Transcript for:
Ultra Learning Lecture Notes

what I'm trying to focus people on is not so much okay what is your schedule because that's really just up to you is what are you doing when you are trying to learn and that's where I think the ultra learning approach differs from a lot of more traditional approaches both to formal schooling and to self education is that a lot of people just the way they're approaching it so my critique is not you know yeah if you only have 10 minutes to work on Spanish and 810 minutes is enough it's just what are you doing with those 10 minutes and similarly with programming or with learning Excel or with you know enhancing a career skill or what-have-you it's all about what are you doing with that time so that's what we'll talk about in the book if you get it you read through it you're worried you know what I don't have a lot of time to spend learning you'd be surprised not only how much you can do with the time you have but also how much learning you're already doing that you could make more efficient if you rethink how you're approaching it because we're all trying to learn new things in our jobs and lines I am joined by none other than Scott hates young Scott welcome to the show oh it's great to be here great to be talking you I'm really excited to go through what we are discussing today which is Ultra learnings for the listeners at home who don't know who you are would you be able to give us a little bit of a background to you please sure so I've been writing about learning in psychology and self-improvement from for my website for over a decade now and for a big chunk of that I spent my time focusing on learning and how do you learn things particularly outside of school including the kinds of skills schools don't teach and part of this book was just me sort of documenting a little bit of my journey and all that really interesting people I've met who have taken on really interesting challenging self education projects and in the process really discovering how applicable this is to people who you know they don't want to do something really crazy they just want to get a better job or they want to learn a language for their next trip or they just want to be good at something but it's gonna make them feel confident and enjoy their lives you did something speaking of crazy things you did something pretty crazy a few years ago to me well which which thing are you talking about the MIT we'll start with the MIT okay sure so this was this is more than a few years ago now actually I was thinking back yeah eight years ago I believe I did the MIT challenge so this was a project that I did after I graduated from University and so I'll give a little bit of a backstory just so the just to make it so you can understand why I would try to do something like this but I I went to university and I'd studied business and I kind of gone into that thinking well I want to own my own business I want to be an entrepreneur therefore I should study business and I only learned after number of years in school that what Business School mostly is about is how do you be a good middle manager in a large company it's not really telling you how to start a business it's like here's how you can be VP of whatever in blah blah blah cork and so I graduated with this idea that Oh I shouldn't have picked this I should have made you something else now I did enjoy my time at university but it was something of a I don't really want to go back and do more studying and do more of that experience and so the big thing that I've been considering is an alternative when I was going into school was computer science because here science we learn how to program you learn how to make things like the whole world is run on technology now so even if you're not a coder you still kind of need to understand computer science a little bit to sort of succeed it particularly as an entrepreneur online which is where I was wanting ahead with my career and so I was thinking well should I go back to school should I go back for another four years and that didn't seem very appealing and around that time I stumbled upon some classes put on by MIT so they have a bunch of their classes where they record the whole lectures they put all the materials throw it up online anyone can access it you can access it right now it's MIT so I think it's ocw.mit.edu/donate Oakland course where you'll find you know hundreds of classes and so when I found one of these classes I took it and I was like you know what this is better than most of the classes I took in school like them ones that I paid money for so I took one of these classes now this is great and I was did a little tank around I was like you know what maybe you couldn't just take a class maybe you could take all the classes that you would need for degrees so this is sort of piqued my curiosity because I was looking around I didn't seem like anyone had tried to do this before I don't know maybe there's someone who did it and it is escaped my attention but I couldn't I couldn't find anyone who'd try to do this before I thought why has no one tried to do this before and so I dug through and I spend about six months researching and putting it together and obviously doing it this way where you're just doing it online self-study with course is a bit different than being an actual MIT student but with a few like I would say not too big alterations you can learn pretty much close to the whole curriculum that an MIT student would do so this kind of got me excited and as I was going through it I realized that once you get outside of the school once you sort of you stop having due dates for assignments you have to go to this lecture hall for your exam you have to show up to this on time I could watch videos and you could watch faster speed through the parts where they're rambling you know slow down rewatch parts that are confusing to you that you could actually do it even faster than when I was in university so this sort of led to this idea okay well what if I tried something a little bit more ambitious a little bit more challenging for myself and so I set this goal this MIT challenge to do this project over one year rather than the sort of typical for I mean I didn't take the summer off but still like over twelve months and so that was sort of the first little project I did and that kind of led me to doing some other projects and led me to meeting a lot of people who have done cool projects and that sort of how we how I got to this this book ultra learning because I think it has a lot of implications for other people I don't think that you can class doing a Fourier MIT computer programming course in one year as a little project [Laughter] well I mean there are people who I covered in the book that have accomplished projects much larger than that one of the people that I thought his story was fascinating was eric barone who he basically about the same time I started the MIT challenge worked for five years straight building his own video game and I've done that a little bit I did I played around that a little bit when I was high school into video games stuff I think the average person does not really appreciate how multi-talented you need to be to create your own video game you need to be good at music so most people can maybe play the piano nevermind compose original music and multiple instruments you need to be able to do art you need to be able to program you need became design you need to be able to do there's like even within those things there's multiple sub specialties that typically require a team of people so he worked on this for five years had to completely learn tons of skills from scratch the game he released stardew valley ended up becoming a massive hit and made him a millionaire pretty much overnight so I think in comparison to some of these people I feel like my projects are little but yeah I know it's a little bit of a relative comparison yeah you're totally right it's big fish little pond little fish big pond as soon as you start to delve into it out of this world of ultra learners I guess so going back going back to the MIT project how many hours were you spending learning per week so definitely when I started there was a well obviously I'd picked a fairly ambitious time for myself lying just I wouldn't be able to meet it and I wanted to really go a little bit faster than what was strictly necessary so there are 33 classes that would have been made up the degree with some minor substitutions but roughly the same amount of credit hours and I did 32 of those in that one year I did one one of the classes before a sort of a test and so I started off with like a basically the pace of about a class a week as I was going through it because that's enough time to do but if you do that if you do the math in your head 32 classes 52 weeks in a year 32 classes so that's actually a little too fast so I did that for the first think maybe the first nine or ten I did it in roughly a week one or two of them I did a little bit longer and then it was like okay this is working let's slow it down a little bit so one of the problems with doing one class in a row which I would not recommend to the average person this was just sort of an artifact of how I did my project is that it kind of makes it cramming it's easier to forget things if you learn it over a short period of time so I switch to doing it so that I would be doing like three to five classes in parallel over like a couple months and so that was how I did the rest of the classes is sort of over that a little bit more delayed pace so in the beginning it was it was actually a pretty intense schedule probably about 50 to 60 hours a week but then later on it was probably a little under full-time maybe 35 to 40 so not a trivial amount mind you I want to I don't want to be like saying that all that's easy I could do that but if you think about how much time you spend when you go to university not to mention that you're giving up four years of your salary not to mention that you're probably paying tuition that you are you know taking out student loans etc etc I think that the the way I did that project was a lot less onerous than getting an actual degree so it sounds kind of you know I think it sounds a little weird but I think when you consider the status quo I think that's the thing that maybe we should be questioning a little more yeah there's a reframing going on here isn't the it definitely info as I read through ultra learning it it it just strikes such a question about the current education system and I think we can probably can probably get onto that a little bit later and we can riff we can riff on the fact that education maybe doesn't