How To UNLEASH Your Super Brain For SUCCESS! | Scott Young

Because of this environment, we tend to view learning in this very zero sum. You know, either you're the best or you're the worst kind of way. But the fact of the matter is that we all, you know, can get better at things.

I want to. I want to jump straight into it because, you know, the reality is, I feel like, and this is. This is coming from personal experience, that we're all learning in the wrong way. At least I know I did for a long time. And maybe that's subjective because maybe the personality style is kind of linked to maybe the best way to learn. What's the number one thing that you've discovered that prevents people from learning the right way?

Oh, man, there's way too many to talk about. We can get into some of them here, but a really simple one which sounds really obvious is do the thing that you want to get good at. So this sounds, again, super obvious, but how do you learn a language? You go on your phone, you download duolingo. But is what you wanted to get good at doing Duolingo? No. You wanted to speak with people, Right. Or you wanted to start a business? Are you actually starting a business or are you just attending conferences? Are you just buying books and reading them? And so I think that that is a big factor in learning lots of things is that we don't zoom in on what it is that we're actually trying to excel at and we don't put ourselves in environments where it really makes a difference.

You know, I'm so glad you said that because.

Let'S see here. I'm trying. My brain wants to go two different directions. All right, so we'll go with direction one first.

I'm glad you said that. And the reason is, is because I find that people want to get traction in a specific area, but yet all their attention is focused in a different area. Yeah, right. Like, I want to make more money, but I'm going to go play basketball for six hours a day. You know, that kind of thing.

Go ahead. Yeah, well, I mean, that's a huge factor is that a lot of times the thing that you really need to do to be making progress is somewhat more difficult than what, you know is something that's sort of vaguely related to it. I mean, the playing basketball versus working on your business. I think everyone knows that the basketball is not going to help your business grow unless you're. We do this. Yeah, yeah, true. But there is subtle ways that we do this, you know, so one of the ones that I thought was really interesting has to do with students. And when I was doing research for this book, I stumbled on this little section of research literature that is all about how students often study really badly. So the way students often study is they open their book and they read it over, and then when they're done, they're like, well, you know, I'll read it over again, or I'll take my highlighter out and I'll circle things and I'll transfer it and I'll put little, little colored post it notes all over my notes. But the important factor is that they have the book open when they're studying, so they're looking at what they're learning. And just it's obvious that's how you study. But there's a lot of research shows that if you want to be able to remember things, you have to shut the book and practice remembering it. You can't just look at the material. And so this idea is known as retrieval. And I think it fits this picture is that closing the book and sort of testing yourself, getting a blank piece of paper and writing out, well, what do I remember from this? I mean, what do I remember? That's a pretty simple exercise. There's nothing really fancy about this. But the act of trying to remember, it starts building those pathways in your brain to help remember things. Another way this comes up, I remember I was helping someone and they were not really a public speaker, but they had to give a presentation for like an exam or something. And they had their cue cards and they're just like going over again and again and again, and they keep doing this for like a day or two. And I'm like, well, why don't you, like, try giving the speech without, you know, looking at the cards? And they're like, oh, well, I'm not quite ready yet. I'm like, well, just try it. And then they do it and they're like, oh, I don't remember anything where I speech. Memorizing speeches is so hard. But what this person didn't realize is that what you needed to do was from the beginning, put the cards down, try to remember what your speech was, try to say it. And then when you get stuck, of course you can look at them. But the idea here is that you're practicing remembering. So this is just a small tip. I know that, you know, memorizing speeches and studying for exams isn't where everyone's at right now, but I think it illustrates this general principle that the putting the cue cards away and trying to recall from within is definitely harder. A Bit more stressful than just looking at them over and over again. And so this is the trap, I think we fall into with learning, is that we unwittingly choose the strategy that's equivalent to looking at the cue cards over and over again. And as a result, we're. I can't. I can't believe I don't, you know, remember this. And that's one of the reasons.

Well, in that case, we're essentially setting ourselves up to kind of like for lack of it, or. I don't believe in failure. I believe in learning, of course, but we're setting ourselves up to learn the lesson a second time, let's put it that way. Right?

Yeah, yeah.

But the other thing that dawned on me as you were sharing that is, you know, I kind of. I'm a big believer in, you probably should know how you learn and then what you need to learn. What I mean by that is, you know, I'm a big believer in. Or at least a. I have a lot. I like a lot of the things in neuro linguistics kind of pursuit. And I'm someone who's a more of a visual slash, kinesthetic learner, where my wife is more of an auditory learner. So one of the. One of the connections that I've found, and I'm curious to know if your research found the same thing, is when I learn things either in a visual mode or a kinesthetic mode, things tend to stick. If I learn it in a straight audio mode, it doesn't work for me. But if my wife learns it in audio mode, it totally sticks for her.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think one of the things that you have to do when you're learning is you have to figure out what works with you. I think even your personality makes a big difference. I mean, you know, I know people, you know, to use the example of language learning that are, you know, they're kind of have. I don't want to say they have add, but they're sort of like low tolerance for sitting down and studying. And so they work really well, like going out there and speaking to people right away. And then there's the opposite person who, like, has no problem sitting in the library for six hours. But, like, the thought of having a conversation with someone is just painful. And you see these people evolve different strategies. And I do think that you can compare them. Like, I think you can say, well, this strategy, better for this. This strategy, better for that. So I don't want to say they're just equivalent. But, you know, you see people who, okay, I really like studying. That's what I'm really good at. So their strategy is very much based on like flashcards and it's very much based on I'm going to do tons of listening. And they tend to be, you know, maybe not quite as confident or fluent speakers in the beginning, but they tend to have large vocabularies and they have really good comprehension. Whereas the person who's only doing conversation, maybe he's not going to be able to read through literature quite as fast too. And so I think figuring out what works for you is important and I think taking into account your personality and your likes and dislikes and you know, even just, I know people that they can't sit and read a book, but they listen to like, you know, 100 audiobooks a year.

