128: Ultralearning with Scott Young

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What's next? This is a question we're all having to ask and answer more frequently. I'm Jenny Blake, your host of the Pivot podcast and author of the Only Move that Matters is your next one.

For show notes from this episode, visit pivotmethod.com podcast. If change is the only constant, then let's get better at it. Here we go.

My guest today is Scott Young, a writer who undertakes interesting self education projects such as learning MIT's four year computer science curriculum in 12 months and learning four languages in one year. He lives in Vancouver, Canada and is the author of his new book Ultra Learning. Master hard skills, outsmart the competition and accelerate your career. Scott, welcome to the show.

Oh, it's great to be here.

Jenny, I'm so fascinated. You had me at the word ultralearning because I love learning, reading, growing, but I hadn't really considered this phrase, which I'm pretty sure you invented, of ultra learning. What is that? How do you define ultralearning?

So I can't take too much credit. I actually didn't invent the term. It was actually invented in an article by Cal Newport, but it was just.

Sort of something that was a podcast Dave, by the way.

Yes, yes, exactly. So.

At the risk of immodesty, I definitely didn't coin it for myself, but it was just something that started to kind of pick up to describe something. You know, this is how a lot of new words get created is you're trying to describe something, you're like, well, you know, what is this? What is this going on? And so I talk about in the book, not only about some of the projects that I've taken on, but a lot of other people have taken on these interesting projects that have this sort of twin qualities of being self directed learning projects. So this is sort of in contrast to the way we normally think about school where you just sit in a classroom and a teacher tells you what to do and you know you're trying to study for an exam or that you know you're trying to pass a test or something. Like this, but you're often just kind of following what they've set for you. And the other quality that I think separates it from a lot of, like, what we think about as self education is that it's somewhat more aggressive or intense and pursuing methods that are more effective, but they often can be a little bit scary or more frustrating at first. And so that sounds kind of, you know, oh, wow, that sounds really difficult. But I find, and I document in the book, that the results people get are so interesting and so impressive often that I think it's worthwhile to explore this and especially to consider what's the right way to learn things.

Thank you. That's very helpful. And I love knowing it came from Cal. He's a regular on the Pivot Podcast and always some of the most popular episodes. I want to talk about this no English for a Year project that you start to introduce in the introduction. But first, circling back to the MIT this one of your earliest ultra learning projects, you actually did pass the exam of four years of curriculum after just one year. And I would think that a common reaction to that for even people reading your book is, well, this guy's clearly just a genius. He's way smarter than me. And I can definitely say that when it comes to math, I would be intimidated by one lesson of one day of that year of MIT math curriculum. How do you address that of people thinking, well, you must have something that they don't, especially in terms of just intelligence or within a specific subject area?

Definitely. Definitely. Well, I will say this because although, you know, again, I don't know what other people's impressions are about things, I think for a lot of people, people find math, or especially the just even the brand name mit, it just sounds super intimidating. The reason for choosing that wasn't because, well, you know, I'm gonna. I'm gonna do the hardest possible school, but because MIT is one of the few schools that puts all their curriculum online for free, basically. So it was really a choice of convenience rather than, you know, trying to choose this extremely difficult, prestigious school. And yes, I will say that, like, doing MIT classes are certainly intimidating for a lot of people, but there are a lot of little strategic choices that I made throughout the year that actually made it a simpler process. So I would not, for instance, say that if I went to MIT and enrolled in actual classes, I could have done the same thing. So this isn't to say that, you know, that. That some hard work and some intelligence is not required, but just that a lot of it was Because I was able to design in a way that made it a little bit easier. So one of the classic examples that I was pointing out is if you think about assignments, very often when you're doing assignments in school, you have to do the whole assignment. And because you are graded on it, it's very important that you get it right. So there's a real kind of, like, painstaking quality as you go through the assignment and work on it and work on it. Whereas when I was doing these classes, I could do the assignments just one question at a time. Just do a question, get some feedback, do a. Get some feedback. And so that actually makes the learning process go a lot faster. Another little kind of trick or thing that you can do to make things go along faster is you watch lectures. And normally in the classroom, you have to just sit through it. And if anyone knows from watching lectures, often you're probably not even paying attention or you're getting bored or your mind's wandering. And what I would do is just watch them at a slightly faster pace, like 1.5 times the speed. Again, it sounds really crazy, but your brain quickly gets used to listening to it at a faster speed. I know a lot of people that do that with podcasts and things like that, this. And. And again, because it's a video, if you ever get confused, you just pause and just go back a few minutes, and you can. And you can do it again. And so there were a lot of little things like this that I think made this project possible. And I feel like that's, you know, just some of the ideas that I'm trying to explore in this book of what are ways that you can approach learning to do something hard, like learning computer science or like learning languages, and approach in a way that's more effective.

