so today my talk is titled five lessons about life and ultra learning so I've spent the better part of the last decade writing and thinking about the question of how to learn better and I'd like to share some of what I've uncovered with you so that you can learn things better in your own life but before I jump into the lessons I have two quick points I want to make so the first point is as soon as I start talking about learning some of you are gonna automatically think school and that's unfortunate not because school isn't important or it doesn't matter but because it's just such a narrow part of what I'm talking about when I talk about learning so to understand that think about the last time you got a new job you had to learn new tasks roles how to work with clients and colleagues or when you went on a trip somewhere you had to learn new people places cultures cuisines maybe even a language and if you do decide to start a new business you're gonna be learning constantly or your business isn't gonna be around for very long so the truth is is that learning impacts our lives all the time even if you're never gonna set foot in a classroom again and so I think it makes sense to try to understand that process even just a little bit so you can learn things better and get better at the things that matter to you so the second little point is that I titled this talk five lessons about life and ultra learning which raises an obvious question what the heck is ultra learning so it just so happens that I wrote a book about it I spent the last few years researching and writing this book it's gonna be coming out in August for those of you who are interested after this talk and beyond the book though ultra learning has had a profound impact on my life and I think it could have a profound impact on your life as well it's had a profound impact on many of the people I met in the course of researching this book people like Eric Barone who was working minimum wage as a theater usher and went to becoming a millionaire after spending a lot of time painstakingly developing the skills of game design and releasing a best-selling game or people like New Zeeland librarian Dianna faizon Feld who when she was reaching near the end of her career decided instead of becoming obsolete she wanted to become and so she learned statistical programming and data visualization to take her librarian skills and upgrade them to the Internet age or people like nigel richards who won the french world Scrabble championship even though he can't speak french and so i think i'd like to give you an impressionistic journey of what I mean by ultra learning and why I think it matters to you over the course of this talk but I think just to make sure that we're all on the same page it would help to have a definition so ultra learning is a strategy for learning that is both self-directed and aggressive so what do I mean by that well self directed in this context is kind of the opposite of what we typically think of when we think of Education where you show up to a classroom and a teacher tells you what to learn how to do it and often you don't even really know why self-directed learning in contrast is when you are in charge you've decide the project you decide how you're gonna learn what you're gonna learn and most importantly you know why you're learning because you're learning something that you care about aggressive learning in this context merely means it's focused on what gets results even if that can be a little bit scary or frustrating at first so with this definition in mind I'd like to get to my first lesson the hard way is the easy way and understand that I'd like to tell two stories about learning two different languages at two different points in time French and Spanish so the first story of learning French happened to me about ten years ago I was in university and I had the opportunity to study abroad for a year in France on exchange so I was super excited this is gonna be my first chance to live in another country I was gonna be able to eat croissants and baguette every day and drink French wines but on top of that I had a secret goal because I wanted to come back speaking French I thought that would be so cool to spend a year abroad in another country and come back and be able to speak the language I wanted to partly on francais now flash forward for months and things don't seem to be going that well I'm near the bottom of my french class I think I even got a D on my final French exam and everyone around me speaks to me in English including the French ones and so suddenly it started to feel like a year just wouldn't be enough and so maybe the problem was just that I had too high expectations I mean most people spend years learning a language before they're having conversations in it so maybe that was my problem that 12 months just wasn't enough or maybe the problem was me I mean I was always more of a math and science student in school and so you know maybe I just don't have the gene for learning languages or the ear for picking it up so as I was complaining about this state of affairs to a friend back home he introduced me to someone who would forever change how I thought about life and learning now some of you may even recognize this person because he is spoken on this WDS stage before his name is Benny Lewis so this has become somewhat of a famous point for Benny that he does these fluent in 3 months projects for those of you haven't heard of him where he goes to new countries and tries to learn as much of a language in a short period of time but this was 10 years ago and he had just started his blog so I was extremely lucky that my friend had found out about him and had been able to introduce him to me and like most people who you see someone do something so much faster and seemingly effortlessly than you're doing it the first thing I thought when I heard about Benny's challenges was that's there's no way you can learn a language that fast I've been in France for four months and my French is garbage so how can someone try to learn a language