Yeah.

So I think sometimes in our culture we tend to be like, no, no, you're not doing it right. Like you're supposed to be reading the paper book. The audiobooks don't count. But it's the same information. And so I think finding what works for you is really important.

Well, and I'm glad you mentioned that because, you know, obviously you've done a tremendous amount more research in this area, obviously with the best selling book Ultra Learning. But you know, when it comes down to it, I want to help, you know, with what I do for a living nowadays. I want to help people get the insight and information and the perspective they need as quickly as possible. And you know, I've learned that, you know, obviously that the modalities.

Tend to help a little bit. And then the methodology that I've ran into that seems to also help is understanding kind of where you're at. You know, I'm, I guess what's called a self learner, right. If I need to, if I know I need to learn something, I'll go watch YouTube. I'll go watch, you know, and I'm again, we, I got a dmx, not the rapper, but the DMX cord issue in our live event center for a live event we're doing tomorrow. And of course the DMX cord is what makes the lights, the colored lights go off and on and dim and you know, roll around and all this kind of stuff. And we were stuck for my, my tech guy was stuck for over an hour yesterday and I'm like. So I walk in, he's like, well, I can't get it to work. I was like, did you YouTube it? He's like, what YouTube it? Of course we YouTube it. There's like a three minute instructional video on how to fix it. But I think that's a kind of a case in point because I think that there seems to be this correlation between not just how you learn, whether it be, you know, kinesthetic or visual, but also in what way you learn it. Like, you know, for me, I'm more of a self learner. For him, he's much more of a, all right, sit and work with me. And then you got that. Like the other, the third party that I've kind of identified is kind of like this apprenticeship, like you. You actually have the master with you while you're technically doing it. Right? Yeah. Have you found that, that same kind of theology in your, in your research?

Well, I think again, YouTube has become a really, really important tool for learning lots of things, particularly like the things you're talking about, like fixing technical issues. YouTube is probably about the best. It is because you read a written descript, you know, from like assembling IKEA furniture, that if you have ever want to feel dumber, try to, yeah, try to assemble IKEA furniture. And you're like, you know, I went to college, how come I can't put this table together? But it's because it's often using kind of abstract sort of pictures. There's no talking, no verbal things. So you don't realize, oh, make sure that you're using the side that has the slightly different bevel or you're not going to be able to.

What exactly is the top of the rectangle?

Right, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So.

So. So the thing I think that is helpful with YouTube is that you get to see someone doing it. You know, pictures worth a thousand words, so a video is probably worth a million. And you also get to hear them describe it and also talk about, well, make sure you don't do this and make sure you don't do that. And so I think there's a certain sense that YouTube is kind of like a virtual apprenticeship these days for a lot of skills. Now I think there's some skills that are harder maybe to learn just from YouTube, um, especially skills that are, you know, mostly mental. Like, it would be maybe harder for me to learn how to write an essay, for instance, from someone who's just, all right, I'm writing this essay right now and talking about. Because what you're trying to learn there is maybe a little bit more abstract, like how do you organize your ideas and these kinds of things as opposed to, you know, fixing a cable. But I think these are tools that are very Powerful. And so, you know, one of the reasons I wrote this book, Ultralearning, is that there's become this real revolution in learning tools, even though we don't often think of it that way. So YouTube is an example that like most people, it's dumb cat videos and you know, quality programming like this one here. But not always, you know, it's just something for entertainment and we don't realize, oh, actually this is a game changer. There's so many skills that people can learn in a radically different way now. And you know, one of my favorite examples of this, about how changing the sort of tools for learning can create dramatic results is actually Tetris. Tetris. Tetris.

Okay, I gotta hear it.