Now you have me thinking back to my UCLA days. There were many lectures where I wish I could have done 1.5 or 2x. And it's funny because both my brother and my husband will sometimes listen to podcasts or audiobooks on 2 or 3X. I mean, some insane speed that I can't even fathom. And I used to say, oh, I can't speed them up. I really like the pacing and I absorb better. But there was a certain show that I was binging the content of this podcast, and so I started listening at one, and I noticed you're absolutely right. I started, A, getting used to it now. B, I cannot listen to a show on regular speed. And then it had me wondering, who is speeding up the pivot Podcast and how crazy must I sound coming through your earbuds at 1.5x?

But more and more, I'm sure you sound wonderful.

Are doing that. It's weird how it becomes normal. So now 1.5, and I'm even approaching 2x. That used to sound crazy to me. Actually does sound manageable now.

Well, definitely. And I think, again, as I said, the MIT challenge in that project, I think, again, a lot of us have these internalized beliefs about math particularly, that make it seem just super daunting. And so I don't want to say that you have to do this particular kind of project or learn this particular kind of skill to be an ultralearner. And a lot of the people that I cover learn skills that are completely unrelated to that, but they still accomplish impressive things. So one of my favorite examples is Tristan Dimontebello, who. His project was about public speaking, which is about as far as math class as you can get. But he still got interesting results by using some of the same principles.

Let's return to your no English for a year, another early project, which is so ambitious and awesome that you did this. Take us back to day one. In a situation like that, you've just committed you are not going to speak English for a year. Take us to that first day. What's going through your mind?

So. So I actually want to rewind the clock a little bit earlier than that because I think it's important to show the before and after, because when I. Okay, I'm gonna do this project. I'm gonna go with a friend. We're gonna travel to four countries. We're not gonna speak any English. We're only gonna speak the language we're trying to learn. It sounds really uncomfortable and difficult. And so I think it's important to explain why I wanted to approach it this way, because if you don't know the kind of before picture, I think it's, again, one of those things like, what would possess you to do something like this is so extreme. I went on a student exchange in France. This is when I was in university a few years. I think it was several years.

And the thing that I noticed when I was there is that I was really working hard to learn French. And in the beginning especially, it wasn't going very well. Most of the people around me spoke to me in English, and I was studying really hard at home, on top of all my other classes, all the other things that I had to do. And I just felt like it was just kind of plodding along and around this time we met someone that you and I mentioned before. The call that I met Benny Lewis, who is sort of famous for doing these kinds of projects where he has his fluent in three months blog, where he goes to new countries and tries to learn as much as possible in a very short period of time. And this was just really eye opening for me because, you know, I've been in France at this point for like about four or five months, and it's a real struggle. And I'm thinking, well, how the heck is this guy doing it so quickly? And the thing that I kind of realized in this time is that the people who are very successful at learning these languages do kind of enter into this state of total immersion and then it allows them to practice a lot. Whereas for me, even though I was living in France, I was really in this English bubble of people who were speaking me in English all the time. And so, real quick, before you continue.

I laughed out loud in the book when you said that Benny vented to you. He said, my problem isn't with the French, just Parisians, that it's not with the language. Sometimes it's the social setting or the social reaction. And it's so true. I love also how you describe the bubble of when you're learning a new language. And I've certainly experienced that trying to learn Arabic and French, which is the moment somebody knows that that's not your first language, they'll start speaking in English. So it is actually not that easy to pop out of the bubble. Even if someone is getting over their own embarrassment and trying to immerse themselves, it's not always the case that others around you will respond in that way.

It can be. It can be difficult. And I think especially a lot of people who maybe who haven't had this experience of living abroad to learn a language before, they just assume that it happens automatically. I know of a lot of people I've talked to, like, well, of course, if you live in a country for a while, you will learn the language. And this is just not tr. Actually, if you talk to a lot of people who've lived in other countries, I find it tends to be more common to learn the language in Europe. But for instance, I know people that have lived in China for 20 years and their Mandarin is terrible, like they can't speak anything. And so it's certainly not the case that just go there and live there and you'll automatically learn the language because of this English bubble problem. So this was really the problem that I kind of was aware of. And I felt like if you could avoid the bubble, like if you could just sort of say, hey, we're going to avoid the bubble, because as soon as we land, everyone's going to know that we're only speaking in this language, and that's going to immediately change the social situation. And so when we went to Spain, this was our first stop, and we had done a little bit of practice before. I think we had done for Spanish, maybe, I want to say about 50 hours practice. So it's not zero. It's not like we didn't know a single word when we arrived, but we just knew some basic sentences, basically, and a little bit of vocabulary. But that was enough to just sort of, okay, we're struggling, but we can kind of just get by in the very first week or two. But something funny happened after that week or two that once you start making friends and once you start socializing, once we even just start interacting with each other, I guess, gets easier and easier. And so, realistically, I would say after about a month or so, it was actually easier to do this process for learning Spanish than it was for me when I was learning French. And so if you consider how much progress we made over the same period of time, I'm quite confident saying that I got better in Spanish after three months than I did after a year in France. And it wasn't just that I made more progress. It was also that my Spanish, or was the process of learning Spanish was. Was easier than it was when I was in France. So I think that's another kind of misconception, is that when I talk about this process for doing it and ultralearning in general, it kind of has this, well, yeah, maybe someone would want to do that, but that's too hard. I'm going to do something easier. And the thing that I want to say is that the thing that's difficult about learning very often is that initial frustration. It's the initial getting past those obstacles. And so often, if you can just dive through them, if you can structure a project that will push you through them all at once, you can eventually just get onto that flow of learning much more quickly.

