429. Mastering the Art of Learning: Insights from Scott Young

Welcome to episode 429 of the Brainy Business Understanding the Psychology of why People Buy. In today's episode, I'm excited to introduce you to Scott H. Young, author of Get Better at Anything.

Ready? Let's get started.

You are listening to the Brainy Business podcast where we dig into the psychology of why people buy and help you incorporate behavioral economics into your business, making it more brain friendly. Now, here's your host, Melina Palmer.

Hello. Hello everyone.

My name is Melina Palmer and I want to welcome you to the Brainy Business Podcast. In today's conversation, I'm joined by Scott H. Young. Scott is the Wall Street Journal best selling author of Ultra Learning, a podcast host, computer programmer, and an avid reader. Since 2006, he has published weekly essays to help people learn and think better. His work has been featured in the New York Times, Pocket and Business Insider, on the BBC and at TEDx, among other outlets. He doesn't promise to have all the answers, just a place to start. Today we're discussing his new book, Get Better at Anything and oh my goodness, are you going to want to pay attention on this one. You need this book. You'll love this conversation and its insights.

Buckle up y', all really quickly.

Before we get into the conversation. Can you tell I'm excited? I want to be sure you know that there are links in the show.

Notes for my top related past episodes.

And books, including of course, how to Get Better at Anything and more. It's all within the app you're listening to and atthe brainy business.com 429.

Now.

Let'S jump right in. Scott H. Young, welcome to the Brainy Business Podcast.

Oh, it's great to be here.

Yeah, I'm super excited. I absolutely loved this book. I read it on a plane and I was making so many notes for myself and highlighting all the things and I love learning and helping people to take in information. And so I've been super excited about this conversation for weeks. So, so I'm so excited that you are here. For everyone who doesn't yet know you, can you share a little bit about yourself and the work that you do?

Yeah. So I'm an author. I've written two books about learning. Actually my first book, Ultralearning, was a Wall Street Journal bestseller and it sort of documented some of my and other people's kind of unusual projects in learning. So one of these was I did a project called the MIT Challenge where I was trying to learn MIT's for your computer science curriculum. But I was Using their free materials, they were posting online. And I did another project with a friend where we traveled to different countries learning languages in a year. And so that became the basis of that book. And then for this book, I wanted to really dig deep into a lot of the science, the psychology, the cognitive science of learning, and how does it work and what are the ingredients that we need to get right. And I found a lot of stuff that surprised me and was fascinating. And so hopefully it'll be interesting to people here. But in many ways, my life has been centered around learning, you know, from how to study in college to how to learn skills as an adult, to mastering your career. And that's really what I like to talk about with people.

I love that. So do you have a route that you feel like got you interested in this idea of learning in general?

Well, I mean, I don't know. It's funny when you think about origin stories, because I definitely didn't think of this when. When I was getting started in it, but my parents are both schoolteachers, so, I mean, I think that's like, sort of this obvious thing. You, like, you grow up in a household where the parents are, you know, working in schools, teaching kids this kind of stuff. I think it just maybe rubbed off on me. But, I mean, I also feel like part of my interest actually comes from my interest in business as well, because when I was a teenager, I got this idea that I want to, you know, start my own business. I want to run my own kind of, like, solopreneur kind of business. And I was very aware of how difficult that was, like, how difficult it is to be successful. You know, everyone hears the statistics that, like, 80% of businesses fail, and most people, you know, they can't make it work. And so I think it was that challenge that lighted a fire under me of, like, well, if I'm going to do this, then I've got to be good at it. Like, I can't just coast and do it. Like, I can't just, oh, well, you know, whatever. I'll just get this job after graduation and just get, you know, pounded out for 30 years. Like, I have to actually be at my best. And so I think that also fueled this motivation for learning, because whenever you're in a competitive environment where you see the big difference between the people who are the best and the people who are just okay, I think that is a motivation to figure out how getting good works. Right?

Yeah. Yeah, definitely. I am also intrigued by this, the. The challenge aspect of it. Right. So as someone who I. It's, I guess, my saddest thing to be able to say that, like, when people ask about what you want your superpower to be, you know, it's like, if you could have a superpower, what would you want it to be? I have always said that I would love to be able to communicate perfectly in every language. I want to be able to, like, read and talk to people in their language and, like, know them all kind of somewhat flawlessly. And I am so terrible at learning a language. It's very sad. I definitely don't. I speak none of the other languages even close to fluently and have a really hard time learning them personally. So I'm fascinated by this. Learn a language in a year, and going around and doing that. So can you share a little bit about this, that experience?