necessarily work for everyone also I know that some of the listeners and some of the guys behind the modern ways project and the team will be thinking that your experience with your degree sounds very familiar and it is the Batum what I would have said about mine went to Newcastle University did a business management degree because I thought that if I did a business management degree I would learn how to run a business because if I really business I'll be rich and I'll make part of income and I do this than any other and I I started my business while I was at uni some I sat down next to my business partner my future then to be business partner at my first ever seminar and now 13 years later were still together haven't got rid of each other yet and what I was seeing was this contrast between what I was experiencing in the real world of business and what I was learning and I was immediately maybe some people more typically would find the lack of directness from learning to application when they eventually get into the job market for me for me I was becoming disenchanted with education as I was going through it which was especially yeah brutal realisation and then I went on to do a master's in international marketing not because I wanted to but because I thought this is so transactional and easy that I for the sake of one more year of commitment yeah I might as well crack it out and then once that was done I was at the end of academics and I think a lot of people a lot of the listeners may think the same that you've done this you know with my urine industry and my master's degree I was in full-time education for over 17 years full-time education like that was in from at the age of 5 until the age of 23 like there we go that's that's your job so the fact and then where is now my I'm 31 years old and my passion is to learn new all the time but somehow the education system and managed to beat that out of me so I can see I can see your desire to do it and another stuff so before we get into the former and some of the awesome stories in ultra learning could you run us through some of the other projects that you did like your portrait your portrait drawing and stuff like that oh sure yeah yeah so so I've done a couple other objects like public projects I think I like you I'm always learning things it's just I don't always try to do them up so that I'm trying to document everything and post it online so perfect for people to see that my key challenge was the first big one that I did like that I need another one a little bit after that and this kind of goes to how I got into doing this so when I was in university I spent a year studying abroad in France so it was an exchange opportunity and like a lot of people who go to another country and are gonna be there for a long time you get this idea of like oh I can learn another language and I can come back and I'll be fluent in French and you know I'll be so impressive and everything speak to a Florin exchange girls and all and so I had this idea in my head and I went to France and a funny thing happened all the people around me just spoke English all the time so all my friends spoke English including the French ones frustrating it was it was it was getting really frustrating because I had been expecting oh I'm gonna be learning French really well and I'm you know studying at home and like I've also got my other business classes and stuff to do and I'm just there like what gives you know like I try to speak to people in French and they're like I okay up but like you don't speak very well I'm gonna speak to you in English and and it was frustrating and and so it was around this time that I met a very interesting guy who I talk about in the book Benny Lewis and Benny Lewis well I should just preface this was saying that like like most people who are in this situation where you go and you think you're doing something is that I thought to myself well maybe I just don't have enough time like maybe actually learning another language you know what made me think I could do it in a year maybe it would take like 5-10 years and and I just didn't have enough time and I met this guy Benny Lewis who does it in three months now I mean I'm not saying he's fluent after three months that's sort of his kind of goal but it's more an aspiration than saying he ducked achieved it every time but the thing that struck me was just how radically different his approach was because for me I'm going there and being like oh I hope that they accept me speaking French he's just like diving right into conversations he's speaking from the very first day he's getting tons of practice in and achieving quite a bit in a three-month period of time so seeing that contrast was one of the main motivators for me to do the MIT challenge was just this kind of it was a little bit of that what what is it the matrix you know taking whatever the pill moment is aware you're like oh this is yeah this is like different from oh maybe I don't have to do this the way that everyone else is doing it and and I of course I applied it to computer science there but obviously that example stuck in my mind I was thinking about you know language learning and about oh man if I had just done it that way from the start maybe things would have been different and so around that time I had a roommate and he was planning on going to a masters and you want to do some traveling so we started getting to talking and I was telling him about this and I was like you know what what if we went to try to learn languages and he was a little skeptical he's like wow I don't know about that like that sounds kind of hard this kind of thing but I think I persuaded him and we ended up doing this project that I called the year without English where it was basically we would go to four different countries Spain Brazil China and South Korea with the idea that we wouldn't speak English in those countries I mean we weren't perfect in every country particular in Asia but that was the motivation that you land day one we speak only in that language to each other everyone we meet we speak in that language we're not like oh I don't know whether I'm ready yet to speak Spanish it was day one going with that Lenoir funny thing yeah and the funny thing was is that although when I described this to other people because I've seen the reaction when I described this project other people's like oh my god I never do that the funny thing was it was way easier than my time in France so the kind of irony is is that the staying at home being in that bubble of English figures not being an immersion and really trying to learn French was harder than just you know ripping the band-aid off going straight to immersion from day one doing that process so we did that project which you know even my friend who was really skeptical in the beginning he can speak those languages too and he we went through and did those four countries and I've done some other projects since like you mentioned the drawing the portraits and I did every one recently learning quantum mechanics and I've done some others for cognitive science and things like that but it's always for me just trying to what's the assumption that everyone has about how you have to do things that if you break you're able to get better results and and that's sort of what I wanted to try to cover in this in this book he's give people that kind of mindset well I mean you've definitely got some non-typical results there I think learning four languages in the space of a year what fluency did you get to with with them so I will say this defining fluency is really fraught because I find it for people especially people who are you know not fluent in a lot of languages that there's kind of two assumptions that have to do with what the one assumption is this is comes from a story where I told someone this story and they said like so do you think you could ask for like you could probably ask for directions in like a taxi and I was like well that's actually really easy like I I could yeah you I could give you that in half an hour and almost any language like there's very little to that that's not really a difficult task on the other hand there's people who think you're a hundred percent fluent like you're completely bilingual and this kind of theus lee that's not the case either the way I would like to qualify it is what we were able to do rather than some particular language exam so in the the spanish and portuguese we were able to make friends we had an active social life we were living in the language we could go to like you know restaurants do whatever we needed to do in the countries it probably would have been like spanish would have been maybe on the cusp of being able to study in it but maybe a little bit more work would have been required to get to that level of technical understanding for the asian languages they're obviously just harder there's more new vocabulary to learn they're more different so you have to spend more time learning them but in chinese i feel like we got fairly well for those of you who are have some background in this the level I reached I wrote the what's called the HSK for exam so China puts on Ford if I sort they put on language exams that are divided into six categories and so at the time I wrote and passed the level for which is considered to be kind of a an intermediate level exam but you can give you a sense of four out of six it's a little bit hard to explain if you don't know what the six levels mean but it can give you kind of a broad qualitative sense Korean we were a little bit weaker on mostly just because doing four languages in a row getting a little burnt out but I feel like even there we were able to get to a level where again like going to restaurants and talking to people and making friends and having conversations is just it's a little bit more limited you got the dictionary a little bit more often yeah I think for most people when they think about languages competence to just go day-to-day is what most people would aim for I don't think many people want to be able to write war and peace in that Korean right they're just they're just I just want to want to be able to say what's what's the best dish here what's your phone number like what was good to go for evening drinks of blah blah blah I just want to get around right that's probably the normal lay person's desire for it but what's ridiculous is I did two years of a half GCSE at Spanish and and fair didn't got a D which is so lame its school and now outside of May llamo Chris it's like what like that and and so yeah some stuff I've picked up whilst partying in Ibiza like yeah yeah like I've almost completely forgotten it so to hear that