I'm really glad you mentioned the frustration because I think, especially with language learning, at least I kind of erroneously assume that, oh, getting all the vocab under my belt, that's the hard part. But it's actually the emotional hurdles, the frustration, both of myself and then the perceived others, people I'm talking to, maybe they're frustrated that it's taking me A long time, or I can't find the right word. And then just my own embarrassment. That's what holds me back. So, so many people I know can relate to understanding, comprehending a language much better than they can actually speak it. And I think that part of that has to do with embarrassment. You're willing, you can listen and pick up the meaning of things, but it's this fear of trying. So how, in those first two weeks that you described, how did you get over? How did you move through that frustration or from other people impatient or just embarrassment?

Exactly. So I'll say a little tangential thing, but I think it's relevant here. So you know those pictures of like New York City, I don't know, like a hundred years ago, where you have the construction workers sitting on top the girders, like when they're constructing the Empire State Building and stuff, and they're eating out of their lunch pail, but they're hundreds of feet off the ground, right? And I remember an interview that was, someone was talking about with these people and they were saying how. Because when I see that, my fear of heights just flares up incredibly, right? Like that sounds terrifying to me. Just be sitting on this girder hundreds of feet above the ground and having to do this construction work. And what they said is that in the beginning, yeah, it is very scary to do that, but you quickly desensitize yourself. So after you've been there for a couple weeks, you're completely fine. Like, you don't feel weird at all being up there. However, once you get back down on the ground and you live on the ground for a while and you have to do it again, the fear resurges. And so I think speaking to people, so speaking to strangers can be a little bit fear inducing regardless, but especially when you don't have your native language to communicate. So you are using a language that you don't feel as good in. And so you know you're gonna make mistakes, you know you're gonna embarrass yourself. You know that this person might be confused or not understand or maybe even hostile to you trying to practice this language. So that can be very scary in the beginning. But something is interesting that happens when you do this immersive process is that after about a week or two, that fear goes away completely. So that fear of, oh, I have to go up and speak to this person, it just vanishes. Now it does come back. So for instance, now I'm speaking in English, I live in Canada. If I just had to go up and say, okay, I'm going to just talk to this stranger in here in Canada. And I have to speak to them in Spanish. Even though my Spanish ability is quite good right now, there's still a little bit of trepidation because I'm not used to it. I'm used to speaking in English, and I have to transition, and I'm not sure how they'll react and this kind of thing. And so the thing that I would say is that when I was in France, that fear was there constantly because I was speaking in English, because I didn't ever go through this period of complete immersion. There was this constant fear of, like, okay, I'm going to try to speak to this person in French, but maybe they're going to react in a bad way, or maybe I'm going to have to push through it because they're going to speak to me in English. And then I have to think about this. And there was definitely some anxiety about that. And so. So, again, the kind of irony that I'm talking about is often this ultralearning approach, and I mean, we're talking about languages specifically, but it applies to so much more, is that it looks a lot harder. But because you get over these frustrations and fears and whatnot in the initial period and desensitize yourself to them, the kind of. If I could draw a graph of how much difficulty there is. Yeah, there's a little spike at the beginning, but it's actually lower over the long run just because now you're in the flow of doing it and you no longer have these fears and trepidations about it.

That just gave me an aha moment. Feel like Oprah right now where she, like, lands an aha every single interview. But really, that the frustration stayed with you all year in the French example. That's so true. It's so true. It's like I'm picturing diving into a cold plunge or something. You have to. You cannot wade into the ice bath. You've got to just dive into it. And, wow, it's so true that you can either be embarrassed and frustrated for a year because you never immerse yourself, or you pop the bubble straight away. And I love what you said, too, about designing the experience up front so that you anticipate the bubble and you therefore work around it. That's so crucial.

So you know what? I would just modify your metaphor slightly, because I think when you do wade into a pool, the part that's in the water does get desensitized to It. So if you're wading into a cold pool, it is possible to do that. I would contrast this to getting. Getting splashed with water, cold water, constantly. It is cold the fifth time, as it is the 50th time. And so there is a real sense that if you splash yourself with cold water and then allow yourself to heat up again and splash yourself with cold water, it never goes away. And so, again, this is very specific to language learning, this process of immersion. But I think it's just characteristic of people that I've interviewed who have done this kind of technique that often there are these sort of structural obstacles to learning certain skills, that it is difficult and frustrating. And if you can design the experience up front so you can push through some of those things early on, then often the experience of people I've spoken to is the opposite that it flips that. Whereas it seemed really terrifying and anxiety inducing for like a. Like just a brief moment afterwards, it's exhilarating because you're making a lot of progress. The fear goes down, but the progress still stays there. So something that was really daunting actually becomes really exciting. And so language can become a lot of fun or, you know, even doing things like MIT classes or, you know, as I was mentioning very briefly, my friend who this guy who did public speaking. And again, public speaking is exactly the same thing that you feel really intimidated doing it. But he was speaking so frequently, like sometimes multiple times in a day, that just the fear of giving public speaking just went down so dramatically that he was gaining a lot of progress and getting a lot better very quickly, but without all of the kind of psychological buildup. And so in his case, he actually went in seven months from having almost no experience public speaking to being a finalist for the world champion of public speaking, which is a competition put on by Toastmasters every year that 32,000 people compete in.

