Scott H Young | Ultralearning

Scott H Young is a blogger, programmer and author. Learning new things is hard. Learning new things quickly is even harder. So how did Scott manage to complete the entire MIT Computer Science Degree of 4 years in just 12 months? Today we're going to learn about learning as Scott shares with us the approaches and real world examples of how people master hard things quickly from his new book Ultralearning. Extra Stuff: Follow Scott on Twitter - https://twitter.com/ScottHYoung Buy Scott's Book Ultralearning - https://amzn.to/31kiNKi Check out everything I recommend from books to products and help support the podcast at no extra cost to you by shopping through this link - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - I want to hear from you!! Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  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 a day, 10 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 and you read through it and you're worried, you know what, I don't have a lot of time to spend learning.

• 0:41Speaker 00

  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 lives.

• 0:57Chris Williamson?

  I am joined by none other than Scott H. Young. Scott, welcome to the show.

• 1:01Speaker 00

  Oh, it's great to be here. Great to be talking to you.

• 1:04Chris Williamson?

  I'm really excited to go through what we are discussing today, which is ultra learning. None other than, oh.

• 1:13Speaker 00

  We both have copies.

• 1:14Chris Williamson?

  Have you read it? It's really good.

• 1:17Chris Williamson?

  So 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?

• 1:23Speaker 00

  Sure. So I've been writing about learning and psychology and self-improvement from 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 the 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 that's going to make them feel confident and enjoy their lives.

• 2:06Chris Williamson?

  You did something, speaking of crazy things, you did something pretty crazy a few years ago, didn't you?

• 2:13Speaker 00

  Well, which which thing are you talking about?

• 2:15Chris Williamson?

  The MIT. We'll start with the MIT thing.

• 2:17Speaker 00

  Alright, alright, sure, sure. So, um, this was, this is more than a few years ago now, actually.

• 2:24Chris Williamson?

  Eight years, is it?

• 2:25Speaker 00

  Thinking back, yeah, eight years ago, I believe, uh, I did the MIT challenge. So this was a, a project that I did after I graduated from university. And so I'll give a little bit of a backstory, just so they, 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 studied business. And I'd 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 a 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 corp. And so I graduated with this idea that, oh, I shouldn't have picked this.

• 3:10Speaker 00

  I should have majored 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, and do more studying and do more of that experience. And so, um, the big thing that I had been considering as an alternative when I was going into school was computer science, because computer science, you 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, particularly as an entrepreneur online, which is where I was wanting to head with my career. And so, uh, 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.

• 3:55Speaker 00

  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. But if you just Google MIT OpenCourseWare, 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 the ones that I paid money for. So I, I, I took one of these classes and I thought, this is great. And I was, did a little tinkering 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 a degree. So this this sort of piqued my curiosity because I was looking around, it didn't seem like anyone had tried to do this before.

• 4:37Speaker 00

  I don't know, maybe there's someone who did it and it has escaped my attention, but I couldn't, I couldn't find anyone who tried to do this before. I thought, why has no one tried to do this before? And so I dug through and I spent about six months researching and putting it together. And obviously, doing it this way where you're just doing it online, self-study with courses, 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.

• 5:18Speaker 00

  I could watch videos and you could watch them faster, speed through the parts where they're rambling, you know, slow down, re-watch 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 I set this goal, this MIT challenge, to do this project over one year, rather than the the sort of typical four. 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's 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.

• 6:02Chris Williamson?

  I don't think that you can class doing a four-year MIT computer programming course in one year as a little project.

• 6:11Speaker 00

  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 I thought his story was fascinating was Eric Brown, 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 with that a little bit when I was high school into video games and 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, never mind compose original music in multiple instruments. You need to be able to do art, you need to be able to do programming, you need to be like game 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.

• 6:56Speaker 00

  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 I know it's a little bit of a relative comparison.

• 7:12Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you're totally right. It's big fish, little pond, little fish, big pond. As soon as you start to delve into 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?

• 7:27Speaker 00

  So definitely when I started, there was a, well, obviously I'd picked a fairly ambitious deadline for myself. I was a little anxious 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 as 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 what I wanted to do. But if you do, 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, I think maybe the first nine or 10, I did it in

• 8:11Speaker 00

  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 switched to doing it so that I would be doing like three to five classes in parallel over like a couple of 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 don't want to, I don't want to be like

• 8:54Speaker 00

  saying that, oh, 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, et cetera, et cetera. 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.

