How to learn anything, with Scott Young | Ramit's Brain Trust

One of the stories that I've shared with the I will teach you to be rich community is the idea that I didn't have to accept being a skinny Indian guy. I was five' eleven. I was £127. And if I had followed the prescribed rules for what I should do, I would not be sitting here. I would be working at Cisco, wearing an ill fitting Cisco T shirt. And instead, I decided to learn about behavioral change, start my own business, and eventually get into the fitness world as well. What happened as I learned more about these different areas of business and life was I changed from the outside in. I learned that if I could gain £40 and learn how to launch courses and go on TV, then what else could I do? And that was a real realization for me that there are a lot of things I thought were limiters, like my genetics, but that actually had nothing to do with it at all. I just hadn't learned in the right way. So today I'm thrilled to introduce my friend, Scott Young. Scott knows a little bit about learning and changing yourself from the outside in. He's done such things as learning the entire MIT curriculum, learning four languages in one year, and sharing the insights of how he did it with a growing audience.

Hi, I'm Scott Young. I'm the writer@scotthung.com and I write about learning, behavior change, and personal productivity. I think because we were talking about this before, intelligence is such a huge one that people have conditioned themselves to believe, usually from poor school experiences, that they're not smart or they're not that kind of smart, that they, you know, I'm smart at other things, but I'm not good at math or I'm not good at languages, or I'm not good at whatever it may be. And I think part of it is just that we don't have a positive experience with it. We were in this environment where maybe we were behind the other students, and we get in this class, we're being compared against them. And someone says to you from a very early age, you are not as good as all these other people at this. And that gets drilled in at a very early age. And so you have a lot of people that say, you know, can't change your intelligence. And there are certain parts of your intelligence that are probably fixed, but a lot of it is based on your past experience. If you've learned six languages, even if you're not naturally good at them, if you've learned six languages, seventh is going to be really easy for you. Definitely. You know, I was more of a math sort of science person when I was growing up, a little bit less languages. And so I used to think, you know, I probably can't learn other languages very easily. And I went to France, and I lived there for a year, and I learned, like, okay, French, but not really, really great. And. And so doing this latest challenge that I did was quite. You know, it was quite scary doing something like that. But then after the first country, the second country, it became just this automatic process. There was no doubt in my mind that I could do it. It was just. You just have to follow the roadmap that's laid out for you.

Let's talk about it. So what was the latest project on languages?

Right. So after the MIT challenge, I took a year off, and then I started the next project, which was going to four countries in one year to learn four languages with the goal of basically not speaking English for an entire year. That was gonna be the method of how we did it. So it was Spanish in Spain, Portuguese in Brazil, Mandarin Chinese in China, and Korean in Korea.

Okay, and how did it go?

It went pretty well. Like, I would say that I'm at a decent conversational level in all of them. My Korean is a little bit rustier for conversation. And for Spain, for example, like, I would say that I'm very comfortable in it. Like, I lived entirely in Spanish for three months without issue. Talk to us a little bit about.

Some of the challenges.

So I felt that learning a language was not so much of an intellectual challenge as it was a social challenge. And I'll explain why, because you and I talking right now, we're perfectly fluent. Everything you say, I at least understand the words that are coming out of your mouth. And if you suddenly go into a situation where you're at the beginning, where you don't speak a language very well, and I no longer understand anything that you're saying, and I have the ability to express just a handful of concepts. And. And this is a real social situation. This isn't a classroom where the person is forgiving and understanding. They're kind of like, wait, what do you want? And you're trying to explain it. That is the part that scares most people. That's the part that's hardest for most people to be like, no, I'm gonna keep trying with this and keep pushing through. And then eventually this is gonna become easier, as opposed to just going, ah, do you speak English? And then trying to back out of it.

So you told yourselves were not allowed to break character.

Never.

Did you?

Well, we did have to break character in China a little bit, and in Korea. Those are languages that. The learning curve, it takes longer to learn them. So that was a learning point for us, is that it's much harder to learn Chinese than Spanish. But even the distance between the two. And the difficulty was we underrated, but even in those countries, we would still be like, if you break, then, okay, we gotta get back to it. It's not a situation where, okay, now it's over and we're speaking English. It's every single time you fail, it's like, okay, hey, we've been speaking English for two minutes now. We got to get back to Chinese, and we got to get back to doing that.

When you're going through this, how did you make the mental conviction that I'm going to push through, I'm not going to revert back to what's comfortable speaking in English?

Well, having a big blog where you've told people that you're going to do this and you're filming a documentary, it really helps. So if you. If you have the opportunity to do that, that's a great one. But honestly, it was just. We had done a lot of preparation for this, and we had been sort of talking ourselves into that we are going to do this and we're going to be serious about it. And when we. When we went to Spain, it was very difficult in the beginning, but if you've been prepping yourself and you're like, you know, it's going to be difficult, you know, you're going to want a break, but you're going to stick to it. And we were able to stick to it really well. And what happened was, I would say most learning occurs on, like, an S curve, that it's. There's a long period where you don't really have anything, any improvement, and it's very frustrating. And. And then you get a lot of improvement. And then once you reach the mastery stage, it starts leveling off again, and you have to work really hard to continue making improvements. And languages are very much like that. So those first, you know, two weeks to a month in Spain were just brutal. Like, there's so many frustrating experiences and you're, like, having unnecessary fights and you're just like, I just don't want to talk to anyone. I just want to sit alone.

Yeah.

And you go through that. But then after two, three months later, it's not even that much time. It wasn't a long period of time. You are able to have these full conversations. Everything is really easy. It's lots of fun. And you see the people outside looking in, the people who don't speak Spanish very well or Portuguese very well, and they're really struggling, and they're still struggling. And you're past that now. You're in a point where you're having fun, you're able to do things you can, you know, make friends, go on dates, just do everything you would do normally. And you're able to do it in this new culture, this new environment.

Fascinating.