If we're talking about the same person. There was also an example in your book of someone who spoke on purpose to third graders. He went into classrooms. Yeah. For that full immersion that they weren't going to pull any punches if he wasn't funny or entertaining. Is it the same person?

Yeah, he did. He did a number. Yeah. This is Tristan di Montebello. So just a really interesting guy. And he was someone who was super interesting for me because he wasn't really like some kind of extreme individual that I had just discovered that he was so impressive. It was just someone who I knew for a while and had been reading my blog. And when I said I was going to write a book about ultralearning. He's like, I'd like to try something like that. So really the story was, was so interesting to me just because this wasn't someone, you know, you mentioned at the beginning this worry that, well, this is just for someone who is super intelligent or for someone who has just the right personality or what have you. And I'm not going to say those factors don't matter, but I think people really underrate how important method is because throughout school you're doing this one size fits all approach. So there is really very little variation in how people approach things. But when we're talking about ultralearning, we're talking about these self directed projects. I mean it can be night and day how effective your method is and that can make, you know, a world of difference.

Awesome. You know, it's funny, this interview is coming at perfect timing because one of your principles in the book is meta learning. And so before we even get into some of the principles, I want to talk about principles. So we'll get meta on this for a moment.

Yeah, yeah. Meta. Meta learning.

Exactly. Meta. Meta. Even in the interview, you. I've. I've been sharing episodes recently about going through a business renaissance and restructuring everything. And as we speak, I'm preparing to give a workshop for my private momentum community on 20 operating principles. I know it's probably too many, they could be consolidated. But one of the things I did when I was restructuring my business and expanding the team was actually distill what my operating principles were. How do I do what I do? Because if I'm bringing on a team, this was important to me to get them everybody on the same page. You say in the book, principles allow you to solve problems, even those you may have never encountered before in a way that a recipe or mechanical procedure cannot. So I was very interested to see this connection here around principles. And your whole book is actually structured around nine universal principles that underlie ultralearning. Can you enlighten us on why principles are so important and how it would even relate to a listener ultra learning project that they might set up?

Yeah. So I think this is something again when you're from a little bit of inside baseball here. But writing this book, this was one of the big challenges because when I was going through the process of trying to figure out how to write this book, the main thing that stuck out is how unique and idiosyncratic a lot of these ultralearners and their efforts are, that they're really something that doesn't boil down to a formula. And that was what was so exciting about it. It was that this person was, you know, kind of designing this solution that was, you know, a perfect solution for them, as opposed to what we normally think again about education where it is, you know, okay, well, we need to make sure we can run 400, 500 people through this class. So like, okay, everyone's doing the same thing. And so this was the challenge because as soon as I turn ultralearning into a step by step procedure, I've kind of lost some of the magic. And the reason to focus on principles again is the same thing with, when we're considering, like if we imagine like a physics problem, there is a sense that if you have a very well defined physics problem, you can say, okay, well, first you need to put this equation down and then you need to substitute these numbers into the equation. Then you can solve and get the answer. But that's not how real physics problems are solved. In the real world is typically that, you know, physicists know some principles of physics. They know things like conservation of energy or conservation of momentum, and they can use knowledge of those principles to figure out which equations they need and which numbers need to get substituted and how they can solve the problem. And so I wanted to approach learning the same way that rather than try to give people a recipe, what are the principles that underline learning and not just ultra learning, but learning itself in the sense that, you know, this is how your brain actually works and this is how you acquire knowledge, this is how you acquire skills. And if you can understand that, then you can can sort of troubleshoot a lot of your own problems. So I go through again, nine principles in the book. Again, I don't think it's entirely exhaustive. There's probably a few other principles lurking around there. But these nine principles, I think if you can understand each of them and you can understand them deeply as I go through them, then really any learning effort you're going through, you can kind of match it up with those principles and see, like, okay, how well is it faring for this? And if it's doing badly, then that's often a reason to look at, okay, this is maybe why this won't work, or maybe this, why this won't be sufficient to really get the skill that I want to acquire. So, you know, we can talk about some of the principles that, that you want. But I think again, this approach of looking at, you know, what am I doing when I'm learning, what is the actual activity I'm doing. And then you can sort of adjust these little dials to get better results.