• 9:23Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, there's a reframing going on here, isn't there? It definitely, as I read through Ultra Learning,

• 9:30Chris Williamson?

  it just strikes such a question about the current education system. And I think we can probably, we can probably get on to 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 Wisdom Project and the team will be thinking that your experience with your degree sounds very familiar and it is the bait and 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 run a business, I'll be rich and I'll make passive income and I do this, that and the other.

• 10:07Chris Williamson?

  And I, I started my business while I was at uni. So 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, we're 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 is like especially brutal

• 10:51Chris Williamson?

  realisation. And then I went on to do a masters 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, 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 masters degree, I was in full time education for over 17 years.

• 11:23Chris Williamson?

  Full-time education, like that was it from like the age of five until the age of 23. Like, there we go. That's, that's your, that's your job. So the fact, and, and then whereas now my, I'm 31 years old and my passion is to learn new shit all the time, but somehow the education system had managed to beat that out of me. So I can see, I can see your desire to do it and, and other stuff. So before we get into the format and some of the awesome stories in Ultra Learning, could you run us through some of the other projects that you did, like your portraits, your portrait drawing and stuff like that?

• 11:56Speaker 00

  Oh, sure. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, so I've done a couple of other projects, like public projects. I think 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, and post it online. So for, for people to see that the MIT challenge was the first big one that I did like that. I did 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 going to 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.

• 12:36Chris Williamson?

  Speak to all the foreign exchange girls and all that sort of stuff. Yeah.

• 12:40Speaker 00

  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. And it was getting really frustrating. It was, it was, it was getting really frustrating because I had been expecting, oh, I'm going to 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 sort of like, well, what gives, you know, like I try to speak to people in French and they're like, oh, yeah, yeah, okay. But like, you don't speak very well. I'm going to 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.

• 13:20Speaker 00

  Um, well, I should just preface this with saying that like, like most people who are in this situation where you 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 what made me think I could do it in a year? Maybe it would take like five, 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 achieves 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 and achieving quite a bit in a three-month period of time.

• 14:05Speaker 00

  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, you know. Uh, what what is it? The Matrix, you know, taking whatever the pill moment is where you're just 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 he wanted to do some travel. And so we started getting to talking and I was telling him about this.

• 14:46Speaker 00

  I was like, you know what? What if we went to try to learn languages? And he was a little skeptical. He's like, well, I don't know about that. Like, that sounds kind of hard and this kind of thing. But I 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, particularly 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. Learn or die. Funny thing. Yeah, and the funny thing was is that although when I describe this to other people,

• 15:29Speaker 00

  because I've I've seen the reaction when I describe this project to other people, they're 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 speakers, not being in immersion and really trying to learn French was harder than just, you know, ripping the bandit off, going straight to immersion from day one and 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 one recently in learning quantum mechanics. And I've done some others for cognitive science and things like that.

• 16:10Speaker 00

  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 is give people that kind of mindset.

• 16:23Chris Williamson?

  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?

• 16:32Speaker 00

  So I will say this, defining fluency is really fraught, because I find that for people, especially people who are, you know, not fluent in a lot of languages, that there's kind of two assumptions that I have to deal with. The one assumption is, this 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 could I could give you that in half an hour in 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 100% fluent, like you're completely bilingual and this kind of thing. And obviously, 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.

• 17:15Speaker 00

  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, um, uh, the level I reached, I wrote the what's called the HSK four exam. So China puts on four different,

• 18:00Speaker 00

  or sorry, they put on um, language exams that are divided into six categories. And so at the time I wrote and passed the uh, level four, which is considered to be kind of a an intermediate level exam, but it 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 a broad qualitative sense. Korean, we were a little bit weaker on mostly just because doing four languages in a row or getting a little burnt out, but I feel like um, 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 gotta pull up the dictionary a little bit more often.

• 18:40Chris Williamson?

  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 like Korean.

• 18:52Speaker 00

  Right.

• 18:52Chris Williamson?