Yeah, yeah. I'll go into a little bit more detail on that project. Yeah. So the project, we called it the Year Without English. And so it was a friend and I. This is again, like, about 10 years ago, we decided to go to Spain, Brazil, China, and South Korea. And so for each country, when we would land in it, we spent about three months in each country when we land, the idea was that we wouldn't speak in English to each other or to anyone we'd meet. Now, of course, there's obviously, like, some minor exceptions, but for the most part, we stuck to that rule. And what that means is that everyone you meet, because you're speaking to them, let's say in Spain, you're speaking to them in Spanish, they learn to speak to you in Spanish, you meet people who are okay with your not so good Spanish, and you form friendships, and basically you form this environment around you where you end up speaking Spanish all the time. And so some interesting things happen when you go through this kind of experience. So one of them is that even though after three months, I cannot say that, like, my Spanish was perfect by any standard, like, I'm not, like, delivering flawless university lectures, although people can judge for what they wish. But I felt like we were doing all right. But the. The feeling of fluency, the feeling of comfort in speaking the language, that actually comes a lot faster. And that's surprising to a lot of people because the way we typically learn languages in school is kind of the opposite approach. You spend years and years and years. You know, you learn vocabulary, you learn conjugation, you acquire a lot of knowledge, but you don't actually get the. That much repetitive practice. As a result, there's a kind of like a storehouse of Spanish from high school in your brain that's probably gotten rusty over time, but your ability to apply it fluently and smoothly is quite low. And so there is this sense that, like, oh, man, I took high school Spanish and I took it in university. I've done it for five years. And, like, I can't even say ola to someone. It is. It's sort of depressing, right? But I think it's just the way that we learn it in that context really prioritizes this, amassing this knowledge, but low fluency. Whereas if you are in an immersive context where you have to speak and read and interact and listen to people on a daily basis, maybe your actual base of knowledge is smaller. Like, there's lots of words that you don't know for things that you don't encounter in your everyday life. But the things that you do need to use all the time, they come really quickly. So anyone who's like yourself, maybe who thinks they're bad at learning languages, I would suggest humbly that perhaps you just have gone about it the wrong way. And that if you're in an environment where you can have this immersion for an extended, extended period of time can make a really big difference in what you think you can accomplish.

Hmm. I love that. And it's very much about. You can't try to do them all at once with all the things in any context. Right. So like you said, it's not like you were trying to be doing Spanish as you're also working with Chinese and, like, all at the, like, on the same day. Right. You have to be in that. And you're not also trying to, like, run your first marathon and do all these new things. Right. You have to pick a thing you're going to focus on and go all in.

Definitely in the beginning, I think it's important to. When you're tackling a difficult goal to have some concentrated focus. I find with the immersion, one of the things that you will notice if you learn languages is that if you learn more than one, there is interference, which means that you learn. Like, for me, for instance, I had learned some French when I was in university. I did a year abroad in France. And then when I learned Spanish, I was like, oh, this is great. It's coming so well. And I went to a meetup. This was in Barcelona near the. Near the end of our kind of Spanish day. And there were some French people. And I thought, oh, well, I speak French. I'll speak some French to them. And it was like, I Couldn't get more than three words out before. Like the, you know, pork was coming into my. Into my vocabulary. And it's because of this interference. Now, the way that you overcome this, it takes a lot more practice is that when you're in the maintenance phase, when you sort of like you've done this intensive burst, then you want to start introducing the skills in conjunction. So you want to start having, like, a tutoring session of Spanish, French and Portuguese, like, kind of right next to each other, and that starts to train your brain to switch. But in the beginning, it can be very difficult to do that. So I do know some people that try to learn multiple languages at the same time, but I wouldn't in general recommend it just because, you know, it's often very discouraging how disfluent it is in the beginning when you're having to switch back and forth.

Oh, yeah, definitely. It's so interesting to hear you talking about all of those learnings and knowing how it ties into the second book and the tips and the different aspects and thoughtfulness there. So I'm excited as we're going to transition into that conversation here as we look to get better at anything. Right. If we're trying, whether it's languages or. Or anything else. I like I said I love the book and I think that the. Of course, there's a reason that the Tetris example is at the very beginning, but I think that is such a useful kind of case study. Can you share a bit about Tetris?