you were able to achieve impotency in four languages in a year will be a big surprise to a lot of people well so that's the thing I feel like when I before I did this so again my experience from France that I thought like even learning a language conversationally in a year I thought was very fast like I thought well you know what maybe it just can't be done and after like doing the research for this book I find that like kind of the the critique some insiders have is not that you know not that it can't be done but to the level of fluency that I'm thinking right now is just kind of like oh yeah of course you could do so there's a lot like it's actually lots of people do it so it's not even really oh you need to be some kind of genius to do this it's just do you have the right approach and that's really what I try to talk about in the book you know particularly directness this is one of the things we talk about because I think the way they teach languages in school I don't really want to fault language educators because often they're trying to get the students to do the right thing the problem is just the assumptions of how classrooms work make it very hard to break out of it if a teachers is okay with you need to practice this at home and then they don't do that I can't really fault the teacher but at the same time I can kind of fault the paradigm of going to a class and the way students think is I should do a little bit of homework on piece of paper and that should be enough whereas the immersive approach which by the way you don't need to be in the country to do that if you want to do that there are services like like I talked EECOM and live mocha or even jump on and have conversations with people around the world if you get language partners it's free and so this is something you can totally do you can even you know have a if you have a spouse or someone who's interested in learning the language too you could have a little okay at home we just speak in this language and practice with each other so is I don't want to make this idea that like well you have to go on some special full-time immersion project to do this it's just about thinking critically about how you want to acquire those skills and I mean languages there's just one example yeah so one of the things that might be going through a number of people's heads at the moment before we get into the specific strategies of all yawning itself one of the things would be well I can't dedicate 50 60 hours a week to doing computer programming I can like just drop my life and like blast blast off to Spain with my with my mate for a bit so their concern might be the amount of time dedication to that but I'm pretty certain having read the book that the time that you put towards something doesn't actually need to be that that ruthless you can still get lives in some pretty strong effects with a lower time investment so what you're saying is exactly right so I kind of define the ultra learning approach in my book as aggressive self-directed learning and I think a mistake and it's it's a common one because when you want to talk about dramatic stories those are probably going to be someone who did something in short period of time right like that's just sort of what makes for a more interesting story and that necessarily is going to lean towards people who are doing it full-time so that that is a lot of the stories that I have in the book not all of them but a lot of them and I think one mistake to draw from that is oh me being able to learn Spanish full-time is critical or me being able to you know I'd like to learn computer programming but I can't really put in more than two hours a week on it and you know so this doesn't apply to me but what I'm trying to focus people on is not so much okay what is your schedule because that's really just up to you is what are you doing when you were trying to learn and that's where I think the ultra learning of approach differs from a lot of more traditional approaches both to formal schooling and to self education is that a lot of people just the way they're approaching it so my critique is not you know yeah if you only have ten minutes to work on Spanish and eight ten minutes is enough it's just what are you doing with those ten minutes and similarly with programming or with learning Excel or with you know enhancing a career skill or what-have-you it's all about what are you doing with that time so that's what we'll talk about in the book if you get it you read through it you're worried you know what I don't have a lot of time to spend learning you'd be surprised not only how much you can do with the time you have but also how much learning you're already doing that you could make more efficient if you rethink how you're approaching it because we're all trying to learn new things in our jobs and lines yeah we are so we've danced around it for long enough we're more aggressive self-directed learning which is an ultra leisure project where do we stop so the first step is to figure out what you want to learn and I think that that sounds like a trivial step and for some people maybe you know you've really wanted to learn guitar or painting or French for a long time so you can already know what you want to learn but for a lot of people it's not that they want to learn something particular but they want to get some outcome in their life so they want to get in shape or they want to start a business or they want to get a promotion or they want to do they want to do something else and learning is how you get at it and so the starting point is to figure out well what is the skill that you actually want to learn so there's lots of different ways you can go about it I have different techniques in the book for kind of eliciting ways to figure it out one of the ways I really like is what I call the expert interview method so basically if you want to let's say improve your career a good idea is to get some idea of what skill you might want to learn so okay I'm an engineer and what what if I improve my public speaking ability and then you talk to some people that have the job you know that you want or that have already accomplished what you wanted you just sort of ask them hey what do you think about if I did this kind of project or got better at this now I do think it's okay to learn something and then realize oh that wasn't exactly what I needed that sort of part of the learning process but part of what I talked about an ultra learning is the process of thinking about why do you want to learn what you want to learn is not just an issue of well then I might learn the wrong thing but even if you even if you decide what you want learn like you want to learn French thinking about how you're gonna use that French can be really informative for how you should actually practice it because I would have a completely different set of recommendations for learning languages if your goal was to learn like ancient Greek or something to read classics like its you're not gonna be trying to have conversations with people an ancient Greeks Greek at like parties and stuff you're going to be approaching it in a different way so thinking about why you want to learn something and what's the situation you want to apply it in is so critical so that's another principle I talked about in the book directness which is essentially that hundred years of educational psychology research shows us that transferring skills from one domain to another is really hard to do and it only usually happens once we're a near a level of mastery so in a beginning standpoint it's very difficult and so the ultra learning approach and what I talk about the book is always to try to fine-tune how you're practicing it so that it more matches the situation where you want to apply it and this has a lot of profound impact because if you choose the wrong way to practice it you can spend hundreds of hours learning something and then be like wow this isn't actually very useful yeah I think a lot of people will potentially spend quite a bit of time thinking about what it is that they want to learn and I know certainly that I get stuck in that paralysis by analysis or the the one the planners dilemma as me and some of the guys have come up with in the modern wisdom group that the the terror or the understanding that compounding interest is the eighth wonder of the world is a little bit of a blessing and a curse because if you you always terrified if I take the wrong fork in the road think about all of the missing compounding interest that I'm going to lose out like you're not doing anything so choosing something yeah I know that you'll deal talked about this but an ultra learning project based on my understanding of it the skills that you learn from one will make all subsequent ones more easy the fact that there are particular Cadence's there's the strategies there's simply the art of like a massive amount of recall which is probably going to be like every also learning fraud and like progressive overload on strengthening a muscle the second time the e period is your strength training you will have greased the groove from the first one and we'll pick up some skills more easily so that's one of the things that I try to talk about in the book is that you know you could you could read this book but reading the book is just the starting point because even though I've tried my very best to try to break down the core ideas and what I've learned from doing this there's a lot you have to learn from experience and that's again kind of this directness idea in the book is that just reading about something does not necessarily make you good at it and so what I'm hoping to give people is sort of a roadmap but obviously they have to you know start driving their car along it and so for for me when I'm giving people suggestions for ultra learning projects is don't sweat too much about which ones you pick for right off the bat you pick a short one doesn't have to be crazy ambitious pick something you'd like to learn because you're gonna start to find these things like what you said you're you're talking about Cadence's and rhythms but lots of things like oh this is the difficulty with this this is the thing that you really have to pay attention to versus oh no actually I was spending a lot of time with this that's actually not a problem I don't need to worry about that not to mention there's a lot involved with the self motivation angle so a big skill you'll learn is just like you said how do you pull the trigger on projects how do you design them so that you actually can finish them you know so many people come to me and they tell me oh you know what I'd really like to do this but everything I start