  They're just, they're just, they just wanna wanna be able to say, what's, what's the best dish here? What's your phone number? Like what, where's good to go for evening drinks or blah, blah, blah. Like they just wanna get around, right? That's probably the, the normal layperson's desire for it. Um, but what's ridiculous is I did uh, two years of a half GCSE at Spanish and, and failed. I didn't fuck, got, got a D, which is so lame. Um, it's school and now like outside of Mayam or Chris, it's like what, like that and, and some, some stuff I've picked up whilst partying in Ibiza. Like, like I've almost completely forgotten it. So to hear that you were able to achieve

• 19:34Chris Williamson?

  competency in four languages in a year will be a, a big surprise to a lot of people.

• 19:40Speaker 00

  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 critiques 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, it's just kind of like, oh yeah, of course you could do that. So there's a lot like it's, 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, um, you know, particularly directness. This is one of the things we talk about because I think

• 20:24Speaker 00

  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 teacher says, okay, well, 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, um, um, like italki.com and LiveMocha, where you can 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.

• 21:09Speaker 00

  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 it's, 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 are just one example.

• 21:29Chris Williamson?

  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 ultra learning itself, one of the things would be, well, I can't dedicate fifty, sixty hours a week or forty hours a week to doing computer programming. I can't 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, um, 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 elicited some pretty strong effects with a lower time investment.

• 22:13Speaker 00

  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 a 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.

• 22:55Speaker 00

  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 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 my critique is not, you know, yeah, if you only have 10 minutes to work on Spanish a day, 10 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 and you read through it and you're worried, you know what? I don't have a lot of time to spend learning.

• 23:38Speaker 00

  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.

• 23:50Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, we are. So we've danced around it for long enough. We're going to talk aggressive self-directed learning, which is an ultra learning project. Where do we start?

• 24:01Speaker 00

  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 kind of 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,

• 24:44Speaker 00

  a good idea is to get some idea of what skill you might want to learn. So, okay, I'm an engineer, and what if I improve my public speaking ability? And then you talk to some people that have the job that you want, or that have already accomplished what you want, and 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's sort of part of the learning process. But part of what I talk about in 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, um, even if you decide what you want to learn, like you want to learn French, thinking about how you're going to use that French can be really informative for how you should actually practice it.

• 25:28Speaker 00

  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, it's, you're not going to be trying to have conversations with people in ancient Greeks, Greek at like parties and stuff. Um, 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, um, is so critical. So that's another principle I talk about in the book, uh, directness, which is essentially that, uh, 100 years of educational psychology research shows us that transferring skills from one domain to another is really hard to do. Uh, and it only usually happens once we're near a level of mastery. So at a beginning standpoint, it's very difficult. And so the ultra-learning approach and what I talk about in the book

• 26:13Speaker 00

  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, oh, this isn't actually very useful.

• 26:29Chris Williamson?

  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 planner's dilemma, as me and some of the guys have come up with in the Modern Wisdom Group, that 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're 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 on. And you're like, hang on a second, man, like, you're not doing anything. So choosing something.

• 27:09Chris Williamson?

  And also, I know that you'll you'll talk 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 cadences, there's the strategies, there's simply the art of like, a massive amount of recall, which is probably going to be like, every ultra learning project. And like progressive overload on strengthening a muscle, the second time that you periodize your strength training, you will have greased the groove from the first one and will pick up some skills more easily.

• 27:45Speaker 00

  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. Pick a short one, doesn't have to be crazy ambitious, pick something you'd like to learn, because you're going to start to find these things, like what you said, you're talking about cadences

• 28:29Speaker 00

  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 start 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.

• 29:12Speaker 00

  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 and break down things that I don't know how to do right now?

• 29:29Chris Williamson?

  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?

• 29:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, that that project, but I mean, 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 done this and this.

• 29:59Chris Williamson?

  Consistent.

• 30:01Speaker 00

  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 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 that 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 be fluent in this, maybe I could be bigger. Right? Exactly.

• 30:42Chris Williamson?

  Got you. So we've chosen our project. The listeners have decided what it's going to be. They haven't waited around for too long. They've not obsessed over it. They've got their project. Where are they going next?

• 30:52Speaker 00

  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 teacher's like, okay, here's the textbook, you know, sit and listen to me talk for a while. Go do 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, where did 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.

• 31:34Speaker 00

  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, 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, an online course. It could be an app. It could be something that you want to use as a resource. If it's a, if popular skill, again, programming languages are good examples. There might be many resources. 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.

• 32:18Speaker 00

  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 was learning military history. And we decided, you know, his practice activity was going to be to write like some essays or some book reviews of some of these things. Cause 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 activity is a really important piece because a lot of us just take the material. Okay, I'll flip through it and then be like, oh, 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. Then you can start looking at, okay, feedback. What kind of feedback am I getting? How do I have to turn that little dial?