and even try to attempt something like fluency in as little as three months but after that first reaction I decided you know what I'm gonna try to keep an open mind maybe Benny understands something about learning languages that I don't so an email and a train ride later and Benny and I were meeting face-to-face and the thing that I learned from our conversation wasn't the Benny had some magic trick for learning languages some secret shortcut that allowed him to learn it so much faster than everyone else but that his entire philosophy towards learning languages was different from mine you see while I was studying at home timidly trying to prepare so that I could be ready to talk to people Benny was fearless having conversations with people even though he very clearly wasn't ready often going up and having conversations when he just learned a few phrases from a phrase book a few moments ago and so I took Benny's advice to heart and when I went back and continued studying French I do feel like I got to a reasonable level after my year spent in France but I also had this feeling that much more was possible you see if you go to another country and if you've ever had this experience before and you want to learn a language but you don't speak it now you'll experience what I call the English bubble and this is a very common experience because when you land in the country even though everyone around the country speaks it you don't and because you don't what are you going to talk to people when you first arrive well you're gonna speak to them in English right and because you speak to them in English slowly but surely you form connections and friendships that all know to talk to you in English even if they speak the language you're trying to learn and soon enough this becomes a bubble so that when you want to practice the language you actually have to work at it because everyone around you talks to you in English all the time but what if I thought you didn't make this mistake now I had already had my experience in France so there wasn't much I could do beyond just try my best to push out of it but what if you never let that bubble form in the first place what if you only spoke the language you're trying to learn from the very first moment you stepped off the plane so this brings me to my second story about learning Spanish this is now several years later and I'm living in Vancouver with my roommate he's pictured here of that jazz wall and I've been working as a writer online and my friend has been working for a few years as an architect and saved up some money and he wants to go on a gap year before going to do his masters and so because I could work online from anywhere in the world we talked about the possibility of traveling together and around this time I told him about my experience learning French both of being able to get to an okay level but also of believing much more was possible now naturally he was a bit skeptical at first I mean going to another country and only speaking a language that you don't speak right now that sounds kind of scary and frustrating and maybe it wouldn't work for him but over many conversations over several months I managed to persuade him to give it a shot and so we decided to use what I call the no English rule which mean that as soon as I got off the plane we would not speak in English to each other or to anyone we would meet except for a few emergencies and so sure enough a few months later we were landing in Valencia Spain to learn Spanish and I got to be honest with you it was difficult in the beginning it often felt like we were cavemen grunting and pointing at each other in order to communicate I felt like whole conversations were done on her phone where I would type something into Google Translate it would spit it back out at me I would say that then he would take that sentence type it into Google Translate and read what it said in English and so it was difficult but that was just the first two weeks and then something funny happened it started to get a bit easier and after a month we were socializing making friends even going on dates after three months our Spanish was better after that brief period of total immersion then my French had been after an entire year in France and so the point I want to make is not really that immersion works for learning a language I'm sure you probably already knew that before I went on the stage even if you've never learned another language before but I want to tell you something it's actually kind of counterintuitive that it wasn't just that it was more effective it was easier to because while I'd been in France everyone was used to speaking to me in ink so that meant that every time I wanted to practice it was a deliberate effort I had to force myself to try to speak in a language that I wasn't entirely comfortable with in Spanish because we had this habit from day one it meant that even when our ability was really low we still had the ability and habit to speak in this language we were just learning and so it was never an effort it just felt natural and this difference in learning style isn't just a matter of learning something a little bit faster because we didn't just go to Spain after we went to Spain and completed our three-month project we did it three more times going to Brazil to learn Portuguese China to learn Mandarin and South Korea to learn Korean and this wouldn't have been possible if we hadn't been using the right approach and so the point I'd like to leave you here isn't even really about language learning because language learning was what interested me but I care about what interests you and so what I want you to think about is think about the goals and projects you have what would you do how would you do things if doing them well were all that mattered what if you didn't get frustrated or worried about getting rejected or have fears or frustrations how would you approach things and the idea I'd like to leave you with is that the hard way might not just be more effective it might also be easier than you think so this brings