like I start learning guitar two weeks later I give it up I start learning French I give it up I started doing this I give it up and a big part of this process is okay let's get through one complete very like even if it's a small project so you can be like ah this is start to finish how it works and then you can just iterate and repeat so a lot of what you're learning when you do these projects is not just the approach to learning guitar or French but how do I have this lens this eye for viewing all the things in my life and how do I accomplish them and finish them and break down things that I don't know how to do right now yeah so would you potentially suggest that people aim towards one which is slightly less ambitious than trying to do a four-year degree in one year yeah that that project but I mean and that project was my first kind of public project but I think I kind of came to it after taking a lot of smaller projects as well so I wouldn't recommend doing something crazy ambitious unless you have like you look back at your track record and like well maybe I haven't done an ultra learning project but I've you know started my own company and youngness not even citizens oh yeah some people have that but if you don't feel like you have that don't feel like this concept isn't for you that's I guess the point I'm saying that you can break it down to something very small so one of the things I often recommend is you know pick a goal that you can that is really bite-sized it seems kind of contrary to the idea of ultra learning but you know I want to learn enough Spanish for my upcoming trip to Madrid so that I can you know order tapas at a restaurant is a perfectly fine you know month-long project to do on the side you know after work before your vacation that's totally fine so don't think they all have to be these big dramatic projects but when you start speaking in Spanish in Madrid maybe you'll think hey you know maybe I could bigger right exactly got you so we've chosen a project the listeners have decided what it's going to be they haven't waiting around for too long they've not obsessed over it they've got the project where are they going next so the next thing to do is to look at what is the actual mechanism you're going to use to learn it that sounds a little abstract but I think it's something that we often don't think about because when you're in a classroom the teachers like okay here's the textbook you know sit and listen to me talk for a while go to your homework and then you'll pass the exam and maybe there's a little bit of thought to like how should I study this but there isn't that much choice you've just been told what to do and that's so ingrained in our thinking that very few of us like when I talk to them about learning a language for instance and they're like well where do you go to study it like the concept of learning it on your own with just sort of like random resources seems kind of impossible to them and languages are just one example like programming or you know any other skill you could think of a lot of people are like well I need to go into some kind of formal process and for some that might be the best way of doing it but what I usually recommend is doing a little bit of research ahead of time so you can figure out okay what are all the materials that I could use for this if it's a popular skill there's likely many so it could be a book you want to use as a guide it could be a online course it could be an app it could be something that you want to use as a resource if if popular skill again programming languages are good examples there might be many resources so you might want to jot some of them down the next thing I like to look at is not thinking in terms of the material you're using but what is the actual activity of learning because a lot of people think the activity of learning is you know picking up a book and flipping through it like this but really what the activity of learning is is some kind of practice and that's true even for book learning subjects even if you're you know learning about I had a guy who was I was helping with who is learning military history and we decided no his practice activity was going to be to write like some essays or some book reviews of some of these things because he was taking these ideas and then he had to synthesize it and make it into a format so he could have a conversation with people about it and so focusing on that practice activities are really important piece because a lot of us just take the material ok I'll flip through it and I'm you know I'm not very good at this right so thinking about the practice material is very important and then once you get into the project then there's a lot more tweaks you can make and then you can start looking at ok feedback what kind of feedback am I getting how do I have to turn that little dial drills like how can I break apart this more complicated skill to get good at some of the components certain skills have like a natural pattern to them languages for instance it's very easy to get hung up on not having enough vocabulary so once you're in the process of learning it you're actually speaking with other people you may want to inject more vocabulary so you can speak better or or practice grammar if it's if it's tripping you up so there's lots of little things you can do once you get started and and the way I like to see it about it the way everyone in the book is that the nine principles of ultra learning are like these little dials that you can kind of twist so that you're kind of like oh this is a little off and as you do more than you get a better feel of it-- mmm this is why this isn't working this dial is turned to how can I turn it over to where it needs to be so that would be my advice for people who are getting started yeah you give a a proposed ratio of planning to work unlink in advance of a project and certainly we've been talking a lot recently on this podcast about the difference between strategy and execution and I know one of the problems with executing is the fact that by strategizing you don't ever need to actually meet the real world with whatever that you're trying to do and your dreams your much sooner going to forego the potential of failure in place of never starting at all that's one of the reasons also actually you have to put your money where your mouth is get off your ass and do something so yeah yeah I think why I particularly liked was the prescription for not getting bogged down in the planning period that planning is important and that revisiting the and reassessing your learning method is important but probably less important than just getting started just do whatever the project is well the way I like to see it is that the planning you're doing is a little bit like packing for a trip so you want to make sure that you got enough and your trip so that you get there and I don't know I don't have my passport or I don't have this and then the trips ruined and then you're not doing anything but at the same time you could be that person that you know brings every single thing from their house in their suitcase and they're lugging it along and and then they're not able to actually flexibly cope with things in the real world like when you're on a vacation you can buy things in that country so if you don't have sunscreen you can probably get it there or something like that so to continue that metaphor the way I like to think about it is that the longer and more ambitious your project is the more time you should spend on planning because for two reasons one is just the preparation part but the other reason is just psychologically you need to commit to it so one of the things that I found very valuable at the MIT challenge was doing this research ahead of time and so I spend about six months part time doing some research and the reason I found it very valuable is it started to get me in the mental headspace of like okay this is what its gonna be like for a year this is what I'm gonna have to do is how I'm gonna have to think about it whereas if I just said on Monday okay next Monday I'm doing this I would not have psychologically prepared enough so that when it starts and things get difficult I'm like okay no you know to continue the travel metaphor I'm going home I don't like this yeah so there is a balancing point I suggest what I call the 10% rule which is that for projects you spend about 10% of the total time you expect doing some preparation now again it really depends on what you're trying to do if you're trying to do something smaller like we were talking about some smaller projects those are probably best off just getting started with them and then changing your approach while you're doing them I've done that in projects before so I mentioned doing this portrait drawing challenge and so I had kind of a approach that I used for like the first two weeks and then I'm like alright I can get about this good but I can't get any better with this I need to find something else you know hit the brakes did some more research found okay actually there's this different method that I can use and I took a little course and learn that method like oh okay this actually works a lot better and so you might find that when you're learning as well that you're doing things in the air kind of like oh this doesn't seem to be getting me where I thought it was gonna go and now I need to readjust so I talked a lot about this sort of like balance between what I call learning and meta learning so the learning is the actual thing you're trying to do you're acquiring knowledge you're getting information about what you're trying to learn and the meta learning meta of course refers to when things are kind of about themselves so meta learning would be learning about learning and so for the meta learning is the kind of understanding how learning in this subject works so how do you learn a language how do you learn programming how do you get good at salsa dancing or public speaking or Taekwondo or whatever it is and that kind of meta approach there's sort of an oscillation between what you're doing to actually learn the skill and then what are you doing to try to understand that same process you can know inefficiencies and find things you can improve in it yeah one of the things that I think a lot of people may be thinking at home is well like I've been school for eight years or I was never a good learner I was never academic or whatever it might be obviously there are there are some people out there whose skill acquisition naturally is pretty rapid but also there's there's some commonalities between them what was the story was it this Scottish physicist lady this Scottish sine