• 33:03Speaker 00

  Um, 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. Uh, 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, the way I wrote it 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 of them, you get a better feel of like, hmm, 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, for people who are getting started.

• 33:48Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you give a, a proposed ratio of planning to work. I think 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, I know one of the problems with executing is the fact that, uh, by strategizing, you don't ever need to actually meet the real world with whatever it is that you're trying to do. And your dreams, you're much sooner going to forego the potential of failure in place of never starting at all. Um, 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, I think what I, what I particularly liked was

• 34:33Chris Williamson?

  the, um, 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 doing whatever the project is.

• 34:50Speaker 00

  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 wanna make sure that you got enough in your trip so you get there and you're like, oh no, I don't have my passport or I don't have this and then the trip's 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.

• 35:34Speaker 00

  So one of the things that I found very valuable about the MIT challenge was doing this research ahead of time. And so I spent 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 it's gonna be like for a year, this is what I'm gonna have to do, this 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, I, you know, to continue the travel metaphor, I'm going home, I don't like this.

• 36:03Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 36:04Speaker 00

  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, um, doing this portrait drawing challenge. And so I had kind of this approach that I used for like the first two weeks and then I'm like, all right, I can get about this good, but I can't get any better with this. Uh, 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, I took a little course and learned that method and like, oh, okay, this actually works a lot better.

• 36:49Speaker 00

  And so you might find that when you're learning as well, that you're doing things and then you're kind of like, oh, this doesn't seem to be getting me where I thought it was gonna go and now I need to read, readjust. So I talk 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, 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?

• 37:30Speaker 00

  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 note inefficiencies and find things you can improve in it.

• 37:43Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. One of the things that I think a lot of people may be thinking at home is, well, like I haven't been to school for ages. 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 the Scottish physicist lady? This Scottish scientist?

• 38:17Speaker 00

  Mary Somerville?

• 38:18Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah. Can we, can we hear the story about her? Cause I love that.

• 38:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, so Mary Somerville, I, 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. Um, 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 stuff, lots of calculus, lots of like advanced physics for, um, 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.

• 39:02Speaker 00

  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've come to visit you now. Drop whatever you're doing and come spend some time with me. Or, or, you know, there's a story I really like where she was, uh, you know, she's raising children and she's talking to some colleague who was like, convinces her to study botany. So she spends the morning studying botany while she's breastfeeding her child. And then 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's super accomplished and then they're being modest, there's a little bit, you kind of doubt how modest it is or how much false modesty there is.

• 39:47Speaker 00

  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

• 39:57Chris Williamson?

  She said she had bad focus, didn't she? She said that she was like super distracted.

• 40:01Speaker 00

  Bad memory, yeah.

• 40:02Chris Williamson?

  Bad memory, that was it.

• 40:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. She had a bad memory. Well, I picked her as an example for this chapter on focus 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 and 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 to show that, you know, so much of what we think of as focus

• 40:45Speaker 00

  is a kind of choice about what to do rather than simply, you know, being in a log cabin somewhere, isolated from the world.

• 40:51Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I, 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, like just obliterated two of his vertebrae. And he was a world record squat holder and he said, once I get pain free, I want to go back and break my squat record. And there's like, the radiologists have seen his MRI, just it, it just looks like a bomb's gone off in his back. And they're like, look, man, you're going to be lucky 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 Mr. Somerville's story that you've just given us there or

• 41:34Chris Williamson?

  Brian Carroll, the power lifter that I'm talking about now. It, 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. Me as well, right? Like I make all the, all the excuses in the world. I, I interviewed, uh, we had Peter C. Brown make it stick. We had him on a year ago. And even, even hearing, look, you can employ these, these, um, 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, um, is one of the, one of the guys that's helped to, uh, formulate your ideas for this. And it's a fantastic episode. I'll link it in the show notes below. If you want to go back and check it out.

• 42:16Chris Williamson?

  But, um, yeah, like I was listening to him say, look, there's a formula for, you know, repeated exposure is not the key. Repeated, uh, recall is et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, all this stuff. And I'm still telling myself this story about, oh yeah, but you know, like I'm tired or I've got this or this, that and the other. And then there's Mary Somerville, like, uh, baking, baking, baking a cake whilst breastfeeding 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, uh, I guess typicals, uh, route that women in the 18th, 1800s supposed to take and all this sort of stuff. So what I'm saying is to the listeners at home, your excuses are probably not as strong as hers. So undertake your learning project.