me to my second lesson a little fear is very useful and for this lesson I like to tell a story that took place in between my experience in France and in Spain so I just graduated from University and I was feeling a bit of regret about what I chose to study you see I had always wanted to be an entrepreneur particularly have my own online business maybe like many of you I thought it would be so cool to be my own boss and live and work from wherever I want to in the world and so when I was going to university I wanted to pick whatever would help me achieve that goal the most so I decided to study business what else to study if you want to start a business but business and it was only after a couple years that I realized actually Business School is mostly about how you can be a good little middle manager in a large corporation and not really about how to start your own bini so I was feeling a bit of regret about this and I thought back to when I was a freshman and still deciding what I wanted to study and the other thing I was thinking about studying was computer science and now that seemed actually make a lot more sense because after all in computer science you actually learned to make things you make programs and websites and algorithms and maybe even artificial intelligence and more than that if I wanted to be an online entrepreneur everything I would do would touch computers and software so even if I never became a full-time programmer really understanding that would probably be useful but I mean do I really want to go back to school for four years I want to take out more student loans and extend my life and live in a dorm room well not really and so while I was debating about what to do about this in my head I stumbled across a class taught by MIT but posted online for free so here's an example of such a class and this was the actual lectures MIT used to teach their students along with the actual assignments and exams and even the solution keys and as I was playing around with this class I realized that actually it's a lot better than a lot of the classes that I took in school I mean it wasn't just that it was free and accessible but it was actually higher quality as well and as I went through these classes I realized that it wasn't just one class data uploaded it was many perhaps even most of the classes that for the subject I want to study had at least some materials posted online and as I was going through this class I realized that it wasn't just even that it was cheaper and more accessible but actually there were some places that you could maybe even learn a little bit faster I know that sounds a little crazy when I say it but I want you to think about it when you're attending a class in school you have to show up to the lecture at the assigned time and sit through the whole thing even the boring parts if you're watching a lecture video you can download it and watch it at a slightly faster speed and don't worry if you get confused you can always just pause it and rewind or think about assignments normally you would do the whole assignment and submit it and then wait maybe a week to get your feedback where's this way you could do each assignment one question at a time quickly learning from your mistakes and getting the material even exams the things that all students try could be a lot simpler because you could just do one whenever you were ready and if you failed it you could just try again later with an alternative exam and so the thing that got me interested in this wasn't just the class but thinking if you could learn the content of a class why not an entire degree why go back to school if you could maybe learn the same content on your own and around this time I also thought about my first introduction to this strange world of ultra learning any Luis and I thought about how he not only set these ambitious projects to learn hard things but that he also set himself tight deadlines and that he blogged about them publicly so that not only he would be accountable and could focus on the project and stick to it but also other people could see what he was doing and so this got me interested and inspired to do something I called the MIT challenge where I wanted to learn mi t--'s for your computer science curriculum by passing the final exams and doing the programming projects but instead of trying to do it over for years I wanted to try to do it in 12 months now you can see me here studying for these classes and you know what when I started to tell people about this idea I had for a project I got a pretty common response ooh that sounds really scary and frustrating and why do it that way I mean why set a deadline for yourself like that and most importantly why try to do the whole thing why not just learn a few of the classes as you're interested and I didn't really have a great answer for them then but I do now because we tend to think of fear and anxiety as always bad things I mean they certainly feel like bad things don't they but actually if you look at what's going on in your body fear is actually really close to another emotion excitement they both involve what physiologists call the activation of the sympathetic nervous system this is that thing that makes your heart race a little bit and your focus down and you're able to get to work and so yes I was a little bit scared and I did feel that feeling of fear but I mostly felt excited and because it was really exciting I worked really hard I paired for six months and when I actually started I put in lots of hours to try to reach this goal that seemed so interesting and exciting to me and after a year I was able to reach it and I finished my goal of completing all the classes you can see me here standing next to my stack of textbooks thank you and so my lesson here is again not that you have to go out into your own MIT challenge that was what excited me it doesn't have to excite you but rather to realize that fear and excitement are a lot closer than you think and that a goal that doesn't excite you also a role that doesn't scare you rather also won't