Mary Somerville yeah yeah can we hear the story about her because I love that yeah so Mary Somerville I cover her in the chapter on focus and I really loved her biography because she's not the most famous person like a lot of people perhaps haven't heard of her but she's quite an accomplished woman in terms of science I think her biggest accomplishment was a sort of a translation and expansion of Laplace's celestial mechanics which was kind of like the follow-on to newton's principia mathematica so very advanced lots of calculus lots of like advanced physics for you know this was the this was the cutting edge in the 18th century but the interesting thing about her story is that you know she grew up in kind of a poor household in Scotland and she was a woman and so in that time period you know she didn't have a choice about like you know pursuing science professionally and so she kind of had to make do with the fact that you know people would come over and be like okay I kind of visit you now drop whatever or you know there's a story I really like where she was you know she's raising children and she's talking to some collie who's like convinces her to study bought me so she spends the morning studying botany while she's breastfeeding her child and there's these kind of little tidbits of her life of just showing dedication to to learning things but at the same time and I mean it's hard to peer into this because obviously when someone super accomplished and then they're being modest there's a little bit you kind of doubt how how hottest it is or how much false modesty there is but you read her biography and there's so many examples of her doubting her own capacity and her like well like I couldn't I didn't think I would be able to ever learn a language and then she learns like six or something like that so such there's a lot of openness didn't she she said that she's like super distruction Emery yeah memory though yeah yeah she had a bad memory well that I picked her as an example for this chapter unfocused just because she she was you know in this situation where it's not conducive to focus you know like you you think about Albert Einstein or you know in the quiet patent clerk formulating his theory of relativity whereas this is a woman who you know she's got four kids he's got people coming by and she's got to take care of the house and you know do all of that kind of stuff and people aren't taking you seriously or a lot of people aren't and so you you don't really have the ability to just okay I'm dedicating myself to this so I wanted to pick her as an example for focus just because it's just sort of it to show that you know so much of what we think of as focus is a kind of choice about what to do rather than simply you know being in a log cabin somewhere isolated from the world yeah I absolutely loved that that story it's the same as the stuart mcgill podcast that i did recently where there was a guy who shattered his sacrum and his l5 that just obliterated two of his vertebrae and he was a world record squat holder and he said he's once i get pain free i want to go back and break my scott record and it's like the radiologists have seen his MRI just it it just looks like a bombs gone off in his back yeah i like look money you're gonna be looking to be walking again and then sure enough three and a bit years later he goes back breaks his squat record and I think that framing that contrast effect similar to his Somerville's story that you've just given us there or Brian Carroll the power lifter that I'm talking about now you know he it frames people's own excuses in a really harsh light of day and I think it's so it's so important for people like me as well right like I make yelling all the all the excuses in the world I interviewed we had Peter C Brown make it stick we had him on a year ago and even yeah even hearing look you can employ these F these by the way if you're listening and you're a recent subscriber you may have missed it Peter Brown is cited on the back of ultra learning actually I think it's one of the one of the guys that's helped to formulate your ideas for this and it's a fantastic episode I'll link in the show notes below if you want to go back check it out well yeah like I was listening to him say look there's a formula for you know repeated exposure is not the key repeated recall is etc etc aside from all this stuff and I'm still telling myself this story about oh yeah but you know I'm tired I've got there so this that any other and then there's Mary Somerville like baking baking baking a cake whilst breast feeding a child whilst rewriting like one of the most difficult things in all of physics whilst being like under the feet of the kind of I guess typicals route that women in the 18th 1800 supposed to take and all this sort yeah so what I'm saying is to the listeners at home your excuses are probably not as strong as hers so undertake learning project well you know what I I would take it even I would take it perhaps the softer take but I I know from talking to a lot of people that they've had bad experiences in school and they associate school with learning so when you tell them this is gonna be a big book about learning it just brings up all this drama alright so they have this like that nightmare of like oh my god I've got the exam and I'm not prepared so I'm not doing it and so one of the things I wanted to talk about this is sort of an interesting thing that I've had with the people who've read sort of some of the earlier copies is they come back to me and say hey you know what like I don't see myself as an ultra learner but when you're talking about this that and I said I was like you know what I did that for this thing that I got you know I I did that when I was learning photography or or when I was you know trying to start my business or when I was you know it could be something completely on a khadeem ik and they they're like yeah but I was doing that and so the thing I want to point out is that learning is not school school is I don't think there's anything wrong with school and I've learned a lot of subjects that you know you could study academically and I think that's great but when we think about learning school is just a really narrow aspect of so if you weren't good at that narrow aspect if you you know weren't top of your class and you feel bad about it there's so many other things that you can learn so many other things that you are learning all the time things that you're spending time trying to figure out trying to get better at trying to improve that I think understanding the process of learning is really understanding the process of this kind of mental self-improvement so anything that you want to understand better get better at is going to be through learning and so this is really what I wanted to try to write the book about is not to you know shame people for not using the right studying approaches or not to make you feel bad because you don't see yourself as an ultra learner but to point out you know that thing that you did in the past that went well this is why it worked and this is how you can do those kind of things in the future so that's what I've been trying to do with this book is and I'm hoping that when people read it they're gonna see parallels in their own life and just know how to apply that more consistently for the future what other strategies have we got we've got directness which is a similarity between the thing you are learning in the outcome that you want to achieve or the way that you are practicing and the outcome that you want to achieve on the other side we've got we've talked about drilling which as an analogy I was explaining to someone the other day is the equivalent in CrossFit of look each of the lifts individually are working on your pull-up technique and then your your direct learning would be doing a Matt con doing a workout what's on the whiteboard so you drill down little right the specific elements I tell you one of the in fact two of the two of my most favorite models which you've come out of this we're big fans of mental models on the podcast and one of them was the rate-determining step rate-limiting step by step and the other one is judgment of learning yes yes okay so I loved both of those let's talk about them how could you happy to jump in so the the rate-limiting step is actually a concept from chemical reactions so a lot of times when you have a chemical reaction you have like some molecule here in some molecule there and they like banging into each other and and they like separate off and you get a different molecule and often there's more than one step so for a lot of chemical reactions you're putting a big stuff in a big vat of liquid and and there's one thing that leads to another thing that reacts to another thing that reacts to another thing etc etc and one of the concepts from chemistry which I think is really interesting for this process is that sometimes one of those steps is a bottleneck so it happens way slower or with more energy or more difficulty than than the other steps and that will be the step that governs the rate of the reaction so you can speed up that step everything else gets faster so I'm kind of creating an analogy this to learning because sometimes and this doesn't have to be thinking about things in terms of happen sequentially but just you can imagine that there are components to the thing that you're doing and one of those will be the thing that governs your overall performance so the analogy I used again from language learning was it very often vocabulary is the rate limiting step because vocabulary is that if you could just improve your vocabulary assuming again not this is not always the case but if you're practicing and you're using directness and you're you're speaking a lot if you could just triple your vocabulary you would be much more fluent than you are right now that's just obviously true so then you can start to say okay how do I get that vocabulary another example could be you know if you're talking about mathematics for instance it could be that understanding having a really good intuition of one of the core concepts is the thing slow you're down or it could be something technical it could be that you're not doing your algebra correctly you sometimes make mistakes and that's why you're slowing it down so rate limiting step is one of the things that I talk about when you should be keeping an eye for for drills is like is there one thing that like really if you can get better at this one thing you'll get better at all the things and then the other thing I like to look at is what I call cognitive components so when you are trying to practice a complete skill like