And just to give listeners some examples, we probably won't get into all these today, but these, these universal principles include things like meta learning. I mean, I'm curious about drawing a map, focus, directness, drill retrieval, feedback, retention, intuition and experimentation. And building on what you said, I also find it important to look at when something isn't working or give feedback. I try, let's say to someone on my team, I try not to just correct for that instance, but I'll give the why. So for right now, we're building, we're moving a few courses to a new platform and maybe everything's under one lesson. So I might say, can you break this out into separate lessons? And here's why. I like to give people that satisfying feeling of checking off a box, of being able to mark lesson complete more frequently and for each actual individual step that they're taking or for each week in a, let's say the three month Pivot Mastermind kit. So I do like to zoom out and share the why or the logic in things. And I do this in my personal life too. It probably annoys people, you know, like it probably annoys Michael when I'm talking about, well, here's my logic. But if I explain the logic, we can get on the same page and it's just two different people's logic intersecting or two different principles that are operating that are underneath whatever the disagreement or the conflict or the different way of approaching a task.

Oh, absolutely. And I will say again, with feedback, one of the interesting things going through a lot of the research on feedback is, is one of the studies that I thought was really fascinating because obviously we know that learning and feedback is important for learning. And so when I was going to do the research, I was thinking, well, I'm going to find that feedback's essential 100% of the time. And actually, if you look at, there's a really interesting meta analysis where the study authors Abraham Klujer and Angelo Denisi took hundreds of different studies and looked at their impact of feedback interventions on learning and found that in almost 40% of cases, feedback actually had a negative effect. And the interesting thing about that is that feedback is important for learning. Again, it works in the majority of cases. And so you do need feedback. But one of the things that I wasn't really expecting but in hindsight seems super important is that a real key skill of ultralearners is knowing how to filter feedback. Not only filter it emotionally so that you don't get these sort of emotional effects of someone criticizes you when you're doing X and then you immediately shut down and stop trying. Or someone says, oh, you're doing great. So you're just like, ah, whatever, I'm not going to work hard at this. So just that emotional processing, but also even just on an informational level. So one of the main things that you're talking about is you give the reason for things and that's very important. But often when you're seeking feedback from other people, they won't give you those things. Right? And so it's often important to know not only what kind of information you can get from people, but what things are not really reliable and that you can't really rely on. And so you have to filter them out. So we were talking about Tristan di Montebello and he said something very interesting to me, that when he was doing his process of getting good at public speaking, he often would ignore what suggestions people gave to improve his speech and focus on the consistency of those suggestions. And he found that as people had a more and more consistent reaction to his speeches, the speech was getting better. That was sort of a proxy indicator for him. And I thought that was very interesting because a lot of people, you know, you can think about your business. One customer says, hey, I don't like this user interface design. So you go change it. And then another person says, well, I don't like this now. And then you change it. Or, you know, you have some little prototype and some. Someone says, well, I don't like that the color is green, right? And so you change the color. But that maybe wasn't the thing that they didn't like about it. They just don't know what they didn't like about it. And so you can't really ascertain that always. And so I think this is important when we're thinking about feedback is that there's a lot of nuance to using this well, and that's why I kind of dive into it in the book.

So such great points across the board. And oh my gosh, a perfect example of user feedback that we found that early on as well. And, and I remember telling one of my team members, like, we can't, we cannot just jump every time someone gives feedback. We'll drive ourselves crazy. And there's no guarantee that one person's specific feedback is going to be a priority for everyone or for the program or for the business. So we'll collect it, we'll look for themes and then we'll take action.

Two parts of the principles that I would like to dive into. Drawing a map. And then intuition, which is a common topic on the Pivot podcast and one I'm really interested in. You have a perspective that intuition might sound magical, but the reality may be more banal, which is that intuition is the product of a large volume of organized experience dealing with the problem. So that will be our teaser for part two of your answer. But first, drawing a map. What do you mean by that?