excite you and if a goal doesn't excite you you won't be motivated to work hard on it now if this is where this story end and I just learned some computer science in an unorthodox way I would have been very happy that was the reason I took the project but something interesting happened because other people started to find out about it I was invited to give a TEDx talk and I was offered to give an interview at Microsoft for a job the startup wanted me to join their team even a publishing company in China offered me a book deal to write a book about studying and so the lesson I want to give here is not just that you should pursue goals that scare and excite you but also the goals that excite you will excite other people as well so this brings me to my third lesson feedback is good so ignore most of it and so this story I'd like to tell not something that happened to me but something that happened to someone I was working with in the process of researching my book his name is Tristan de montebello and so we had been friends for a long time and as he heard I was writing this book he said you know what I want to try an ultra learning project too and what I'd like to do it about is public speaking now he had done a little bit of public speaking before had done a few presentations in college but they didn't always go so well he told me one story about delivering a speech at a startup in Paris and he told a joke and nobody else laughed so he laughed to fill the awkward silence but this time he was prepared to work hard on it and work hard he did it impressed even me he was speaking multiple times a week sometimes even twice per day video recording every performance going up to the audience getting feedback seeking advice from a diverse range of people and his progress actually amazed me because it wasn't just that he got a little better at public speaking in fact in less than seven months he went from that low starting point to being a finalist for the world champion of public speaking which is a competition put on by Toastmasters every year that has over 32,000 people competing in it so there's a lot of things that I think you can learn from Tristan's project but I want to focus on feedback because Tristan clearly got a lot of feedback and that was clearly very important for his process because he was getting live speeches actually talking to people he would go off and ask for suggestions after each of his speeches were done but when I asked him about how he used this feedback he told me something interesting he said that he often ignored the suggestions people gave him about what to change about his speech and he said focused on the consistency of those suggestions so he quickly learned that if he just followed everyone's advice he would quickly get thrown in the wrong direction however he learned that when his speech wasn't very good the advice would be all over the place as his speech got better and better the advice started to get more consistent and I thought this was really interesting because it was something that jived with what I understood from the research on feedback so just a little bit of a flashback I'm starting to write this book and I decided to do some research on feedback I'm thinking feedback is really important I'm gonna look at the science and it's gonna say feedback is always useful it turns out that that's actually not the case so in a comprehensive meta-analysis done by the researchers avraham closure and angelo denis see they looked at hundreds of different studies that involve feedback and learning and they found that in actually 37 percent of cases feedback actually had a negative effect meaning that if you gave someone feedback they learned worse so what's the reason behind this well one of the reasons is that sometimes feedback isn't very helpful so you can all remember that time that a teacher a culture an employer said you know what you're no good at this you might as well just give up I mean that was back to but it probably didn't motivate you to learn very hard interestingly from this study they also found that praise also has a negative impact so even though we all like to hear how great we are it turns out this also has an effect on motivation which makes it harder to learn well and so the interesting thing here I thought was that this actually really joins with a lot of the research that our search drives with Tristan's experience when he was working on his speech that he went and got lots of feedback and the reason why is that feedback is scary and useful and because it's scary that can often be the reason why it doesn't work because we're so afraid of receiving feedback or we react to it so strongly that we get overwhelmed and it sabotages our motivation that feedback can be a downside but somewhat ironically the way to get over that is to just get more feedback so if you're afraid of feedback if you're afraid of standing on a stage like this one right now and giving a speech the best way to do that is to stand on a stage and get feedback from the audience and so getting more feedback is very useful but at the same time you need to learn to ignore the feedback that isn't helpful just the way that Tristan filtered the suggestions and focused on the signal that mattered for him to improve so this brings me to my fourth lesson the shortest path is straight ahead once again I'd like to tell a story but this story is not about me the story is about that Jaswal this is the guy who I went on the trip with learning languages now this actually took place a number of years before we went on that trip after he had graduated from architecture school and unfortunately he was graduating in the middle of the great recession and so when the economy's bad they don't want to build skyscrapers when they don't want to build skyscrapers well Architects have a hard time finding a job and this is exactly what VAT found he started by sending his resume to every single firm in the city no response when that didn't work he started showing up uninvited to architecture firms pleading to speak with