think about driving your car this is a good example so when you're driving a car you're doing a lot of things you have to have your foot on the accelerator pedal you have to move it over to brake occasionally you have to be steering you have to have your signals you have to check your mirrors you have to make sure cars aren't coming under it make sure pedestrians aren't running across the road you have to make sure that you know all the little bells and whistles in your car or like not you know saying the engines on fire and this kind of thing and when you start that feels completely overwhelming like there's so much stuff happening and so what what you can do when you're learning is you can often like try to focus on one of these elements at a time now obviously as a car if you just focus on the accelerator pedal you're gonna crash really easily but for a lot of other skills that's not necessary you can just focus on doing that so if you're drawing a picture you could focus on just putting the lines in the right place rather than worrying about the shading at the same time or if you are working on public speaking you could just focus on you know how is my pacing am I going too fast or too slow and the reason for doing it this way and there's different ways of splicing apart skills is it very often the limit to improvement is that when there's so many things going on it's hard to get better at any one aspect because your mental resources are kind of spread over everything and so what they sort of deliberate practice approach or the approach that I talked about in that chapter is slicing things down so that you can focus on these sort of smaller elements and that there's different ways for doing that for different skills yeah moving under the judgment of learning things so this is right it's actually not a massive section in the book it's only a couple of paragraphs but like me they really sideswiped me honestly Scott I'm telling you man like I was reading it and I was like that's that's me right there there's an asymmetry between how you feel learning is going and how learning is actually going and it's reflected in the data as well isn't it at least in the short term and I was just that so my company we run club nights right we have about 400 students that work for us 18 to 21 or at university doing some doing difficult degrees some of them doing less difficult degree but all of them learning right and there's our office gets used like a private library typical to a lot of universities any uni students they're listening join a promotions company that has the nicest and most convenient office that you can become an event manager they'll give you a key and then you can just go in and learn in there instead of going into the library that's I think the life hack them decided to use yes but yeah I look at their learning strategies and some of the guys are using a review method and some of the guys are using a recall method would you be able to just take us through judgment of learning for sure so I'll speak about is specifically this judgment of learning findings so this is research done by Jeffrey karpicke and Janelle Blount I believe Janelle Blount was I think it's karpicke is the lead researcher on that and he has done a lot of work on the testing effect and what he calls retrieval and this is a similar to what you were talking about with the make it stick that essentially this was a very interesting study I just thought this result was fascinating but they took streets and they broke them up into different groups and assign them different studying techniques so this students didn't choose what studying technique they were using they were assigned it and so I believe the four groups were one of them was they reviewed the material once so meaning like reading it over the other one they reviewed it multiple times and then there was one that was concept mapping and then the final one was what's called free recall where basically have a blank piece of paper and you try to write down everything you remember so it's not like it's not like a test or a prompt it's just okay what do you remember from that and interestingly they didn't ask the student at which one did they think could do better out of these four but what they did ask the students is how well do you think you learned the information so that was the question to them so they've given them a technique and they said how well deal information and what was interesting is that the students who did review repeated review thought that they learned the material the best and the students who did free recall thought that they learned the material the worst and when you actually test them it does the complete opposite that those who do the free recall do above and beyond the best compared to repeated review and so the reason the sort of explanation for this proposed by karpicke and Blunt and other researchers is what you were calling this judgment of learning is that we don't actually have the ability to peer into our mind and see that there's information stored there instead we use a certain proxy signal to try to guess how well we've learned something and one of these is considered the fluency of the information so when you're doing repeated review you're seeing it a lot and that processing feels easier and easier so each time you review it you're like oh yeah I remember this I remember this I remember this and that's convincing you that you understand it very well now the free-recall people when you put a blank piece of paper and you try to recall like I'll give this as an exercise okay after this podcast is done or you can just pause it right now try to recall what we talked about so far in this podcast you'll be surprised be like oh wow actually it's really hard to remember a lot of things to Spain and then so maybe they can jot down a few things but the thing is is that's really hard to do and so when you're doing this really hard thing you're like oh wow I actually don't know this at all and so your judgment of how much you learned is much lower however the act of trying to recall it makes your memories much better so there's a bit of a paradox here that when you think that you learn something really well because you can process it really fluently is actually when you don't have it memorized and when you are doing free recall and you're like oh my god this is so difficult that's when you're really learning it and this I think was just sort of a very small slice but really um really typical of the whole ultra learning idea is that something that feels nice and easy and comfortable is I feel a lot less effective than the thing where oh wow this is frustrating and difficult and hard and and challenging for me but you're actually gonna learn much faster so there's this kind of paradox of learning there it's the same especially going back to the CrossFit analogy the the strong guys in the gym will continue to work on strengths because it makes them feel good they have a degree of fluency in that I feel oh I'm progressing that well yes you are but you're deficient in this particular area and if you were to work on that instead your overall game improve and the same thing goes for this I think I'm right in saying that it's actually matched in someone's ability to take tests immediately after review I think in the super super short term review is more effective like very like ours or maybe even less than ours so I don't know I don't know the exact timeframe that they did this study there's been different studies on this but generally when you show someone something so the basic idea is really easy to understand if I were to like imagine that there's no delay imagine that I like put a word on the screen let's say the word is dog and then it just like what was that word well you're gonna know it for sure right yeah um however if if I say you know like you read dog like you know 10 minutes ago and then I said what was that word maybe you would have forgotten it by now if I just asked you to recall it because if you didn't recall it successfully you don't know what the word is so there is a sense in which review can be a little better in the short term and it's just that we don't really I guess what I would put it this way that our intuitions about how we processed information don't actually say a lot about how well we're going to remember information in the future if you all have experienced this when you go to a party and someone tells you their name and you're like oh yeah I know that name two seconds later and so it's it's when this person tells you your name it's like oh yeah Steve oh that makes sense I won't forget that and then five seconds later you forget and the reason why is because when he said Steve you're like yeah that's a normal name that people have yeah and we're processing it fluently so you're like oh okay I know that but then when it's two minutes later and you have to be like oh this guy what's his name yeah you forget it and it's not just I'm not here to criticize people are doing this is human nature and so I do this the same way I also forget people's names at parties the thing is is that you need to understand this when you're approaching learning projects when you're learning things like languages or medicine or things which require a lot of memorization or things that have a lot of memory because if you are not approaching it right you're gonna put in a lot of effort that's just gonna go to waste because it's not actually gonna be stored for recall later introduce yourself apart ease as something very memory like Xavi eh oh yeah yeah like some some really exotic name that's never got me remember it's a VA from last night but yes I'm moving on moving on to where we up to now like retrieval I guess we're kind of in and around there and I guess a lot of people when they think about learning they think about memorization right they think about like school remembering formulas for chemistry remembering like algebraic equations or you know even in our business degrees like who was it that came up with the scientific management method and stuff and you're talking about any on board but you know retrieval and especially for me I'm particularly interested in this retrieval is learning something or even comprehending it but they're not being able to recall it is essentially the same as not knowing it like if you can't ever recall it like you erect so so oh yeah I was just gonna say on this point about retrieval the perfect sort of illustration of why the ability to retrieve things matters and indeed not to say the ability to memorize things better matters but the ability to have knowledge inside your head so I'll put it that way is that