• 43:01Speaker 00

  Well, you know what? I, 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 going to be a big book about learning, it just brings up all this trauma. All right. So they have that, like that nightmare of like, oh my God, I've got the exam and I'm not prepared. It's why I'm not doing it. And so one of the things I want to talk about, and this is sort of an interesting thing that I, 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, when you're talking about this, that. And 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.

• 43:43Speaker 00

  Or when I was, you know, it could be something completely unacademic 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 it. 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

• 44:28Speaker 00

  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 a, 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 kinds of things in the future. So, that's what I've been trying to do with this book, is, and I'm, I'm hoping that when people read it, they're going to see parallels in their own life, and just know how to apply that more consistently for the future.

• 44:57Chris Williamson?

  What other strategies have we got? We've got directness, which is a similarity between the thing you are learning and 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 looking at each of the lifts individually, you're working on your pull-up technique, and then your, um, your direct learning would be doing a Metcon, doing a workout, doing what, what, what's on the whiteboard. So you drill down, look at the specific elements. Um, I'd say one of the, in fact, two of the, two of my most favorite models, which have come out of this, we're big fans of mental

• 45:39Chris Williamson?

  models on the podcast, and one of them was the, uh, rate determining step?

• 45:47Speaker 00

  Rate limiting step, yes, yeah.

• 45:48Chris Williamson?

  Rate limiting step, and the other one is judgment of learning.

• 45:51Speaker 00

  Yes, yes, okay, so.

• 45:53Chris Williamson?

  I loved both of those. Let's talk about them.

• 45:56Speaker 00

  Happy, 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 and some molecule there, and they like bang 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, et cetera, et cetera. 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 difficultly than than the other steps. And that will be the step that governs the rate of the reaction. So if you can speed up that step, everything else gets faster.

• 46:41Speaker 00

  So I'm kind of creating analogy this to learning because sometimes, and this doesn't have to be thinking about things in terms of happening 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 that 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 that's just obviously true. So then you can start to say, okay, how do I get that vocabulary?

• 47:23Speaker 00

  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 slowing you 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. It's 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.

• 48:08Speaker 00

  You have to check your mirrors. You have to make sure cars aren't coming at you. Make sure pedestrians aren't running across the road. You have to make sure that, you know, all the little bells and whistles on your car are like not, you know, saying the engine's 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 you 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 going to 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?

• 48:53Speaker 00

  And the reason for doing it this way, and there's different ways of splicing apart skills, is that 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 the sort of deliberate practice approach or the approach that I talk 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.

• 49:18Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, moving on to the judgment of learning things. So this is, it's actually not a massive section in the book. It's only a couple of paragraphs. But like, fuck me, it 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 like, so my company, we run club nights, right? We have about 400 students that work for us, 18 to 21, they're at university, doing some doing difficult degrees, some of them doing less difficult degrees, but all of them learning, right?

• 49:59Chris Williamson?

  And there's, our office gets used like a, um, a private library, typical to a lot of universities. Any uni students that are 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 that a lot of our, a lot of our event managers have decided to use.

• 50:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 50:24Chris Williamson?

  But yeah, I look at their learning strategies and some of the guys are, 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?

• 50:33Speaker 00

  Sure. So I'll speak about specifically this judgment of learning finding. So this is research done by Jeffrey Karpicki and Janelle Blunt. I believe Janelle Blunt was, I think it's, Karpicki 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 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 students and they broke them up into different groups and assigned them different studying techniques. So 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.

• 51:17Speaker 00

  And then there was one that was concept mapping. And then the final one was what's called free recall, where basically you have a blank piece of paper and you just 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 students, which one do 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 do you learn the 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.

• 51:58Speaker 00

  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 Karpicki 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.

• 52:41Speaker 00

  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.

• 52:55Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, there was the thing, there was the directness and then he went to Spain and then.

• 53:01Speaker 00

  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've 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've learned 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,

• 53:34Speaker 00

  really typical of the whole ultra learning idea is that something that feels nice and easy and comfortable is actually a lot less effective than the thing where, oh, wow, this is frustrating and difficult and hard and, um, and challenging for me, but you're actually going to learn much faster. So there's this kind of paradox of learning there.