So this is the first part and again, when we were talking about ultralearning as being a self directed learning project that immediately scares some people because, well, now there's no longer someone telling you exactly what to do. So you have to say what you have to do. And this inevitably involves a little bit of what I call meta learning research. So meta learning, meta, for those of you who don't know, is just a word that means that something is about itself or a higher layer of abstraction. So meta learning is kind of a fancy term for learning about learning. And in this case, what that means is that whenever you start learning about a new skill, you should spend a couple hours just going on Google, just being like, how do I learn X? And I know that that sounds like a really vague process, but if you were to take any skill, whether it's programming, salsa dancing, French drawing, you know, marketing, and you just type that into Google, you would find some articles and they would link to other articles and you would read more and more and more and you would find resources. So you would find courses, books, tutorials, applications that you can use. You would find suggestions, you would be able to start again, drawing this map of not only what you need to learn, but what tools you're going to use to get there, what options are available, and what are the pitfalls. So if you look at how to learn a language, you'll hear a lot of language mistakes of things that people, okay, I tried to learn French and I did this and it didn't work, or I did this and I found it helpful because of xyz. And so you spend a little bit of time with this and you already start to get a picture of, okay, how would I accomplish this? And I think this is just a really useful life lesson. I know that we don't often think of our projects to do things as being learning projects. I mean, we're fixing the sink or we're starting a website, or we're, you know, trying to write a speech. We don't really Think of them as projects to learn something. But whenever you're doing something you don't know how to do, now it really is a learning thing. And so this research is often important to kind of get a grounding, to get that basic map so you can start heading off into the wilderness. So that would be the meta learning principle and then the intuition. This was something that I thought was very interesting because whenever we think of genius level people, and so the story that I cover there is Richard Feynman, the Nobel prize winning physicist, there's a kind of aura around them of mysticism, of this person is just so smart that they, you know, their brain just doesn't work like yours or mine. And what I found is that it, if you dig into it, not only into these stories, but into the research themselves, often what you'll see is what appears to be just sort of a magical intuition. It's just the normal process the brain uses when you have a lot of experience. So some of the classic studies on this were done with chess grandmasters. So they took chess novices and chess masters and put a board with chess pieces down and then took the pieces off and said, can you recreate what was on the board? And what novices do is they tend to put the pieces down one piece at a time. So they're like, okay, the pawn was there, the knight was there. And as a result, they can only remember a handful of the pieces. Chess masters, in contrast, put the groups of pieces down as chunks. So they would say, oh, well, I remember there was a forking pattern like this, or this was the King's Indian defense. And they put these pieces down in these sort of more elaborate and complicated patterns. And there's two interesting things to note about this. When you measure the memory ability of chess experts versus ordinary people, they tend not to be better outside of the domain of chess. So these patterns are quite specific. They're not actually just that chess grandmasters are just smarter. It's that they have very specific patterns stored in memory. And then the second thing is that if you scramble the board so you put a chess position that would never arise from actual play, but just something that's just random chess pieces. The grandmasters lost their advantage. So they no longer were able to put down the pieces the way that novices do. And I think this is very interesting because when we think about someone who's really good at marketing or public speaking or math or languages, there is a kind of aura of awe that we feel with them. Like, well, there's no way I could do that, and really what it is is that this person has just acquired a lot of patterns. And these patterns, as they form in your mind, become easier and easier to manipulate. So that a chess grandmaster, it's not like their brain is moving faster, it's just that they're able to see things in smaller pieces, in greater levels of abstraction, so that they don't have to do as much mental processing to arrive at the correct answer or what the correct move is.

If we would get meta even on this. Whenever you learn about intuition or one of the times I've learned about intuition, whether from Penny P. Pierce, who's been on the show many times, or others, one of the ways to build the intuition muscle is by focusing on it. So it's actually by saying I would like to become more intuitive and noticing coincidences in the environment, serendipities, synchronicities, and starting to observe and even keeping an intuition journal, just like a dream journal, that by putting your reticular activation system or just putting your consciousness on the. The subject of intuition can actually grow the skill, let alone within the subject area as you're describing.

Oh, absolutely.

Another nugget that was near and dear to my heart from your book. There's certain interviews and books and authors I think are like cousins with pivot, where they just go really well together. Like we could assemble a really delicious five course meal for someone. A learning meal. That's maybe one of the nerdy things I've ever said.

A learning meal.

I like it. Yeah, a gourmet learning meal. Experimentation is the key to mastery. And within the pivot method, which is four stages, the third one is pilot. So I talk about career pilots and the importance of small experiments that you never need to know which of your experience is going to win. Just like horses at the Kentucky Derby, your job is to line them up, lift the starting gates and say go. So you could imagine my delight when I saw you say here, experimentation. And experimentation is the key to mastery. I would love to hear your perspective on that. But I also believe it's one of the most crucial parts of navigating a pivot is not trying to have all the answers up front.

So I put the experimentation principle last, not because experimentation logically comes at the end, but often because of exactly what you said, that very often you can reach a level of adequacy or just general competence from just following some playbook someone else has left you. So if you want to become a decent programmer that there's going to be a Lot of books that will get you from. From zero to okay, I can write a simple program. It's a lot harder to go from. Well, I know some programming, but I'm not the best programmer in the world. Or I know a bit of this, but I don't reach this real sort of pinnacle of the craft. And the story that I covered there, which I thought was a really fascinating one, was Vincent van Gogh, the Dutch painter. And he's someone who's really interesting because obviously van Gogh is one of the most famous painters in the world. World. Like, he is, you know, unquestionably one of the greatest painters of all time. And if you read his biography, though, that impression of him is like, so night and day versus what his reality was when he was alive and when he was working on his craft is that he wasn't very good at drawing. So he couldn't draw things very accurately. And he really struggled with that. And, you know, a lot of people didn't like his work. And so he was trying lots of different things. Things. And he also had other issues. Like he had definitely some issues with mental illness and definitely some issues with his social life and other things like this that impeded his work. And so this is clearly not the kind of person that you would imagine would reach super great heights with their craft. And yet he was quite successful. And I think a big factor in that was his relentless experimentation. The fact that not only in the beginning with using different methods and materials to get to. To his goals, but also even as he matured as an artist, stylistically, he was always trying to change things up and change his approach and pursuing different paths and different materials. And I think it's a really good model in many cases of how you develop your skills. Going from starting out to a level of mastery that in the beginning you can kind of follow their path set by someone else. But later on you have to be more exploratory and more experimenting with styles and, and materials and ideas. That is, you know, no one's done that before, but you have to try it.