Remember it from when you were a kid and it was huge in like the late 80s, early 90s, everyone was playing Tetris. However, now Tetris on a Game Boy is popular. On a game? Yeah, on a Game Boy or arcade or whatever. Right. Tetris now is far less popular than it was, you know, 30 years ago. Right. We can all agree on that. But if you look at like how fast the best people are at Tetris, they're way better than they were 30 years ago. Like way better. And why is that? And part of the reason is that it used to be, well, you just knew some guy who was really good at Tetris and maybe he'd be like, you could watch him with the controller or something and that was it. But now there, there's like forums that people have dedicated to getting really good at Tetris and there's, you know, videos where someone can be like, oh, you gotta like flick it like this. And there's this trick. So like there's even like a stage at the end of Tetris where you beat all the levels or just glitches out and you can keep playing it but you can't see anything. It's just like, it's just rapid firing garbage. Like that's the kind of thing that, like, if you didn't have a video where someone's showing you kind of how you do that or watching their progress, you wouldn't be able to progress. And so I think that the idea of being able to watch someone do something is really a game changer because before you know you, you just would, it would be too daunting to try to do something if you didn't personally know someone who could help you fix it or help you work on it. And so I'm really eager and excited to Explore some of these tools that you can use for learning that, you know, save a lot of money, that give you access when you didn't have access before, things like that.

Well, and I think that's why I love your work so much, is because you. You save the most valuable commodity time, right? Why spend 16 hours trying to learn something? You spend three doing it. You know, doing it in the right methodology, using the right strategy, using the right tool technique. You know, one of the ways in which I learn the quickest is to take myself out of the environment which I'm normally in, and immerse myself into an environment that I'm normally totally opposite of. So I'm a huge believer in immersion. I know you are as well. Like, let's talk about the importance of immersion, how that kind of breaks down.

Well, I think one of the things that is often underrated is how much the environment shapes what you learn. So you can think of it as just a mental exercise where, you know, the difference between someone who learns a lot and learns a little is just sort of in your head. But I think a lot of it is based on the environment. And if you have the right kind of environment, with the right supports as well as the right pressures, you can learn things that are quite complicated. So, you know, take it for example, the fact that most people know how to drive a car. And driving a car is actually not a trivial task. You have to operate this big vehicle that, you know, can explode and kill you if you don't do it properly. And you have to know all the traffic laws and you have to do all this thing. But like, most people learn it, and they learn it because there's sort of this societal expectation. You learn it. We got the driver's school. We've got this structure that works in place. In contrast, I would say, you know, programming, for instance, is a skill only some people learn. And so some people get into that environment where they have friends, that program, and maybe they're like, you know, into some nerdy things, and they, like, play making games and stuff when they're in high school. And so they just naturally get in this environment where they learn programming. Whereas other people who are outside of that just think this is the most complicated thing in the world. And they pick up a programming book. And I don't understand this at all. But you don't understand it at all. In the same way that if you'd never seen a car before, if someone's trying to explain to you the gas pedal and how you have to Shift gears and stuff. That would also be bewildering. And so I think picking environments where you're surrounded by people who know the skill, where you have to use the skill. So it's not just, okay, this is nice to have, but it's obligatory. So the language learning immersion is like the classic example of that. But then also there's supports, there's resources, there's tools that you can use to facilitate it. So you don't just, like, break down in this, like, learning helplessness of like, oh, no, I can't do this, and I have to. And I'm going to, you know, cry myself to sleep. But you get this sort of buffer to help you. To help you learn what it is you need to learn.

Well, let me ask you this. So I know you had a new endeavor recently that you decided that you were going to learn your wife's language.

So out of curiosity, how are you going to do that? What tools and techniques for emotional learning can you use? Or how are you applying? I guess, how are you applying some of the things you teach?

Well, so this. This was a brief project I did kind of April 2020. So we're, you know, rewind the clock. We're in the middle of the pandemic. Everyone's locked in at home. And it was sort of like, well, know, my wife, she grew up in, now, north Macedonia, and she speaks Macedonian. Her relatives do. I've been there. They, a lot of them don't speak English. And, you know, we just had a son recently. And so congratulations. I knew some Macedonian. Thank you. If I knew some Macedonian, then, you know, that would also help if we want to teach him a bit eventually. And so this was sort of like, oh, you know, maybe. Maybe I can't travel right now. You can't really even, like, if this is, again, April 2020, you're not even leaving the house that much.

But maybe I can do something there. So we did a little sort of mini project. And the idea was, and we can kind of go into this, I did this other project which was a bit more elaborate in scope, but it was to use what we call the no English rule, which is for, you know, it was about a month and a half that we did it. I would just only speak to her in Macedonian. She would only speak to me in Macedonian. And, you know, that was it. And we would just practice. And so what happens in that situation is that a lot of everyday routines and rituals and vocabulary get drilled down so much that they just become totally spontaneous and automatic and I think that's one of the challenges of a more traditional approach of classroom based learning is that they give you so little time to do it. You have like maybe an hour a week or something that there is this pressure to get coverage to. Okay, you know, like my sister, for instance, did a college Spanish course and they were, I don't know, like 17, let's say, different conjugations. Every week they did a different conjugation. But I mean, knowing the pluperfect, subjunctive, whatever is not as important as knowing how to say, like, you know, where is this? A hundred times? So that when you ask where this is, there's zero hesitation. And so I think this is one of the factors. I think the other factor too is that when you use a language to communicate, you're getting this constant feedback about, oh, am I being understood? Whereas if you just, let's say, do flashcards, you don't always get that feedback. Now, the flashcards are necessarily bad, but just that if you're only doing flashcards, you don't get that. Oh, I'm actually not saying it right. So there was even a few humorous moments where I, like, I studied something wrong and I'm saying it. Then she's like making fun of me. Yeah.