I mean, this story, it's like such a fun kind of story because normally when you think about, like, getting better and you read books on this, it's about, you know, chess grandmasters and elite athletes and this kind of thing. And so Tetris, you know, the arcade game, just seems like a little bit of one of these things doesn't belong. But I first heard this story from the YouTuber John Green, and he was commenting on a phenomenon which is that if you look at the best Tetris players, so, meaning there has been, since the game has come out, records that people have kept of, like, high scores, various other sort of benchmarks for, like, how good people are at the game, the people who are playing today are so much better than the people who were playing the game shortly after it came out. It's not even close. And, you know, when you hear this, a few common explanations spring to mind. Well, you know, maybe players have just been accumulating so much experience over this time, but that's not the Case because some of the best players today are like 12 and 13 years old. So they weren't even born when Tetris came out. And many of the players who are from the earlier era are still playing today. Another explanation might be, well, you know, people just are more obsessive now, and that's also not the case. I mean, people are writing these op EDS about how they were hallucinating, falling blocks. When Tetris came out, like, when it came out, it was definitely a phenomenon. People were obsessed over it. The explanation, John Green EVENT and I really agree with, is that what has changed is our ability to learn from other people. So there were techniques and strategies that maybe one or two people found out in the early days, but it didn't have a good mechanism for spreading. And now we have live streaming. You have, like, cameras over the player's hands. You can see how they're holding the remote. And it turns out that that's super important. Like, the way that current players are playing is they play with the remote upside down and with, like, a glove in one hand, so they can, like, flick it so that you can just hit it just right, so you can press the buttons at an incredibly rapid rate. Like, it's just weird stuff like that that you'd never figure out on your own, and you would learn very easily if you were to watch someone else. And so what the Tetris example showed, and I thought was very interesting and interesting also, because there's parallels in business and science and elsewhere, is that this ability to learn from other people, this ability to, like, figure out what the best practices are and emulate it for yourself, is perhaps the key bottleneck for learning. That that is what makes us unique as a species, is that we have culture, we have the ability to learn through observation. That, like, contrary to the, you know, saying monkey see, monkey do that, is what human beings are able to do. And what monkeys are not able to do is that they are not able to copy and emulate. And so this is really kind of our. Our hidden strength. And this is something that if we want to get good at things in business, in languages, in our career, being able to observe what the best strategies are, being able to observe the techniques that are being used in practice is so important. And so that's sort of the starting point for the book. But I go into some other factors as well that underpin our ability to get better at things.

Yeah, well, I don't always just kind of like walk through frameworks. You know, I get excited and jump around Sometimes, but I think in this case, you know, we're talking about the see aspect and how that comes into play, where we've got the see and do and feedback when it comes to learning in the book. And so if we think about, I. I always talk to people about understanding your problem in a better way and being more creative in the way that we think about things. And you know how this is helping in that C space. So can you share a little bit about. I guess you can pick if you want to, like, yeah, gloss over all of the chapters or pick a specific one in that section. Whatever works for you.

I'll give the bullet point version of it. But essentially what impressed upon me when I was reading the research is just how difficult it is to think solve problems that like, we kind of take for granted that, you know, problem solving is sort of this innate talent that we have. Oh, we work hard and we solve problems. But if you just look at it mathematically, if you look at it from the perspective of someone who is like, if you were to design a machine to solve problems, it's very difficult. And in fact, most problems are not solvable. This is something that like, you can prove mathematically but is. It's kind of a surprise. And even problems that, you know, we routinely solve actually have these just vast, enormous possibilities of ways you could approach it. And so if you're not clever with how you approach it, if you don't use proper techniques, you're never going to be able to solve it. Like, my favorite example is like a Rubik's Cube, you know, this like, toy. You can find people online who solve them in under a minute. If you were to spend a second on every single combination that is in a Rubik's Cube, you'd have like many times the age of the universe. It's not possible to solve it that way. And so the first idea of like, why we need to learn from other people is that we need to find the right way to think about problems, the right way to move in these spaces of problems. Because if we don't, if we just have to default to the trial and error approach, the possibilities may be endless and we may either not ever find a solution or we may end up settling on a solution that's not that good. Like, it's not as good as we could have found. And that's indeed what happened with a lot of the early Tetris players, is that they ended up using strategies that are inferior because they didn't know any better, they didn't have the ability to learn from other people. Other things that are important in this sort of C area is that we have this capacity called working memory, which is famously limited. There is that famous paper, you know, the magical number seven plus or minus two, which argues that the amount of things we can keep into our head at one time is very limited. But interestingly enough, it seems to be more limited with information that's unfamiliar to us. So as we learn more, as we acquire more skills, we sort of effectively have a larger working memory capacity. And what that means is that if you are first learning something, it's very important to break it down into simple parts that you can understand. Because the person who is an expert, this person who has a lot of experience doing it, they can manage a lot more information. So that's one of the major difficulties of learning complicated skills is that we need to be able to figure out what the expert is doing and sort of reverse engineer it. So I talk about that a little bit too. But I mean, that's. That's sort of the basic idea. Problem solving is really hard. We should sort of be impressed with how it's sort of incredible we can solve problems at all and then realize that how we're doing that is by understanding, using these representations that are given from other people.