Beautiful. Thank you. I love how it kind of reminds me with experimentation and research. There was a quote I loved from the end. You say research is a bit like packing a suitcase for a long voyage. You may not bring the right items, but you will prevent a lot of fumbling later. So that both with experimentation and with research up front, as you described with meta learning and that process, even googling, how should I learn about X? Or how do I learn about X? And it's Funny, just Googling itself is a meta skill. I'm always surprised. I taught myself coding HTML and CSS at my first job working at a startup. But even the other day I was, we've started a Zendesk trial for managing email with multiple team members and I can't stand when emails look like a ticket. I don't want people emailing me or my team to think to have it look like a ticket. It's just silly to me. But they don't have this one click turn it off option. So I had to go in and actually look at the code and edit the code and trial and error and over and over and I'm Googling Zendesk. How do you do this? Zendesk, how do you do that Googling? Not just directly writing to chat. And it was so empowering. Yes, it took me a long time and it was, was frustrating, but it was really empowering to figure it out step by step by step by step. And sometimes I think people similar to what we talked about with math, they think, well, I'm not, I'm not, I wouldn't be a good coder. I don't know how they don't realize it's 80% Googling. 80% CSS code for how to write a color, how to change the font. I mean, it's Googling.

You know what, it's funny because what you're talking about is exactly right. I've spoken to novice programmers and they say, well, they kind of feel sheepishly, well, I have to Google things sometimes. I'm like, all programmers are Googling things constantly. This is just how it works. I remember watching this talk from this guy who was sort of a very long time programmer, I forget which language he developed, but clearly at the height of his skill, and he opened the talk with the kind of how many of you could write a program successfully without an Internet connection basically, if you didn't have access to Google, how many of you could do it? Basically it's this sort of not so well kept industry secret that all programmers are essentially Googling things all the time so that they can figure out oh, what's the right way to do this? And oh, I got this error, what does it mean? And this sort of thing. And so I definitely feel like there's a lot of us that have this feeling that we're not legit, that we're not doing it the right way and that the right way is some kind of formal process that, you know, experts do and we're kind of cheating or we're doing the shortcut. And I think that that's just so ridiculous because very often it's the people doing the thing and using the shortcuts and using the Google and using all of these kinds of extra methods. They're the real people doing it. And it's not, you know, it's just in these sterilized classroom environments where that kind of thinking is discouraged.

Absolutely. And this goes beyond. I think maybe someone listening is thinking, well, I still don't want to learn to code. But it's not about that. There's. First of all, even experienced coders have to Google things because the web standards are always changing and the best practices and people solve things, but also every new piece of software. I know, for me, with running my business, I'm so grateful that so much can be done on the cloud and with through subscription services that save a lot of time and money and maybe even entire team members I wouldn't need. Because software can do things now like running payroll role. I use gusto for that. Yeah. But I'm constantly having to learn new software and it happens by Googling and looking at their help center and then Googling the forums and. And just continuing. And then only when I've reached the limits of that, then I'll write to customer support and sometimes they have me file it as an idea if thing doesn't work, which kind of annoys me. But nonetheless, I don't think there's this. I don't think you can escape this. And we all might have a relative who's like, afraid of their phone, you know, or doesn't want to mess something up. But this is that experimentation also being a key, which is, I'm always telling people, don't be afraid to try, for the most part, punching buttons, well, virtual buttons on your phone or even on your computer. You can't really screw things up that badly. Like.

Why can't I say that word?

Use it.

Irrevocable.

Yeah, it. Why can't I say it as an adverb?

Wow.

Okay, that's. Yes, that's the case of someone who reads too much and then doesn't say the words out loud.

Oh, yeah, that was a real tongue twister for me.

That just never happens.

Okay, so I will say this just to your listeners because I think there's sometimes an impression that learning is something you did in school or it's something that you do occasionally. And maybe learning is not the priority of your life. And I really want to strongly consider people to reconsider that. View, because if you look at any textbook on learning and what learning is defined as and what we're thinking about, learning process, you just realize that actually you're learning every second of every day or you'd be a rock. I mean, you often don't think of these activities as learning. You don't think about like, well, I remember what I did this morning as being a kind of learning process, but it is a change in your brain that allows, allows you to remember things that you didn't know before. And similarly, things like, you know, when you're working at a job, it's, well, I'm figuring it out. I'm not learning. Well, figuring out is learning, and I'm doing this. Well, it's not learning. And so the reason I bring this up is because I think often when you reframe your projects to do things as learning projects, it can kind of activate a different sort of mindset for it. And I think that the learner mindset is, is often a more valuable one. Because, yes, you're still trying to accomplish some goal that may not be learning. Like you're trying to get a website set up, or you're trying to figure out how to work this Excel macro thing, or you're trying to figure out how to file your taxes. But at the same time, if you view it as a learning project, you can apply a lot of these principles that I discuss in the book so that you can get through some of the things that frustrate you about your regular life, even though you often don't think of them as learning. Learning problems.