Because it sounds like asinine or something like, where's the bathroom? And you're like, hand me the spoon in the toilet.

I think, I think the one, I think the one that I remember is there. There's some big monument that they put up in Skopje called Man on Horse. That's what it's called. And it's how you say it, but I. The V is spelled like a B in the Cyrillic languages. So I was Bony Nakonya. I was Bony Nicole. And she's like, what is this? Bony Nicorne? And yeah, it was because I had gotten it wrong. But I think, you know, that's an example where, like, if again, I'm just doing this sort of passive thing, I might not realize, you know, that I'm making that mistake. And so I think this immersion, certainly it applies to language learning. I think in the extreme, I think immersion is very helpful. Even the kind of limited, you know, just with my wife immersion that I had at home, that still was huge. But I think something akin to this is true for most skills, whether it's you want to get good at business, whether you want to learn a new sport, whether you want to learn a musical instrument, being in an environment where you kind of need the skill and you're using it In a sort of a real way makes a big difference versus just, okay, I'm just going to go to this class and then go home and this has nothing to do with any of the rest of my life. And then you're kind of. You're counting on the fact that you're just going to really build this huge passion for it that's going to spill over, I think, in order to make progress.

No, I think that's really good because, you know, I can only imagine that some of the earlier conversation was a lot of pointing and grunting, like.

All the way back to Neanderthal days. But no, I think that's important, Nick, is that, you know, a lot of times I see a lot of people who are struggling and a variety of different things maybe there and then it's in almost every case. In almost every case, it's because there's something that can be learned that's not yet learned in almost every case. Right. So running, you know, learning to ride a bike, learning to balance your budget, learning to actually communicate with your spouse appropriately, learning to be a good leader in the workplace, learning, you know, gosh, learning to fix a car. Like all these different things. You know, most people struggle, in my opinion, or in staying that stuck category due to lack of knowledge, not realizing that so much of that knowledge is there for the taking. How did you specifically fall in love with the desire and the need to learn? Like, how did, how did ultra learning become?

Well, so I got started on this. I started blogging way back in 2006 and I was in university and given that I had zero life experience, talking about studying was about the only thing that I was at all qualified to talk about. I wrote about studying and exercising good habits and these kinds of things. And it was around this time that I bumped into online and in person some people that were doing really incredible things. So people like Benny Lewis, who was doing these fluent in three month challenges where he'd go to another country and do essentially what I was describing with the Macedonian project, where he's like almost entirely speaking that language and he posts like videos at the end of three months and he looks like, oh, wow, he's having a conversation with this person in Czech or Thai or sign language or whatever. And so it was, it was impressive. And people like Josh Kaufman, I think he wrote a book called the Personal MBA where he's like, I'm not going to go back to school and get an MBA and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars. I'm just going to organize a Curriculum and read all these books and I'm going to know business and people like Steve Pavlina, who I read an article of his that he wrote. This was sort of retrospective. But when he was in college, he went back and did a double major in computer science and mathematics over three semesters. Just by being, like, really ruthless, by being productive, optimizing his schedule, taking triple course load, this kind of thing. And this just fascinated me. I think it fascinated me for two reasons. One, I just liked the idea of attempting something like that. You know, I think so much of our school system really does kind of drive toward the middle a little bit. It is. It is sort of, what can the average student handle? What's the. It's not individualized and tailored. You sit in a class with 30 other people, if they do something that only works for two or three, then you know the rest. The kids are either frustrated or falling asleep. And so it can be hard to sort of get that in a. In a, you know, traditional educational environment. And the other thing that I really liked about it was there was just something really cool, like, I'm writing articles about setting, but I like, these people are actually doing cool stuff and talking about it, like, while they're doing it. And so that really drew me in, just even from the idea of, you know, making content online that it was, oh, this is exciting. You know, like, I'm excited watching, like, oh, how's Benny going to do this? On the next episode? Have flew it in three months. You know, I thought this was really exciting. And so I was drawn into doing that myself. And I ended up doing a couple projects. I did the first project I did, I called the MIT Challenge. And this was to try to learn MIT's computer science curriculum. Now, in this case, I didn't go to mit. What I did is they actually post most of their material for computer science online for free. And so I just made a plan of, like, I'm going to figure out which classes are in a degree, try to take as many or close as I can to the degree, and just try to pass the final exams and do the programming project. So that was a project I did, and I did it over 12 months. So there was like, that was my compressed timeframe. And then a year after that, I did another project, this time with a friend, where we traveled to four countries to learn four languages using the sort of approach, what I call the no English rule. We're traveling, like, we land in Spain and we don't speak in English to each other to Anyone that we meet. And so this has some sort of, like, common.

That has to be a lot of pointing and grunting.