Yeah, I really love the chapter that's talking about the. That copying is actually creative, but in a way, like it's. It's based on, you know, learning those. Those fundamental aspects. And I think there's so much in this space. And we'll talk about, of course, practicing. And it's like, you gotta practice the right stuff and get to where you've moved things. Like you're saying here from. When we look at this, like, conscious subconscious, you know, system one, system two, thinking of, you know, our brains and things is. It's hard. You have to put that effort into the right thing and where it can be difficult as you're doing it. But difficulty is actually important in being able to remember things and being able to experience what happened in a way that you're going to be able to take that, like, next step. I always talk about the. You. You give the example of phone numbers in the book, right? I can see the phone number a million times, but it doesn't mean that I actually remember it when I have to type the thing. And I think I use this as, like, directions. Right. My husband can have driven us somewhere a million times. I'm typically not the driver for all sorts of reasons. And even though I've been there 75 times in the last month. It doesn't like when I go to drive, I'm going to use the GPS because I don't, I'm not retaining that information. Right. But so doing it enough in enough different ways to where it becomes this kind of that like flow state. There's a bit of this, the intuitiveness that comes from continued experience. And I think that that has its foundations where you talk about the, like Renaissance painting. So I've said so many things, I shall let you take this where you, where you are.

Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean what you were talking about, about the, the chapter, the maxim copying creativity begins with copying. That idea, I think sort of runs counter to our lot of our kind of like background, you know, post Enlightenment, post, you know, this romantic Jean Jacques Rousseau, this idea that like, well, we want to cast aside tradition, we want to like think for ourselves, just look at things as they are and reinvent, be creative. That's important. But I think again, it's, it's tossing away our greatest strength. It's tossing away the fact that we are an accumulative species. That is what we are good at is sort of like getting quickly to where other people are so, so we can innovate. And so I think the idea here is, is not that creativity isn't important or that creativity is just copying, but that it begins with copying I think is poorly understood. It's poorly appreciated, especially by, in a lot of like creative endeavors. I mean, I took a lot of art classes in high school where there was very little instruction in like the fundamentals of the basis. Like just go wild, just have fun. And I mean, yeah, if the goal was just to have the kids have fun, that's great, but it's maybe not so good if you want them to actually draw something that actually looks like it's supposed to look like or is, you know, an actually beautiful picture. And so I think that that's something that's true in many fields. So if you are at the start of the field copying, you know, like when I, when I started writing books, one of the things I looked at when I was trying to figure out my table of contents was pick some books I like and see how they structured it, you know, because when you are actually trying to solve a problem too, that's when copying is most valuable. Like when you actually have in mind, okay, I'm going to try to write something. How do people write essays? You pay attention to different things than when you're just reading. Like you, you gave us the example with the, you know, following the directions. If I told you, okay, you're going to have to, you know, run this route right after I'm done, you would pay attention better, right? Because you now have as a goal, okay, I have to pay attention to what I'm doing here. So I think that's also a major factor that makes the difference between sort of useful copying and just sort of passive consumption. Because when you're actually trying to solve a problem, then other examples become super important. They're things that you really latch on to and pay attention to.

Yeah, it's like when you're training somebody, right? And even, even like you said of telling someone, okay, pay attention because you're gonna do this next. Or I'm recording a video of, of me. Like, I click here and then I go over here, and then I go this, and I do this, that, and I go through all the steps. And then you say, okay, now it's your turn. It's like, okay, so I do this. And then, yeah, I was paying attention. I knew I had to do it next. And yet when it's my turn and I'm on the spot and I have to do it, I realize I didn't actually retain any of what you told me.

I have a fun example of this because I just think it, like, really captures this idea perfectly that we can see something a lot and. But if we're not actively in this process of, you know, I call it see do feedback in the book. And the other parts are very important to make the seeing work as well. So I was. I was giving a talk somewhere, and it was an important talk. And so I was giving the talks or practice talk to my wife a few times. She heard me give it more than a few times, actually. And. And she said after, she's like, oh, I've heard this speech so many times. I could give it. And I was like, oh, okay, all right, give it a shot. And so she goes up and like, this is just in our, you know, hotel room. This is not in front of an audience. And she's just giving it. She's like, oh, wait, what was, what was your next point? What were you going to say? What are you going to do this? Because even though she had heard it a bunch of times, and what's going on in the brain is that when you hear something a bunch of times, it becomes more. More and more effortless to process that information. So this is this kind of illusion of fluency. It's becoming more and more Fluent, the listening. But it's not necessarily becoming a deeper memory in terms of something you can actually recall on command, not having the appropriate cue. And so this is something that we often get into when we're studying for class, for instance, is that students will obsessively reread and reread their notes. But it turns out this is a bad way to study because it produces this illusion of fluency. You're feeling like you know the material, but actually it's just getting more and more effortless to read the material. Material. It's. It's shown that if you close the book and you try to recall what you just read, which is very difficult, and we often fail at it, you actually strengthen your memory more. So this is why, you know, when you're in this cycle of, like, you see it, you close the book, you try to do a problem, or you try to recall something and you get some feedback. Did I get it right? That's a much more effective protocol for learning than just rereading or looking something over again.