whomever's in charge to give his portfolio look and give him an opportunity to practice the profession that he worked so hard on nothing and so I think a lot of people in this situation would want to blame the world around them and I mean this is a pretty easy thing to do when that looked around none of his peers that he graduated with had found a job in architecture yet so this was a pretty comforting thing to believe but that was different you see from the little snippets of feedback that he could pry from people that he talked to it these architecture firms he realized it wasn't just that there weren't that many jobs it was that they didn't see him as a valuable candidate they thought it would take months of training to get him up to a point where he could produce useful work and that just wasn't a luxury they could afford so that decided to start his own ultra learning project to get better at the skills that would allow him to find a job so his starting point was to get a job at what's called a large form print shop this is the place where they print large pieces of paper like the kind for architectural blueprints and from that he was able to study how architects drew their buildings on actual blueprints not just the big abstract ideas of design but little details - like what codes do they used to represent materials or how did they draw doors and stuff and he added to this working on the actual software used in architecture firms so you can see him here with the application Revit this is a 3d modeling software that's used in actual architecture firms and so combining these two things he built a new portfolio with a building of his own design done in the style that was actually used in architecture firms using the software that they actually practiced and this time instead of taking this portfolio and submitting it to everyone in town he submitted to just two firms and he was surprised they both offered him a job immediately and so I think there's a lot of lessons again that you could draw from this but I want to focus on one that maybe you hadn't considered you see if that had gotten so much better at his architecture skills in such a short altra learning project what the heck was he learning in school I mean he had spent I mean he had spent four years studying this in school why had that not helped him get a job and the answer actually has something to do with what psychologists know as the problem of transfer see transfers when you try to learn something in one context see a classroom and you want to apply it in another say in real life and what psychologists have known for decades is that this is actually really hard to do so some examples in one study students who took a high school level psychology class did not do better at college-level psychology classes in another study economics majors did not do better on questions of economic reasoning than non economics majors and I mean this is pretty obvious stuff that you should be able to transfer and yet it's quite difficult to do to quite one of the researchers who has studied this in depth Robert Haskell it is without a doubt an education scandal and so how can you apply this lesson to the things you're trying to learn well the first thing to do is to realize that transfer is really hard and so if you want to learn something well you should learn by doing the thing that you want to get good at so that practice the actual buildings that they were trying to design and use the software that they actually used when Tristan wanted to get good at public speaking he gave a lot of speeches when Benny Lewis wants to learn a new language to have conversations surprise surprise he has conversations with them so you can apply this and if you do you might find that the shortest path really is straight ahead and so for the last lesson I'd like to bring up a quote that has always meant a lot to me so this is by the motivational speaker Zig Ziglar where he says happiness is not pleasure happiness is victory and this quote has always meant a lot to me and I would like - with all due respect to mr. Ziegler amend it ever so slightly because my fifth lesson is happiness is not pleasure happiness is the expansion of possibility and so just the same way that when you go on a trip it's a lot easier to talk about the places you visited and the sights you saw then to talk about how those things made you feel it's a lot easier for me to talk about the outcomes of these kind of projects but winning competitions or getting new jobs or learning a new language and it's a lot harder for me to talk to you about how these projects made these people feel and that's unfortunate because in some ways the outcomes are kind of beside the point you see I was having a conversation with Tristan de montebello he's the guy who did the public speaking project while I was preparing for this talk and he told me you know what it wasn't so much that he felt great about learning public speaking but that doing this project totally made him rethink how we will approach any project he does in his life and that learning this skill he thought what other things could I learn that I thought were impossible for me before and so the point I'd like to leave you with today is that your best moments in life are not gonna be coming from when you get a reward but from when you see the possibilities for your future life expanding and so when Tristan told me this this was something that resonated with me because when I did my MIT challenge my feeling wasn't oh great I'm learning some computer science I sure hope that's useful but rather why did I ever think that I had to go to school to learn something well and if I could learn this what other things could I learn that I thought were too hard or frustrating or difficult for me before and so when you're approaching your own ambitious projects maybe even an ultra learning project I want you to think if you could do this what else could you do that you didn't think was possible before and if you do that you might ask yourself who could you become thank you [Applause]