Yeah. I mean, we did try to do a little bit of prep beforehand, but, like, sometimes that little prep was a little too little in some places. Like, I think definitely when we got to, like, Korea and Brazil, we were like, oh, man, we should have studied a little bit before we got here. But. But it's surprising how quickly you can get into it if. If you are given that situation. I think the mistake I think most people make, and I mean, this is a little bit of an esoteric point, but I think the problem a lot of people make is they think in their head, well, if I just lived there, I'd learn the language, right? Like that. That's something that people say, especially if they haven't looked abroad. They'll be kind of like, well, if I just lived in Paris or if I just lived in Beijing, of course. Of course I'd learn it. Right? Because I'm in the environment. And they don't realize how easy it is to avoid speaking the language, even living in a place where no one else speaks it. Like, you find ways to form a little bubble of English that can insulate you from the, you know, world of French or Mandarin Chinese. And so this idea, the theory behind it was not so much that doing this pure, really hardcore immersion was, you know, that you need to be speaking 100% of the time or you can't learn the language. The problem was just that if you give yourself that out early on, when you don't have the ability, you make this little bubble around yourself, and then all your friends speak in English to you, even the ones that are from Spain and whatnot, and you don't actually learn it. Whereas if you can kind of like, just be really strict for, like, a couple of weeks, then all of a sudden, everyone speaks to you in Spanish. And now you kind of have to, even if you were tired of it. You know, I'm a little sick of this, but all my friends don't speak English, so I'm kind of stuck here, and I have to do this. And. And the surprising thing is, is, is how quickly it becomes comfortable. I mean, I was. That was, I think, the biggest surprise for me, not how good we were at Spanish after the end of three months. Although, you know, people can judge for themselves. There's a. We posted some videos online. I think it was okay, but how comfortable we felt. That was the thing that was weird for us. You know, Mike, we Were not at a level where it's like, okay, I can, you know, do everything exactly the same level of articulateness I have in English. But it was like, you know, we're making friends, we're going on dates, we're doing, you know, everything that you would do in normal life. It was just. This is just what we're doing. We're just doing it in a different language. And so I think that is a. Was for me, a real eye opener. Not specifically about language learning, but just to reaffirm that, you know, the way you learn things in a classroom is often just because of convenience. It's not really like that was the best possible method for learning something. It was just like, well, that's how we can get 60 people into a room and teach them roughly the same thing, you know?

Well, if I'm not mistaken, they had this statistic that was done a number of years ago. I'm not two or five years ago. Somewhere in between that timeframe where they realized that the human brain basically shuts off if you put it in classroom mode. And all you and all people hear is womp, womp, womp, womp, womp, womp, womp, you know, so when you. When you start looking at live events and things that we do, you know, we are constantly getting people out of their chairs, constantly getting them to reengage just for that very same reason. Because, you know, we have been conditioned a lot of our. It seems like conditioned a lot of our schooling years to essentially sit and listen. Yeah. You know, not a lot of application. Right. As a rule of thumb, what role is application played into having knowledge retention, you know, as far as learning something and immediately applying it.

Well, so I think there's a couple factors here. One of them just goes to the point that, like, knowing about something and knowing how to do it are not the same thing. And so very often, I think our experiences in school trick us a little bit because they very much put the sitting in a classroom and listening to a lecture as the central part of what learning is. That's what learning is. And everything else is just. I was just applying it. Right. Like, just like it's an afterthought. But I think that the emphasis should be flipped. Not that you don't learn anything from sitting and listening, but that a lot of what you really need to do is build these sort of action patterns in your mind that you only really learn by doing them and you actually do them. And then that's how you. How you figure it out. So instead of the sort of prototypical math class where you spend all this time learning, you know, the algebra and you master it. And then after they're kind of like, okay, now go off and do algebra in the real world. Well, most people don't ever do algebra in the world. And part of the reason is because when they encounter situations where maybe it might be useful to do algebra, they can't remember how to connect it to the real situation. And so they find some other way of solving the problem, like, ah, it's too difficult, I'll just look it up, or something like this. And so I think that is a classic issue is that we tend to view learning in the guise of studying when it's really more doing, where the studying is like a, like an auxiliary activity that helps you with that. So I think that's a factor. The other thing to do with retention is that it's pretty well known at this point that there are two different memory systems in the brain. So what we can call declarative memory, this is sort of the knowing that and the procedural memory, which is the knowing how. And they seem to work on different memory subsystems. So even people who have like brain injuries in certain parts of their brain can have an inability to make. Make one kind of memory, but not the other. So we were pretty clear that this, these sort of work on different bases. So, yeah, like this is a famous psychology experiment where this guy, HM, had damage to his hippocampus. He was actually an epileptic and they removed them to prevent the seizures and he was just like totally unable to make new memories. So if you've ever seen the movie Memento, it's basically about that guy or.

If it was a 50 first dates.