in the last 20-30 years essentially all human knowledge has been put on the internet that you can search with the right type into Google in about five to ten seconds right but the average person is not thirty thousand times as smart as they were in like the 60s and so that itself should be an illustration that just merely having the ability to look something up when you need it is not enough to be smart yeah totally that's such an interesting comment on what most people would consider as knowledge right there's a recent I did listen it although I'm about to say neva rava cameras on Joe Rogan recently and it is by far one of my favorite podcasts of 2019 and in that he talks about people having a simulacrum of intelligence which is just recall and he's like nobody needs that anymore nobody needs to have just recall he's like we have the internet for that what we need is understanding comprehension the ability to link multiple different concepts together if you haven't already I'll link you once we once we finish the podcast is an absolute GameChanger but yeah looking at specific tactics for recall what were the ones which you yourself found to be most useful or what works best with your particular style of ultra learning so just just before I jump into that one of the reasons I just want to bring this up cuz I thought it was interesting that retrieval is one of the principles I had and originally when I was writing this book I kind of thought well retrieval is just one of the other ideas so retrieval is just feedback that you know you just get feedback and therefore you know if you try to retrieve things because you're getting feedback feedback is good or retrieval is just directness that when you do a test if you practice doing something like the test it's similar to the test and that's why you learn it and the thing that I found really funny is that retrieval is actually a separate thing there is a separate idea there that is important that is not related to those ideas directly at least and that was why I wanted to include it and so the first thing I want to point out is that a lot of the research on retrieval seems to be done with the kind of memorization tasks that you might loathe but just because they're easier to study in an experimental setting so lists of words or matching questions there has been retrieval stuff on more complicated things but again the more complicated it gets the harder it is to study there might be more confounding effects so psychologists tend to prefer simple memorization things however it's my belief and I'm stretching a little bit beyond what the research says exactly is that retrieval is really a process of all skills so even though a lot of the research is about like how do you recall a foreign language word when you hear it spoken it's really a process of everything that you do and what it is when you think of retrieval it is I'm in a particular situation where there is some kind of cue from the environment so that could be I'm speaking to someone in another language and I need to communicate something or it could be you know I'm writing a program and I need to solve this particular problem or it could be you know I'm dancing and I want to be able to do this kind of turn or something like this and there's a cue in the environment and you need to be able to access the sort of pattern that's stored in your head for dealing with that situation appropriately and the challenge is that often that chap that pattern will be stored somewhere but it's not linked to the cue in your mind so this sort of path between where the trigger point is and where the you is is not linked together and so you have the knowledge but you can't use it and so I talked about in the book a lot of different tactics you can use for at Revo but the easiest one is just to practice doing things don't have the book open put the book closed and try to recall it you know when I was reading that when I was doing the research for this book I had a bunch of journal articles I've got a big binder stack on top of my bookshelf now journal articles and once I was sort of discovering this I was like you know what I should do I should just start writing down what did I learn from this journal article on a blank piece of paper at the end of this I got all these blank pieces of paper and sitting in between so this is really easy to do this free recall stuff and it really helps you solidify your knowledge for more specific topics there's more specific strategies so flashcards are good thing to do if you have to learn paired associations so like an English word and a Spanish word or like some medical term and what it means or or things like that you can do really well with flashcards so there's lots of different strategies I think the thing I want to leave your listeners with right now is just the idea that if you want to be able to perform in a particular situation you have to actually practice retrieving not just reviewing yes absolutely again to sing the songs have Peter C Brown to make it stick episode it'll be in the show notes below if you if you feel like you have a particular difficulty with retrieval Peters approach for that and spaced repetition were big fans of Anki on here and others similar spaced repetition flashcard programs one of the co-hosts is a doctor who's just complete his medical degree so he's like he's snowy he's got hankie just coming out of his like eyebrows got ankidroid so yeah we've gone we've gone through retrieval what some of the other principles of Ultra learning that you think people should be aware of well so there's one that I cover in the book which I call intuition which is really the idea that you're talking about when you were talking about this in evolved podcast which is that people don't need to just have memorized facts these days because if you are like what's the capital of Hungary I can go up look that up and what a pest comes up right so there is a sense in which a lot of the brute memorization of factual details is a little overrated nowadays I'm not gonna go so far as to say that memorization or remembering things is all as bad and this is why is that when I was doing the research on intuition one of the things that was kind of surprising to me is that the question of what does it mean to understand something is actually a lot more complicated than it first appears there is a really interesting experiment which is called the illusion of explanatory depth I have it in the book but basically the idea is do you know how a bicycle works and most people would say oh yeah I know how a bicycle works and then I said can you draw one and the funny thing is they've done this is a study and they show people trying to draw a bicycle and I don't mean like some you know photorealistic rendering I'm just talking about like do you know where the chains connect and like what are the pedals go and stuff and you see some of these drawings and it's like completely non-functional bicycles with the chain and like the pedals are over here and like it's rigid there's no like handles so it's in the book you can look at some of the the diagrams that are that are from that actual study in there but the thing is really important is that why do people get that wrong why do people think oh I could draw a bicycle and then they can and the reason why is that when we're talking about factual knowledge again this is this judgment of learning it's really easy to self assess yourself so you can say what's the capital of friends and if Paris doesn't immediately come into your mind or something else comes in your mind well it's not London right then you just don't know it and you can say no I don't know whereas if I say do you understand how a bicycle works there there's a lot of nuance to that like you could understand how to ride a bicycle you could understand that bicycles are things people ride on streets but maybe you couldn't draw a bicycle maybe you couldn't repair a bicycle maybe you couldn't you know explain how the gear mechanism works on a bicycle so the idea here is that understandings are quite a slippery concept and when I was doing this research and looking in particular this story for that chapter was for Richard Fineman is that a lot of what his sort of magical intuition is is really actually a lot of stored patterns in math and physics not just memorize things but things that he was actively using and working with all the time and so his ability to just have a dis in it seems to come from nowhere is really built off this really large foundation of tons of patterns and so why I'm a little bit skeptical of the kind of novel like we don't need to memorize things advice is that true understanding often comes from a place of having a lot of things remembered now not necessarily rote memorize the way that we do it in school but if you don't have things remembered if you don't have things that you can recall for instance if you don't have that knowledge in your head if it's just out on Google then you won't have that intuition and so there's a lot of ideas that this one of the scientific ideas is called chunking which is basically saying that this kind of stored patterns is a big part of the reason why you see expert performers or people who can do you seemingly miraculous mental feats it's because they have all these patterns so that the classic studies were done on chess grandmasters but you know it really applies to lots of different subjects couldn't agree more about the comment on Navarre he is he says it in the podcast with with Joe yeah he went to the library in New York as he was growing up as a child every night because his mother wanted him to be safe before she came home from working on an evening time and he says himself he's like I read everything there was in the library from every magazine every textbook every reference book anything I get my hands on and you've struck on something that's very interesting there that there is a foundation of knowledge that navall is standing on which is so much higher than everybody else's he's able to connect these concepts together because the base knowledge that he has all of these different nebulous like out on a limb Baban spoke style concepts that he's got going on he's got massive array at his disposal that he can choose to use in like that but if someone doesn't have the foundation that they can build off they don't have any mental models that they can use for these these sort of situations you're gonna start bouncing off a particular ceiling right so the thing I would add to that in that discussion is just that the way I see sort of the comment what I would kind of amend if I can you know and then someone else's words what I