Totally. Well. And going through that process, like you say of the speech within note cards, right. And say, well, I. I have. When I put the. I'm not a good public speaker because when I put down my notes, I can't do it. It's like, well, yeah, the first time, but. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, exactly. You'll. You won't be able to get past using the notes until you practice a lot without the notes.

But I think people also. Yeah, people also make the mistake of thinking. Exactly. Like you said, they make the mistake of thinking, well, I need to memorize it by looking at my notes, and then I'll be able to do it. But really what you want to do is put the notes down, try to do it, and then only look at the notes when you get stuck. Right. Like, give yourself, like, a few seconds to try. And I think, yeah, that the idea here is that, like, while we want to have the examples, we need to sort of. There's this tension because, like, you need to see the example. Otherwise you may be just making something up. You're not using the best procedure. But if you don't look at the example when you're practicing, then that actually strengthens your memory more. So there is this sort of, like, all these little tensions in learning where, you know, you need to have both ingredients, but if you have it too easy, then you're not going to learn. If you have it too hard, you're not going to find the best method.

Yes. And so That I think you know this. The difficulty question is one of like, how do we determine? And, and I know you, of course, have a whole chapter on this as we transition in out of C and into do. Can you share a little bit about that next piece?

Yeah. So. Well, we've already been talking about a lot of it, but there's this research that I really like by the psychologist Robert Bjork where he identifies what he calls desirable difficulties. Basically, these are things that make it look like your performance is worse. So it makes it look like you're not learning as fast compared to some other way of studying, but actually produces better performance in the long run. Either you retain the information longer, you're able to generalize it more, or it's resulting in more efficiency. So one of them is what we just talked about, this idea of retrieval, which is that you memorize things faster when you actually have to try to remember it than when, if you just look at it. Another one is spacing, which is that if you study in really crammed bunch, like right before the exam, and that's less efficient per unit time than if you spread it out, let's say, over the whole semester. Another one that we can also talk about is variability. Whereas if you mix up the technique, so you do your forehand and your backhand, you mix them together in your tennis practice, it will look slower, but you will actually learn the skills better than if you only do forehand and then only to backhand. And so these are examples of where things that change the difficulty, that make it feel like you're learning more slowly, actually improve it. And I think that this, getting this difficulty right is made a lot easier if you can do it in a practice loop. So if you can see some examples, do some practice and get some feedback, basically all the successful learning systems of the world, and I cover a lot of them in the book, incorporate this in some ways. So you know the apprenticeship and the sort of renaissance workshop to, you know, the system of direct instruction that was pioneered for teaching kids to read, that is one of the most successful methods that have come out there to how they work for like training fighter pilots, like all of these techniques. The more you can incorporate this practice loop where you can see examples, get practice and get feedback. If you can incorporate those together, that will allow you to fine tune the difficulty. Because if you're failing in all your practice attempts, you can go study the example some more. And if you are getting the example right, you can fade out the instructions. That's one way of Adjusting the difficulty. And it's very hard to do that if you're not incorporating all three components.

Hmm, definitely. Well, let's explain some of the aspects of that feedback. Right. So do we have to get feedback from other people? Is it our own, you know, self, you know, tie back? And what, what does the feedback piece mean as we're bringing this all together for learning?