Something like that, Maybe, maybe that one too. Yeah, I haven't watched that. I can't confirm. But the idea is the same, is just that he was unable to form new memories. However, you could do these sort of association trials. So like the example they use in the movie is where like he touched something and it would shock him and he would like, kind of develop like, you know, a fear response. And so there's certain ways that you can do certain types of memory that are not using your knowledge of like words and concepts and things like this, which is somewhat independent. And so one of the things is that these procedural memories often are more durable than declarative memories. And so this is, you know, part of the reason why they say it's like learning a bicycle and not like learning trigonometry. And there does Seem to be some kind of bridge. So some skills, they start out mostly declarative, but they can turn into procedural skills. So my favorite example of that is typing. Now, I don't know, some people are maybe not touch typers. I'm. I'm a, you know, I'm a touch typer. But. But if you were to ask me where are the keys on the keyboard, like, without looking at it, and you say, where's W? I'd have to think about it. And the only way I'd be able to think about it is I know that I move my finger here, right? So that's how I. But the muscle is there. I don't have to think about where W is when I'm actually typing, but it's stored in a different place. And so because that memory is often more durable, often the act of doing something repeatedly, you're applying the skill, using it makes these sort of very durable patterns in your brain that can often persist a lot longer than something that you can only access through this sort of declarative pathway. And so, you know, with language learning, that was something that we really try to do for an emphasis that if you, you know, you're repeating certain stock phrases over and over and over again, they become more and more routinized so that you can just say them. Whereas the words that you have to sort of recall, I don't want to say by translation, but you have to, like, think about it. You're sort of like, oh, what's the word for X? You have to think about it is not quite in that pathway. And so, you know, now, years after doing this trial, the, like, really quick phrases that we said all the time, those are still there. Like, those aren't gone. But sometimes it's like, oh, what's the word for, like, raccoon or something? It's like, oh, man. Maybe you don't remember that now. Or like, you know, what was the word for spatula? I'm just like, oh, now I have to think about it a little bit. So these are examples, I think, where if you are focusing on doing, you're focusing on taking action and applying, you're often knitting together these action patterns that can persist even if you, you know, forget maybe what the lecturer was wearing on the third day when he was telling you about some concept in that way about it.

So I guess if I'm hearing you correctly, then repetition can definitely aid us in our learning ability.

Well, repetition is like, there. There's lots of research shows that repetition is associated with Memory. There's this whole stuff about the spacing effect, which is that if you repeat exposures spaced out in time, you'll remember something better than if they're all at once. So that's why cramming isn't good, because you actually do remember it for the next day on the exam, but then you don't remember it like a week later, which if you had another class after that which required that knowledge, then you're screwed. So I think the spacing effect is really important. Repetition is important. I do think it has to be intelligent repetition though. I think you don't want to just think that, okay, well, I'll just repeat this to myself a bunch of times when repeating it isn't what you want to do. So for a lot of classes I really stress, you know, you want to understand the idea, you don't want to just memorize the definition because even though you might be able to memorize the definition, it's a pretty rigid way of using the knowledge and it might not help you that much. And similarly, you know, if you are going to memorize, let's say vocabulary in a language or you're going to memorize it, it's helpful that you use it in real situations because then you know that was actually what needed to be memorized. And so I think repetition is a powerful tool. It can be a double edged sword if you use it the wrong way. If you just convince yourself, I'll just memorize all this and then I won't have to learn anything. But I think it can be, you know, something you definitely can't neglect. You can't just think of it as, okay, I'll just understand this intellectually and I'm not actually going to practice.

Well, I mean, it's clear you've done a lot of studying with all this and a lot of research and a lot of. And I guess one of the things I love the most is the fact that you actually practice, quote, unquote, what you preach. So like you've actually, you've learned these things by doing them consistently and you know, trying this method and using this tool versus that one. I'm just curious, from your perspective, who did you originally write the book for? So who, who was the, who was the person that needs ultra learning more than anybody else? Now we can all get, we can all take a ton from it. It's a great book, don't get me wrong. I'm just curious who you wrote it for.

Well, so I usually write these books for a couple different Audiences in mind. And the first one is always, I want to write the book that I would have wanted to have read, you know, 10, 15 years ago. So before I started on this journey, I. Because to me, I think the biggest factors were not even so much the techniques or any of the ideas I was talking about, but really just the very general idea that if you want to learn something, you can learn it, and you can learn impressive things and you can do it yourself. And I think this is something that we often don't believe about ourselves. You know, we don't really believe that we can learn a musical instrument or another language or we can totally switch professions. Like, we doubt that we have it in ourselves to do this. And so I think for me, the. The thing that, you know, got me on this path was not really learning about a technique, but hearing these stories of other people that, just as I mentioned, like Benny Lewis and Steve Avelina and Josh Kaufman and many more people that I document in the book that I found out after I'd already began. And I think they really kind of sucked me into this world where it was sort of like, oh, okay, like, maybe it makes sense for me to, like, figure out this learning thing, or maybe it makes sense for me to, like, figure out what's the right way to study and what' the right way to approach these and to have those tools. So I think that was. The first person was me at 18 or whatever I was writing this for. The second audience I think I was writing this for is people who face, whether they know it or not, learning challenges in their life. So they are, you know, they have to learn new things for their job. They want to learn a new hobby. They have these challenges that they're facing, and they should be given the best possible advice. Yeah, and unfortunately, I think we don't spend a lot of time learning how to learn in schools. There's a lot of, you know, a lot of the stuff in educational psychology doesn't filter past the teacher. So teachers, you know, if they've gone to school, they'll learn about educational theories, and they'll learn about some of these things that I'm talking about here, or at least I hope they would. But that doesn't often filter down to the student. So once the student leaves the classroom, they may not have that awareness of, oh, if I need to remember this, I need to practice, remember, bring it. Which is like, a really basic thing that you'd think would be drilled into students early that, like, no, no, don't study this way. But we don't do that. Right. And similarly, I think even just this idea that, you know, skills are quite specific and that they're often difficult to transfer, so you want to, like, try to do the real thing as much as possible and, like, ground your efforts in that. Again, not something that people have a theory behind. Sometimes people have, like an intuition from just their own personal experience. Oh, yeah, And I got to do this if I'm going to figure it out, but not in a way that's grounded in like, oh, here's the science, or here's what it is. So I wrote this book as well because I wanted to take all of those ideas, put them in an easy package, hopefully make it a, you know, not too difficult read, and give it to people so that if they read through it, they could be like, well, you know, I have got a good basis for doing this, so if I have to go learn some difficult skill, I'll have some starting points for. Okay, this is where I should go in thinking about how to learn it.