would say that I would think differently is that I agree it's not so that memorizing is not important but that how you memorize or how you learn things is what's important and the way that we often do that to pass exams in school is just not related to how you actually apply it so this again goes to the recall it goes to the directness idea because it's not enough to have the knowledge in your head it's not enough to have it on some list somewhere that you only used for one exam 20 years ago but you have to have it in the context where it applies so I have this at this story that I've been telling which I just it's really trivial but I just think it's so good for illustrating that I run a little business and we we sell products and we were supposed to be charging sales tax on top so if it's a dollar it was opposed to be like 14 cents more but we weren't doing that or software didn't do that so at the end of the year we had to calculate the amount of sales tax we should have paid them but we didn't you know this kind of thing and so one of my associates he was like working on it he was like oh well you know if the sales tax is 14% and it was like $100 then it's just $14 and I was like no it actually isn't that because you know you have to think that it's whatever the purchase price was plus 14% has to equal $1 so you got to get your algebra out and be like 1 plus X and this and do the division and this kind of thing and the funny thing was is that like as soon as you frame the problem it's like 1 plus X and the dollar bro oh he knows how to solve it immediately right this is like grade 8 math the problem is that in this situation he didn't recognize that that's what you have to do then that's actually what the problem is asking you and even if you'd heard a word problem in a math class where they were asking this he might have gotten the answer correct it's just an issue of the knowledge is there but it wasn't accessible in that particular moment so I think that a lot of what we're doing with learning is not even so much getting the knowledge inside of your head or the skills inside your head but creating the Association so that when you were in the right situation it arises as opposed to being sterile on some memorize list somewhere moving forward through a life of prolonged learning as well I'm going to guess that that will compound I mean the must be some people that you spoke to for the book who like Fineman I recently had Mario Livio on talking about his new book curious and in that he'd like fineman's his he's got a bit of a problem yeah he got bit of a bromance going on with fighting me too everyone does yeah exactly so how how do you explain or did you come across in fact any people who seemingly had this kind of polymath like unbelievable capacity any people that are still around now that were that would oh well there's there's tons of people there's tons of people there just like extraordinarily brilliant and just have lots of different knowledge and talks and a lot of these people aren't even that famous I mean I just off the top of my head right now a person who's Bobby follow Marshall Revolution Tyler Cao and who I even mentioned a little bit in the book is just someone who like always impresses me with just like the sheer breadth of ideas that he covers and there are people like phiman who are kind of more specialized hauling ass that they have like you know real deep understanding of let's say physics and that allows them to do incredible things within physics you have people like Terence Tao in the beginning of the book who's just phenomenally brilliant with mathematics and I think when you deal with people who just know so much over a long period of time it's really difficult to kind of tease apart methods or what are the different contributions for their success largely just because you know if they did have a natural talent that compounding interest has just been accelerating for so many years that it's really hard to see well how much was it that they did the right things and how much of it was that they're just really smarter or what what have you but I do think that for the average person listening here if you start investing in learning skills now and you start investing in just always having a learning project doesn't have to be full-time it just can be something ongoing in your life you're always learning new things you're always picking up new stuff you'd be surprised how fast it accumulates you know if you just get the habit of you know reading a book a month you're already starting to compound and get it generate new ideas so the the real shame is I think the people who you know say to themselves well I'm never gonna learn that so I'm never gonna start and then they go 10 20 years they're outside of school they're only doing the same thing every time and their knowledge and skills just starts to contract and then they're not able to do that whereas if you keep staying fresh you keep staying in the kind of learning mindset yeah by the time you were in your you know later years you can have accumulated quite a bit of knowledge and you'll be like a smaller version of Eric Weinstein who is as far as I'm concerned essentially a different species to most of us that guy that guys Bret and understanding of across multiple fields is insane I heard him talk with the same degree of like resolution about maths physics jazz music and cephalopods in the space of like 10 minutes on a podcast the end day but yes sort of to round off the discussion that we've had today I think that's a really nice point to make Scott that what you're talking about is the fact that there is a there is a degradation over time of some of the learning skills that you've used and the longer that you kind of wait on that the more difficult it's going to get but the converse has to be true as well that once you've done right I'm going to Spain in two months time let's spend four hours a week you know an hour a night four nights a week I'm gonna commit I'm going to make sure that my learning process has been well planned that its direct I'm going to drill down into my specific skills I'm also then going to do practice which is as close to the situation as I can get I'll make sure I'm working on my retrieval I'm using my intuition and blah blah blah all these sort of things once you've done that first one the dominoes kind of I'm gonna guess will continue to tumble I also imagine as well this is speaking as someone who hasn't done it but I have to say has been quite romanticized by the concept of doing an ultra learning project I imagine that it must become an addiction for some of the people that you've spent your time with that they do one and then you find oh hang on a second he did a problems making project now he's decided that he's going to become a photographer oh my god he's picked up the cell phone like well you know it's funny I this is has sort of been kind of my inspiration for writing this book is that it's really hard to communicate some experiences and so I'm gonna try to do my best but one of the reasons I was motivated to write this it's not just you know obviously I think learning is important and I think that you know people will benefit from this book even if they want to do something small in their life or they want to just a little bit better skills for their work or their hobby or for their life but I do feel like if you can go through this process if you can do some sort of project and set this challenge and do something that felt impossible for you and make it happen and have that achievement in your life the feeling that I had after doing the MIT challenge wasn't just oh I've learned a lot of computer science and no studying is hard it was this feeling of well if you could if I could do this what else could I do and that's big reason I took on a lot of these other projects is that it's you're absolutely right it really does become addictive and not just in the intense can devote a lot of time to this but there is a real kind of steamrolling of self efficacy of feeling like you know what actually I figured this out so I could do something else and so I like to think of it that you know these people who you hear about let's say like Elon Musk or Arnold Schwarzenegger who just have like massive accomplishments in many fields a lot of people see these folks and that they say themselves well this person must just be brilliant and super and talented and you know what they probably are but the other way I see it is that this is someone who's been on like a non-stop confidence like positive feedback loop for like the last thirty years that they've just been accumulating more and more experiences and so I'm hoping that for some people who want to tackle an ambitious project or they want to learn something hard or they want to try to get good at something that they care about they can use this book and start that cycle going and get that confidence so that they can learn all sorts of other things in their life that's awesome Scott I hope that we've inspired some people to begin an ultra learning project if helped you if you are deciding to undertake one I would love to hear from you and I'll be able to pass it on to Scott so as always drop me a message or tweet me actress will X on all social media or make sure that a link to ultra learning will be in the show notes below don't forget that if you follow the show link down there you will be supporting the podcast by buying the book through that at no extra cost to yourself Scott where can the listeners find you online so obviously I would like it if they can read the book if they want to check out my website they can go to scott h young calm and i have been raiding for over a decade so there's lots of articles about learning habits goal-setting and self-improvement amazing I will also make sure that I linked to Scott's Twitter and if you've got any questions you want to get to in direct and feel free to hassle him on there of course but yeah if if you're gonna want to take one I'd love to hear if this has inspired you to maybe restart or continue your learning or add an extra skill in my one for this summer is to try and slackline so I'm gonna try and get good at slacklining the I'm definitely starting at the if I can become even remotely competent at it it will be a universe away from where I'm at now but see well best of luck to you I hope that the ideas of ultra learning will help you there yeah me too I'm worried I might not be salvageable on that thing but we'll see I'll be giving it I'll be giving it a crack Scott thank you so much for your time man yeah thanks for thanks for having me it's been great chatting about this stuff [Music]