic about your own abilities and just to be open to the possibility that everything that you've been taught about what you're capable of achieving, you know, that that should just be a question mark. It shouldn't be something that has been already spelled out for you.

Yeah, I think you're spot on. I mean, I've got two adult, adult children now that have gone through, you know, education and then finishing up undergrad. And it's interesting to see them as two different people and two different sets of interests and the kinds of classes and the kinds of teachers they resonated with too, because I think in my inn of two experience, not including myself, but just looking at my kids, it's that whatever the cultivation, the spark, the whatever, that kind of engaged them. And I think that's a lot that overlaps with your perspective and the principles to that level of engagement rather than alienation around the education, or I can or can't do this, or this is hard or this is easy. And I think again, your book really does a great job of highlighting that. But then also through the principles, gives opportunities to give us all different perspectives on ways to look at things with maybe a new point of view, which I tip my hat to you. And I also have to say, just a geek out on chess a little bit more too, because I think there's such an interesting overlap. I saw Tim Ferriss did an interview of Josh Waitzkin at the, the SOHN conference. Oh, right, this last year. Yeah. And you know, he did, for those that probably also already know this, but just to say it, he did a book a while back called the Art of Learning and he's a, you know, he was the kid in Searching for Bobby Fischer and he's a national chess champion and all this. But he also, in the talk at, at Sohn, he was talking about how to cram two months of learning into a day. And I thought, you know, you guys are like, I don't know if you follow his work or have met him or anything, but it's just, it seems like the two of you really would, you know, together have a, you know, just have an amazing energy about, you know, your perspectives and stuff. Because he, you know, he was talking about like, gosh, well, it was like some kind of, not wakeboarding but kind of like a more physical kind of of thing. And, and maybe that's a good segue into one last challenge I want to talk to you about and share with our audience, which is just amazing. And we'll put this in links in the show notes and it'll appear in the LinkedIn. But a lot of this, you know, I think there's also a lot of people talk about differences in learning vis a vis the brain and you know, right brained and left brained and what's analytical and what's artistic and things. And you, you've been a lot of the challenges we've talked about have been very much along. You know, the, the logical, you know, you. Nothing more logical than computer science probably. But you also have taken a challenge.

I did several logic classes.

I can imagine. So you also did this amazing to me because I have dabbled with attempting to paint and have background and pathetic background in art of portraiture, drawing. And you don't come from a background, you come from a background of university with business. You didn't take, you know, a fine arts degree but you did what you called the 30 day portrait drawing challenge. Can you tell us a little bit about that? How did that. How'd you come up with it again? And how did you do that?

This was a shorter project. And like, we were even talking a little bit before the episode started about this. The problem when talking about portraits on a podcast, I mean, if you listen to this on a video, maybe, maybe you can. Yeah, maybe you can throw up a video, an image of the before and after. That's a great idea.

I'll do that. I'll put it on our YouTube and Vimeo.

Yeah. Because I usually prefer, for this project, just be like, okay, just look at it and you can judge for yourself. But I. So I had been always interested in drawing kind of casually. You can. Even if you go to my website, you can see I do little, like doodles and stuff. Although I did these doodles more recently than the portrait drawing challenge. But the thing I was interested in was drawing faces from the perspective of. It's really hard to draw faces. Well, I mean, have you. I don't know if you've heard this. Maybe it's just me in my cultural era, but I don't know if anyone of your listeners remember Napoleon Dynamite.

Oh, yeah.

There's this scene where Pedro and he draws this picture of this girl and it's just terrible. And he gives it to her as a gift. And he's like, I spent. I spent three hours working on the shading of your upper lip.

I forgot about that.