I mean, that's one reason why I thought the conversation would be so important is because you're right. We haven't been taught necessarily how we should learn or different tools to learn. You know, we're just. We're typically thrown content and can be coming at us in a variety of different ways. But, you know, I, as someone who's ADHD and dyslexic, you know, there were certain elements of my learning that were very difficult for me to learn. Certain, you know, certain things that were, you know, it wasn't necessarily that was a bad guy, you know, just my brain is wired in a slightly different way than some other folks, you know, and training, you know, people to one methodology, from my experience, has been ill. Not as effective as trying to find a formalized approach and a set of tools like ultralearning that then allows you to use what works for you so that you can get the knowledge you need to then better yourself in whatever area. And, you know, that's one of the reasons I like the conversation so much, is because I think. I think we can get all the way into, well into our adulthood. I'm talking 50, 60, 70 years old. And literally teach ourselves. I can't learn to swim or I can't swim or I shouldn't do this or I can't do that. And at the end of the day, I don't know anybody yet that can't do nothing. Everybody can do. Everybody can. You know, everybody. If they put in the effort, they Put in the time, they put in the energy, they learn a skill in a facet that, that, that works for them. Can pretty much learn to do pretty much anything. I'm 5 foot 5. I will probably never play in the NBA, but I can learn to dribble a basketball.

Yeah, yeah, no, I agree. And I think that's one of the things, I think that also holds us back is the. Our entire educational system is geared around giving people rankings.

Exactly.

And because it's geared around who's an A student, B student, C student, not so much. Absolutely. How much do you know? What things can you do that you couldn't do before? Often the things you can do are seen as like, someone irrelevant. Like, you know, when you think about classes you've taken, you're like, what can I do that I didn't know how to do before? What, like, you know, what situation Would I be better equipped after this class? A lot of times, you know, you get a blank face. All that mattered was that I got the top score in the class or I got, you know, the worst score or whatever. And so I think, I think sometimes because of this environment, we tend to view learning in this very zero sum. You know, either you're the best or you're the worst kind of way. But the fact of the matter is that we all can get better at things. Like, again, I'm not going to be an Olympic athlete, but that doesn't mean that I can't learn to jog and I can't go skiing or like you said, learn to play basketball. And I think especially given that a lot of the things that we derive so much of our joy from in life, life are not things that we're absolutely the best in the world at, but that we're good enough to have fun with, you know, like, that we're good enough. Like, I can play the guitar good enough. You know, I'm not gonna be on the stage with screaming fans, but I can play guitar good enough that I, like, bring it to the campground and like, yeah, booze from the next campsite. And so I think these things are really rewarding and they're the things that make us, you know, enjoy life. And so I think even if, you know, again, you didn't feel like you were the smartest person in school, you didn't feel like, you know, I'm going to be the next Nobel Prize winning physicist genius, you can still approach learning in an effective way. And so my goal has always been to, you know, not try to wipe away any Differences or say that like anyone can be, you know, some genius, but really just to say anyone can learn better, anyone can take what approach they're using right now and find ways to, you know, oh, I was doing this before and that now in retrospect seems like it was a mistake because, you know, just like the flashcard or so just a cue card idea with the speeches that like, now that that person knows this, they'll know how to memorize the speech and they'll do it much faster and they haven't become 10 times smarter. It's not, they have some super memory now. They just have a different approach to it. And so I think giving those approaches and giving that sense of possibility of like, well, you know, what things could I learn? What things could I get good at? I think is, is very valuable.

Well, and I also think it helps us steer clear away from the element, at least in, when I was in school. And I know, I mean my kids, when they were coming through school, you know, you had the A, the A student, the B student, and if you were a D student or something, you know, maybe, maybe you required more instruction, more hands on, more tutor or whatever to even get your quote unquote grade up. Yeah, it, it used to challenge, at least for me and even them, but watching them, it challenged their ability to perceive their intelligence because they, you know, they related intelligence to a higher ranking rather than intelligence into a thought process or learning style. You know, what, what have you seen with your, with everything of how learning can actually affect intelligence as a whole. And kind of, how do you define intelligence? Knowing everything you know about learning now?