Yeah. Well, I take the broader view of feedback, which is not just like corrective feedback from a teacher, but anytime you're getting information after you perform some skills. So that's the mountain pushing back against your skis when you're going down the hill. That's the product you launch and it sells really well or it flops. Those are all feedback. One of the things that I thought was really fascinating reading this research is that there's this little kind of sub literature on the role of experts expertise where in some domains it looks like experts don't actually get very good. We don't typically see this sort of like really high performance. So you have some fields like chess or engineering or programming, where you can really see big differences between people who do not have experience and people who are masters of their craft. And then there are other fields where the experts don't even seem to do that much better than fairly simple tools. So you can imagine situations like one of the examples that I cover in the book was there was a, a test that was looking at parole decisions of prisoners, and it was comparing the recommendations of three psychiatrists who were sort of experts in this sort of decision making of whether someone would reoffend and just a simple tally of pros and cons. And it turns out the tally did about as well as the psychologist. So just someone saying, like, you know, how violent was their offense? And like, you know, you add up about 8 or 10 of these tallies, and that was better than people who have two decades of experience and all this training. And so what's going on? Why do you have a situation where some people can be so good and some people can be kind of mediocre despite having tons of experience? And I think a major difference is the quality of feedback you get. So when you are a psychiatrist and you're doing parolees decisions, how often do you get feedback about whether or not the person that you sent out into the wild actually did re offend or how often do you get feedback about like, this is your success rate and this is sort of like your confidence interval. So you have some sense of like, you know, if I say they're going to be successful or not, what's the actual like randomness around that decision? And because we don't get that kind of feedback, it's very difficult to calibrate. In contrast, you know, physicists, they know when they get the question wrong, if you are a chess player, you lose the chess game. And so one of the things that I think is, is a real potent strategy that's currently underused is how can we make our learning environments, our work environments, are places where we actually practice the skills we want to be really good at. How can we make them more like the domains where we do see this steady increase of expertise? And it's not impossible. It's not to say that, you know, professional skills in the real world are messy and vague and noisy and they're not the same as a chess game, but there's lots of ways we can improve it. I, I, I cover Philip Tetlock's work with super forecasters where he worked with them on a protocol of like making predictions about events, something that is like sort of a kind of almost definitionally hard skill to learn that has poor feedback. And through his sort of protocol of working with people, giving them feedback, giving them feedback on their scores, having them work in groups together so they could share information, they were actually able to get better at those skills and they were able to outperform a lot of the simple methods that we were talking about. So I think there is currently a large gap in how good we could be at a lot of these real world business skills and how good we actually are simply because the quality of the feedback, the way that we've designed the learning environment just doesn't permit us to actually achieve high levels of expertise. High levels of confidence, yes, but not high levels of expertise.

Yeah, not, not necessarily the same thing in those to. Yeah. Well, this definitely was making me think about the, in the way that you learn the languages. Right. As we're talking about that. The year without English. Right. So in this space, if you're taking so the rule of we are not going to speak English to each other. We're not. And we're going to be in this space. Right. So you set some very clear lines to be immersed in a way where I'm guessing in the early days you got lots and lots of feedback of people laughing at you or whatever else where you said the thing wrong and you felt kind of silly and then you learned that you're, you know, saying this word wrong and it actually sounds like this other word that is really bad. And you don't want to say that thing. And so that immersive experience with so much feedback in that concentrated way and where you know that you're going to be iterating and you're like repeating, repeating, repeating, repeating is so key to then have the, that fluency that can come to whatever degree we can call fluency.

Right.

But as far as it being easier to recall the thing because you actually were experiencing it in the moment.

Yeah. So, I mean, I. I think there's a few factors that, from this new book that I think really influenced my understanding of why that works. So the first one was the repetitive practice, like going back to the school versus immersion approaches to language learning. In school, you cover a topic, you get a little bit of practice, but I mean, it's like half an hour a week, maybe an hour a week. It's, it's not a lot. Right. And the teacher's trying to cover a lot of material in that short time. So you don't get that much practice on any individual word, any individual sentence pattern. In contrast, if you have to speak that language all day, every day, then it's not actually that you're getting tons of breadth, but you're getting tons of depth. So every single, you know, basic phrase, you're saying it hundreds, thousands of times. And so this, you know, pushes you along the sort of automaticity curve so that when you say basic sayings, basic words, they come out without you even thinking about them. And that's very important to fluency, which is different from just overall proficiency. Fluency is the experience of being able to do things fluidly, and that's very important for language learning. Obviously. The second thing, and I think it's related to what you talked about, the feedback piece, a lot of our reluctance to doing this, and I don't know about your experience, but in talking with people who have struggled with learning languages, one of the things they struggle with, and indeed I even I struggle with after, you know, 10 years being out of this experience, is that it's very daunting to speak to someone in another language if you think you're going to do it badly. So much of our social image comes from I'm competent, I'm articulate, I'm smart, and when you're speaking another language, you're none of those things. And so there is a strong feeling of like, I'm going to be judged negatively, I'm going to have bad, negative social judgment. I'm going to have, you know, I'm going to make mistakes. People are going to think I'm stupid or they're going to laugh at me. Like, you gave us an example. Turns out actually people don't laugh at you. Almost never. Like, that's very rare. That happens. I mean, sometimes if you say something really funny, it happens, but. But it doesn't happen that often. But part of this is this emotional response, right? That you have this emotional reaction to. Like, this is scary, this is, you know, anxiety inducing. And so I'm going to avoid doing it. And when you avoid practicing it, you don't get that fluency that we were talking about earlier. So one of the things that I think is very interesting and I, you know, the last chapter I talk about the research on exposure therapy is that as you get more experience doing it, the feedback that comes from the environment is actually that, oh, you're not going to die. And actually you aren't going to be like this social outcast and be like tossed aside and people be pointing fingers at you and mocking you derisively. Like at first you're going to have someone be like, okay, like, like that's about as much as you're going to get in terms of negative feedback. And so because of that experience. Yes. So your fluency goes up a lot, but also your fear, your anxiety about speaking another language goes way, way down. So again, we can talk about like maybe this sort of three component system to like doing the language well. It's like, how fluent are you? How comfortable do you feel? And then maybe like your breadth and depth of knowledge. Now, three months is probably not enough to get that full breadth and depth so that you are actually proficient in every situation. There's tons of words you still don't know, but if you get those first two right, then actually in a lot of regular, everyday situations, you're going to be fine. You don't need to have a college level vocabulary in order to, you know, go up and order tacos or just to have a conversation about some simple topics. And so that's what I would recommend for people who are approaching a skill. Could be languages, it could be something else, public speaking, it could be launching a business where you have this kind of anxiety that getting the feedback from the environment is very important because you're not just trying to learn a skill, you're also trying to relearn the emotional parts of your brain that cause you to feel anxiety, to feel afraid that are going to discourage you from practicing.