I think it's so perfect. It's so, like, it's not a great portrait by any means, but I challenge you, listening to this right now, to do a better one. Most people are not good at drawing faces. And that was sort of what excited me about it. Because drawing faces is super hard because our brains are extremely well tuned to recognize faces. So in our brain circuitry, we can notice very, very slight differences in someone's face. And so we can notice, like, if you put the eyes on someone's face just a little bit too high, for instance, it will immediately look wrong. And this is not like if you were to draw a tree or a pear or something like that, you get it kind of off and it would still look like a pear or a tree. But faces, you get it off even a little bit and doesn't look like that person anymore. And so this was sort of an interesting challenge. And I thought about it for a while and I'd even done. There's a little book called Drawing on the Right side of the brain. Speaking about right brain, left brain, drawing on the right side of the brain. And I did the little course, and I'd improved, I thought, in drawing a lot of things, but the faces at the end, I still felt my faces sucked after that, and I found it quite difficult. And so I decided, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to try to see if this is amenable to some kind of, like, little ultralearning project. And so there were two kind of phases to the project. The first phase of the project was just getting lots of feedback. So I did tons and tons and tons of facial drawings. And then I had this little method. Excuse me, had this little method I used where I would draw, like, kind of a sketch, then I would take a photo of it with my iPhone, put it on my computer, and then I used kind of like a free version of Photoshop, basically, to put a transparency so the actual reference photo, scale it, and, like, you know, make sure I rotate it so that it fits on the. On my thing lines up as good as possible and make it a transparency so you can still see my drawing underneath. And then I would do that for each of them. It didn't take that long. It only takes about, like, 30 seconds to a minute to do that. And then you could immediately see what was the mistake you made, right? Because when you look at a picture, you're like, well, it doesn't look right. But it's kind of hard to say what the problem is, right? It's hard to say that, oh, the head was too wide or the eyes were too high. I mean, if you develop a sense of it, you can start to note what the problem is just by looking at it. But it's kind of hard to tell when you're. When you start out. And so I was doing this for probably about two weeks. I was doing a lot of this, and so I did hundreds of these, lining it up, and I did get a bit better. And then I kind of hit a plateau. I didn't feel like I even got better even in that time with the drawing of the portraits. And then I was getting kind of stuck again. So I moved to a different approach, which I found this great portrait drawing course by Vitruvian Studio, that's an online course platform. And if you want to see, like, my portraits look like they're okay after I finish the. This challenge. But this guy's portraits are, like, spectacular. Like, this guy is extremely good. He does still life paintings that they look like photos. Like, he is insanely good. And taking his course. Yeah, taking his course, I was able to learn a specific technique for doing them. And so this is, I think, also, you know, I'm talking about portrait drawing, which, I mean, if you're listening this right now, maybe you're thinking yourself, I don't really care about drawing portraits. But I think it's useful because it kind of illustrates a general philosophy. And it also shows why the recipe approach doesn't work, is that I started out with one kind of hypothesis, and it was built on some principles. The principles were, okay, I need to get more accurate feedback. If I can get more accurate feedback, I can improve my drawing. I need to do a lot of volume of direct practice. So there's a lot of these principles. And then you sort of hit diminishing returns. And my feeling was, well, maybe I need a different method. Maybe I need some different theoretical insights that will allow me to have greater accuracy than I can just by kind of eyeballing it, at least for the amount of time I have to work on this project. And so doing this method, I learned a different method. This method is not very amenable to quick sketches. So I still wouldn't be able to draw super accurate, let's say, caricatures on the street. I wouldn't be able to do that because the method that I use does take some time that. To draw like the one I did for my final one. I think I probably took, like, you know, in the. In the hours range to do it. Well, it takes a couple hours, not like a couple minutes. But in the same sense, you're able to achieve extremely high levels of accuracy by using this method. And it extends to drawing all sorts of things. And so this was something that, you know, by applying it and by even just thinking about, like, he also went over some of the anatomy so that you can, like, pay attention to some subtle things about the geometry of the face and these kind of things that might not even be very obvious from a visual inspection, but if you put them in, they make your drawings look more realistic. And it was just something that. That really took it to the next level. And so I think it's kind of a microcosm of this whole approach to ultralearning, which there was an intensity, there was some. Some hypothesis about what might work well based on some principles of learning. And then there was also adaption from feedback. So as I started to stall, I went and I tried something different. So I think even if you're not looking to Improve it in drawing faces. I think the similar kind of overall approach to learning is effective for getting good at lots of things.

I think that's really clever. So thank you for your time today. I have a couple of last questions, if you don't mind. What's your next challenge? What's up on the docket?

Right. So I do have. I always have more ideas for things I'd like to learn than I have time to learn. And I do spend a lot of time dabbling. So not everything I learn makes it into an official public ultralearning project. And no, no small reason for that is just that the public ones, they tend to be a lot of work to just do them publicly. Like, it's more work than just learning on your own. Because I gotta, like, you know, for the MIT challenge, I had to, you know, scan every single document and make weekly updates. And for the portrait drawing, when I'm, you know, I'm scanning all these images and doing all this stuff, whereas when I just do things, you know, like. So I've been learning. Like right now I'm learning oil painting, for instance, but I'm not posting it on my blog just because I want to have fun with it. Wow. But I do have a project that I'm going to be working on next year, but it's currently a secret. So for those of you who are listening, you have to stay tuned for early 2020, when I will be announcing it.

We will put links to your blog, and I guess maybe that's a segue for the next. What are the best ways for people to pick up your book? Hop on your blog. Do you have a mailing list that people can get involved with, learn more about you?

Yeah. So you can go to my website, which is@scotthyung.com that's S C O T T H Y o u n g.com and if you sign up for my newsletter, I give a weekly newsletter where I give a new article each week. I can even give you a free chapter of the ultralearning book. And at the same time, you can get my book at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, wherever you get your books. It's also available on Audible. I know some people prefer to listen than to read. And if you prefer that, if you're not tired of listening to my voice already, then you can listen to me, narrate the book and get some assistance in the things that you're trying to get better at.

That's great. And yeah, just to put a plug in, too, for your website it's amazing. It's very easy to navigate through. And the amount of content you have is just amazing. I mean, you've got guides, I think, what, over a thousand articles. I mean, just very well organized. Some people just have sort of of like a. If you were to print their website, it'd be like, you know, five miles long. But yours, the navigation and ways to get oriented are very clever, very well done. So it, it's.

Oh, thanks. Yeah, it's one of the benefits of starting early.

Hey, yeah, that's right. That's right. So. Well, thank you, Scott, again. You're very generous with your time. You've been very generous to put this book together to be able to help folks do things that perhaps they felt were too limited or out of the. The scope of what they might be able to do. I just really appreciate it and I've so enjoyed our conversation today. Thank you so much.

Oh, thank you so much. Yeah, it was great, Great to talk to you.

Living Life in Full is a production of Stout Media, a subsidiary of Gordian Knot, LLC. Assistant Producer, Gracie Wong Music Dan O' Brien Executive Producer and Host, Dr. Chris Stout. To learn more, stop by our website at Life in Full for show notes and please recommend us to your friends and subscribe on your favorite platform. And as for the obligatory disclaimer, this podcast is for general information uses only and does not constitute the practice of psychology, medicine, nutrition or other professional health care services, including the giving of medical or psychological advice. No doctor patient relationship is formed. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, I take conflicts of interest seriously. For all of my disclosures as well as show notes, please see livingalifeinfull.org podcast and my LinkedIn profile. Thanks. And until next time,