Well, so when, when psychologists, for instance, talk about IQ or they often will use an even narrower concept of like fluid intelligence or they will talk, eg is like a statistical term, this kind of thing. But it's important to realize what, what the idea was here. And the idea was that we want to have stable kind of ideas of cognitive ability. And so we want to strip away all the incidental stuff. So we want to strip away the fact that, you know, well, we can't have the IQ test be a physics test because some kids have taken a physics class, some kids have not taken a physics class. So that wouldn't, that wouldn't really test the pure mental essence or whatever that is iq. And so from a psychometrician point of view, I understand that, you know, like you're trying to study some phenomenon in the world and that's fine. But I think from an individual point of view, the fact that when you learn the physics class, you know physics, and you didn't before, that's obviously made you more intelligent. Now you can reason about physics problems differently. And so in my mind, I think for the average person, the ranking mindset has, has narrower utility, like people treat it as the absolute identity for things, but I think the accumulative model, where you just keep learning things your whole life, you keep adding knowledge and tools and facts and skills, and, you know, if you get on that path and you invest in it, then you can go quite far. And, and the, the proper way to measure yourself is not, am I smart compared to Albert Einstein or, you know, know some savant? But the proper way of measuring yourself is, what can I do? What do I know that I didn't know five years ago, 10 years ago? Because that's ultimately going to be what defines the quality of your career, your relationships, your hobbies, everything, right? And so in some ways, it's not just to negate any of those things that we say about intelligence or academic ability or whatnot, but just that sometimes the effort, the emphasis is a little perverse that it's, it's, instead of focusing on personal growth, it's focused on, you know, like, I want to be a little bit better than so and so, but, like, who cares what it's for, right? It's just that I'm number one. Right? Or I'm, you know, give me my gold star. Exactly. And so I think taking that individual point of view and really focusing on the learner was also a reason I wanted to write the book, because so many books about learning and psychology in there have a. Either a teacher centric view or they're like, they're focused on sort of how does the outside come in and make you learn things. And I wanted to write the book for the individual. The world is as we take it. You know, this is the situation. There's these tools, there's these challenges, there's, you know, you have these abilities, you maybe have these weaknesses, but given all that, what can you do? What should you do? And so I think guides that are written from that perspective are somewhat underrated because ultimately that's really all you can do is you can just look at what your situation is and see how you might be able to improve. And, you know, maybe you'll be able to learn something that you thought was impossible before. And I, you know, it's hard to make that a blanket promise, but I can say for myself, you know, after having done some of these projects, if you told Me? Oh, yeah, you can go through four countries and learn four languages in a year. Like, it'd be like, like, no, that's. That's crazy. There's no way you could do that. And so I think it's only because I kind of got started down this path and met these people and had this environment that pushed me in that direction that, that I was able to go there. And so I think that is something that is really valuable to encourage people to sort of keep an open mind about these things.

Well, and that's why I want to encourage everybody to go pick up the book. Because, you know, again, I, as someone who had quote, unquote, difficulty learning early in school, I'm also, because of that scenario, I'm now very creative as a problem solver in general. It's like, there's not one way to fix a problem or to get around something. There's like a thousand, and I just got to figure out which one works for me. And I think that the book can add a lot of value to people who need to learn a new skill set, need to learn a new. A new behavior system, but need to have some tools and some other things, like I did, you know, along the way to help me actually learn the information, the way in which I learn it best, not necessarily the way a scholastic model, which can be effective, or in a utility model, which can be ineffective. So I want to encourage everybody to go grab the book. Where can everybody pick up the book at?

So the book is available everywhere you can get it at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, wherever you get your books. It's also available Audible. I know. You know, given this is podcast slash YouTube territory, there's probably some people who would prefer to listen to it. So if you're not sick of listening to my voice right now, you can hear me for another, you know, several hours at least.

You got a good mic, man. Yeah.

Yeah.

That's awesome. Where can everybody find you yourself?

Perfect. So, yeah, you can go to scotthyung.com and usually on social media it's Scott H. Young. So you can find me, you know, wherever you like to follow things. And you know, on my website, I have now over 1500 free articles. So if you are just looking for some tools and some ideas, there's lots of stuff there too.

And many of those articles have been picked up by some pretty major organizations, by the way. So congratulations on that.

Well done.

That's awesome. Well, dude, I've appreciated the conversation, love the material. I'm glad you took the time to bring this voice to the marketplace. I agree with you. Most of the work that I've seen in the teaching space or learning space has been more scholastic teaching at you rather than teaching with you or kind of like a guiding mentorship. So thanks for answering the call there, man. I really appreciate it.

Oh, thank you so much. All right. Take care, buddy. See you. All right, take care.

If you love that interview, go ahead and check out this next one right here. Even before the pandemic, we have an epidemic of burnout. The way our lives are set up, up it set up a fast paced the diamond lane road to burnout.