Hmm. Thank you. I love all of that. And as you're going, it's Like, I could talk about this, I could ask about this, I could share about this, but I. I'm going to refrain on that. And I think that. So you're talking about the skill of, like, say, you said, public speaking, I think, is one that people have a hard time with often, as we know. And it. So if you have people. And this can be. It doesn't have to be going up and giving the keynote in the giant room. Right. But it's. I just have to have. It could be networking, it's in a pitch meeting or whatever else. So if. If someone is saying, I want to get better at public speaking, what sort of path might you kind of recommend that people look at?

So there. There's actually a really interesting example from my first book of someone that I actually met right before he did his project. This is a fellow by the name of Tristan de Montebello. And he kind of took on public speaking. I don't want to say reluctantly, but sort of almost by chance, because he came up to me and he said, you know, I'd like to do some kind of learning project, because he knew I was writing this book. Like, he was a musician, and he's like, maybe I'll learn piano. And I said, well, you know, but, like, you already played the guitar. Well, maybe that's not so interesting that you learn another instrument. And so he came back to me, said, what about public speaking? I was like, okay, great. And he threw himself into it. And so, first of all, if you're. If you want to learn public speaking, probably the best resources is the organization Toastmasters. They're a very safe, friendly environment. So low anxiety, you know, people will apply to your speech. It doesn't matter how much you just freeze on stage. No one's going to boo or whatever. And they also provide lots of resources for you to learn.

But.

But one of the things that they were doing, which was just kind of a stroke of luck, is that they just happened to be having the first level of competition for this sort of. There's these many tiers of competition that kind of lead up to the World Championship of Public Speaking, which is an event put on by Toastmasters. And Tristan threw himself into it. He was going to speeches. He was giving, like, up to about two speeches a day, in some cases every single day, going out, speaking, trying to get feedback. And it turns out that he was actually from having almost no experience, after about seven months, he was in the finalist. So he was in the top 10 for the world Championship of Public Speaking. Now, you don't have to have an experience that dramatic to learn from his experience, which is that you want to have that exposure similar to the language learning. If you can have a lot of exposure, it can lower the fear level, lower that cost of practicing. So that sort of psychological cost of like, oh, my God, I have to stand on stage and give a speech. If you can lower that down, that will open up space for you to actually be able to learn and be. Actually be able to practice. So go to Toastmasters, go to these meetings, get practice, and then I think once you are comfortable with the skill, then you can start to play with it. So one of the things that Tristan noticed is that in the beginning, he was really working off of a prepared, memorized kind of speed speech, which is very common. It's sort of what we recommend to people when they're getting started, is to start doing a speech. And then later he just threw it away. He was just like, no, I'm not doing anything prepared. I'm just gonna go, like, kind of from the heart. Because he had gotten comfortable enough speaking that he could just go up there and talk. Like he was, you know, like the way you would have a conversation. And it was more naturalistic and it was more impactful. And so I think that's something that, you know, getting to that point where you can be just like this great presenter, where you can just go up on stage and tell stories and talk about things and people are just enthralled. That's the only thing that can come once you have that fluency, that reduction of anxiety. So very similar to the language learning, the repetition of practice makes you more fluent, and it also makes you more comfortable. And so that's a very important part to. To getting good at that skill.

Well, thank you. I. I love that. And I think, you know, it just goes to show how the. The. The model, the approach, right. As we're able to look at all these different contexts and. And truly get better at anything, Though we can't do everything right. I guess you can. I always like to say it's like you can do everything and you can be everywhere, but not all at once. Right. Like to play on the. The movie title there. Right. So we have to pick what we want to focus on to get better at. So as we kind of close out the conversation here, is there something that you think most people get wrong that is actually kind of counterintuitive of where they really should start or where people tend to get really hung up when, like, is it about just Getting started, is it like, is trying to do too many things? Where should they focus?