Yes. And I'll give one more example because this can also save time in everyday ways. I wanted to create pivot short links so you could just go to pivotmethod.com128. That's going to be the short link for this episode. It's a vanity URL because the home for this episode doesn't actually live there. It has a longer URL. Well, I needed to do this for the entire backlog. So over a hundred links at one time. Now I could have someone on my team do this manually and know that it would take a long time. And I actually had fun trying to figure out Google sheets, which could have been done in Excel, but I like sheets every time Googling like I already know about Text to columns. Okay, text to columns using whatever delimiter. Great. But now I had this problem. Great, but now I need to append a forward slash plus the episode number. Great. I'm every time I'M Googling. Googling. So on the one hand, the task took a certain amount of time, but it didn't take me as long. But I learned new things in the process, and I think that's why I found it fun. Like, maybe it even took me longer than if I manually just typed in every single one and copied and pasted. But I learned some things about navigating data that maybe a statistician already knows how to massage a spreadsheet and get it to do what, what, what they want. But it's empowering to know. Oh, yeah, I don't have to do this manually every time, but I do have to learn some new tricks here and there.

Well, so programming has been an example. We brought up a lot. And I really feel like even if you don't become a professional programmer, learning a little bit of coding is often very useful just because of these kinds of tasks that you can work on. I remember I'm a writer primarily, so I don't do tons and tons of programming on a daily basis. But I remember one of my team members was trying to work out some accounting thing and, and the way the panel worked, in order to create the spreadsheet we needed, he had to generate like 50 or 60 different reports and total it up all separately and then put it into the spreadsheet. It was like an enormous amount of work. It took him all day. And I was like, well, this is stupid. Let's just write a little program that will calculate each of these numbers from a bigger spreadsheet and then you don't have to do all of this work. And so again, it's not to say that all skills break down to programming, but just that if you take that attitude of, you know, there's a better way to do this and I can learn how to do it that better way, whether it's, again, it could be programming, or it could be public speaking, or it could be leadership, or it could be anything like this. I think, again, taking that learning attitude that, yes, I can actually learn how to do this rather than just do it the worst way, I think that's often very valuable.

I love it. That takes us back to principles, a learning attitude. Scott, this has been so fun to chat with you. I always like to leave listeners with one action step. So if you could recommend one thing to help people get started on an ultra learning goal, what would it be?

So the step that I would leave with, and this is the sort of one piece of advice, and it's funny because we didn't actually talk about it as much in this interview. So all the more reason to read the book. But the one piece of advice I like to leave people with, and if there's one thing that I would say, do this if you're going to be learning things, is that whenever you want to learn anything, always start with thinking about how you're going to use what you're going to learn and try to tailor at least some of the time you spend learning into practicing in the situation that you want to use it. And the reason this is so valuable is that actually it's a lot harder to transfer knowledge than we think. And so if you spend all your time just reading a book or doing a classroom exercise, it's often the case that you struggle with applying it later when you're actually trying to use it in real life. And so my main suggestion is whenever you're learning something, whether it's a language or programming or public speaking or however, think about how you want to use the skill and try to tailor it to that environment, because that will make your learning much, much more effective.

I'm so glad you mentioned that. Thank you. You can get the show notes for this episode@pivotmethod.com 128 and now you know all the the sweat and effort I put into making those vanity URLs actually work in bulk. So pivotmethod.com 128. You can also check out Scott's brand new book, Ultra Learning Master Hard Skills, Outsmart the competition and accelerate your career. And Scott, where else can people find you if they want to get in touch or find you online?

Yeah. Yeah, well, you can find me. I'm on most social media, but the best way to find me is through my blog. That's that scotthyoung.com, s C-O-T-T-H Y-O-U n g.com and I want to just end off by saying if anyone here decides to either get the book or they're inspired to take on a little ultralearning project, I'd love to hear about it. So be sure to send me your ultralearning stories of your own experiences learning hard things.

Awesome. Thank you Scott. And congrats on finishing your big ultralearning project which was writing this book.

Yes, thank you.

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Pivot podcast. Make sure you don't miss an episode or my insider tips and templates by signing up for Pivot List, a curated twice monthly newsletter where I share the inside scoop on what I'm reading, watching, listening to, and the latest tools I'm geeking out on. Sign up@pivotmethod.com pivotlist get show notes from this episode@pivotmethod.com podcast and connect with me on Twitter ennyblake.

Remember, build first, then your courage will follow. Hasn't it always.

Sam.