Well, yeah, there's, I mean there's so many issues, it's hard to just pick one. I think, I think you did tap in it to a good point. And I think I would like extend on that a little bit that you know, because I'm sort of the guy who's trying to get people excited about learning. But people can get too excited and then they take on like seven different projects. And so my experience is that people who take on fewer projects tend to have more success. Now this doesn't mean that there's some like deep, I don't know of any deep kind of cognitive explanation of like why you can only learn one thing at a time. That's not how the brain works. But I mean, literally you can't look at the same thing at once. But you know, in your life over a month or something, you could learn multiple things. But what I found is that these kinds of learning endeavors where you are trying to actively get better at something that's difficult for you, these kinds of goal setting things, they require quite a bit of focus. They require you to sort of, okay, this is what I'm working on for this month or for this week week or for, you know, even this year. If you're going to accomplish something audacious and if you take too many of these projects and try to do them at once, it dilutes the impact and the end up, the result ends up being that unless they were very, very low effort to begin with, like they didn't require that much to achieve them, you end up accomplishing a lot fewer of them, particularly a lot fewer of the really hard ones. And so I always recommend to people, make it small and focus on, on short goals that you can accomplish. So just work on something for a month. I think a month is a really nice time frame because if you focused on one thing for a month, you would definitely get better at it. And a month is not that long. So even if you pick something that it turns out that's not what I really wanted to focus on. Well, just stick to it for the month anyways and you can switch to something else when the month is done. And so that's what I recommend for people when they are getting started is to avoid the temptation to, well, I have to learn these eight things at once. It's like, well, you can learn them over eight months and do one month at a time. I think that's probably a good way to at Least get into the skill once you're maintaining it, once you're trying to like, you know, if you learn multiple languages, focus on one at a time and then once you've gotten to a level where you feel comfortable, then definitely mix up the practice, spread it out. That that can be good for long term retention. But in the beginning I think focus is more important.

I love that. Yeah. And just layering, laying it in. Try different stuff. I, I like that one month of and you get to see all the different aspects of it.

Right.

I, I think this with behavioral science stuff too where I tell people it's like, it's not just I know what framing is and like, and now I'm, and now I know what it is. Right. But say okay, so try framing your subject lines of your emails this week and now you're going to look at framing and how advertisements are appealing to you and you're going to try to reframe it in other way the next week. Right. You have to do a bunch of it to then start to intuitively experience it and that's how you get better. Right?

Absolutely. Yeah.

The theme of, of life and the day and all of it. So for everyone who I know is now so, so excited to get your books and to learn more about you and follow you or connect or whatever else, you know, what's the, their best path to do that?

Yeah, well, I mean they can check out my website, scotthyung.com so I've got thousands of free articles there and of course links to ultra learning and get better at anything. And yeah, I mean I hope they'll check out the books if they're interested in this topic.

Wonderful. I am sure that they will and I highly, highly recommend, definitely, definitely should. So thank you again, Scott for joining me today. It was just a lot of fun to learn with you today. Learn about learning today.

Oh, thank you so much.

Thank you again to Scott Young for joining me on the show today. What got your brain buzzing in today's conversation? For me, I love learning and thinking about learning and understanding how we learn and being better at learning.

So you know, I loved everything about.

This book and conversation. We barely scratched the surface of the insights on learning and habits and, and how to get better at anything in this conversation today. And I highly recommend that everyone pick up one or both of Scott's books. It is always nice to see things that you're already doing and see why it might be working and what to replicate elsewhere with more intention as well as what you might be doing. That isn't serving you well so you can make thoughtful changes where needed. I am definitely including insight insights into trainings and courses and talks here at the Brainy Business to make them even more successful for those who interact with our content. We are a teaching organization at the end of the day, so understanding how to communicate in a way that increases the chances people will learn and feel empowered to start implying those learnings is of the utmost importance. What stood out to you in the conversation today? What lines up with how you've learned and gotten better at stuff? And what might you try next? What are you hoping to get better at? Where you can use these insights? I can't wait to hear all about it, so come share it on social media. You'll find me as the Brainy Biz pretty much everywhere and as Melina Palmer on LinkedIn. There are links in the show notes to make it easy, along with links to my top related past episodes and books, including of course, Get Better at Anything. It's all waiting for you in the app you're listening to and@the brainybusiness.com 429 and thank you again to Scott H. Young for joining me on the show today. It was a delight to chat with and learn from you. Join me Tuesday for another Brainy episode of the Brainy Business Podcast. It's going to to be a lot of fun. You don't want to miss it. Until then, thanks again for listening and learning with me, and remember to be thoughtful.

Thank you for listening to the Brainy Business Podcast. Molina offers virtual strategy sessions, workshops and other services to help businesses be more brain friendly. For more free resources, visit thebrainybusiness.com.