• 53:54Chris Williamson?

  It's the same, especially going back to the CrossFit analogy. The, the strong guys in the gym will continue to work on strength because it, it makes them feel good. They have a degree of fluency in that and they feel, oh, I'm progressing. Now, well, yes, you are, but you're deficient in this particular area. And if you were to work on that instead, your overall game would 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, uh, take tests immediately after review. I think in the super, super short term, review is more effective, like. Very like hours or maybe even less than hours.

• 54:34Speaker 00

  So um 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 the basic idea is really easy to understand. Um 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.

• 54:50Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 54:50Speaker 00

  And then it's just like, what was that word? Well, you're gonna know it for sure, right?

• 54:54Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 54:54Speaker 00

  Um however, if if I say, you know, like you read dog like, you know, ten 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 um it's just that we don't really, I guess what I would put it this way. That our intuitions about how we process information don't actually say a lot about how well we're going to remember information in the future. Uh you 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. And then two seconds later, you're like, oh, my God, what was this person's name?

• 55:35Speaker 00

  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.

• 55:48Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 55:48Speaker 00

  And we're processing it fluently. So you're like, oh, OK, I know that. But then when it's two minutes later and you have to be like, oh, this guy, what's his name?

• 55:56Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 55:56Speaker 00

  You forget it. And it's not just, I'm not here to criticize people for doing this. 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 um 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 um stored for recall later.

• 56:23Chris Williamson?

  Introduce yourself at parties as something very memorable, like Xavier or like, yeah, like some, some really exotic name that's never got you. No one's going to be like, that's a normal thing. I'm like, fuck me. Remember Xavier from last night. Um, but yeah, so moving on, moving on to where are we up to now? Like retrieval, I guess we're kind of in and around there. And I guess for 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, um, 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 Henry Ford from like a hundred years ago and stuff like that. Um, but you know,

• 57:08Chris Williamson?

  retrieval and especially for me, I'm particularly interested in this. Retrieval is learning something or even comprehending it, but then not being able to recall it is essentially the same as not knowing it. Like if you can't ever recall it, like you, you're wrecked. So.

• 57:24Speaker 00

  So, uh, yeah, I was just going to say on this point about retrieval, uh, 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 10 seconds, right? But the average person is not 30,000 times as smart as they were in like the sixties. 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.

• 58:03Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Yeah, totally. That's such an interesting, uh, comment on what most people would consider as knowledge, right? There's a recent, uh, the listeners will know what I'm about to say. Naval Ravikant was on Joe Rogan recently and 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. Uh, if you haven't already, I'll link you once we, once we've finished the podcast, it is an absolute game changer. But yeah, looking at specific tactics for recall, what were the ones which you yourself

• 58:48Chris Williamson?

  found to be most useful or what works best with your particular style of ultra learning?

• 58:53Speaker 00

  So just before I jump into that, one of the reasons I just want to bring this up because 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

• 59:36Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:00:19Speaker 00

  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 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 cue is, is not linked together. And so, you have the knowledge, but you can't use it. And so I talk about in the book, a lot of different tactics you can use for retrieval,

• 1:01:02Speaker 00

  but the easiest one is just to practice retrieving things. So when you are doing things, don't have the book open, put the book closed and try to recall it. Um, 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 big binders stacked 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 them. So I've got all these blank pieces of paper inserted 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,

• 1:01:46Speaker 00

  or things like that, you can do really well with flashcards. Um, 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.

• 1:02:01Chris Williamson?

  Yes, absolutely. Again, to sing the songs of Peter C. Brown, the Make It Stick episode, it'll be in the show notes below. If you, if you feel like you have a, a particular difficulty with retrieval, Peter's approach for that and spaced repetition, we're big,

• 1:02:17Chris Williamson?

  fans of Anki on here and other similar spaced repetition flashcard programs. Uh, one of the co-hosts is a doctor who's just completed his medical degree. So he's like, he's, he's got Anki just coming out of his like eyebrows. He's got Anki growing on the back of his head. Um, so yeah, we've gone, we've gone through retrieval. What are some of the other principles of ultra learning that you think people should be aware of?

• 1:02:43Speaker 00

  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 Naval podcast, which is that people don't need to just have memorized facts these days, because if you were like, what's the capital of Hungary? I can go up, look that up and Budapest comes up, right? So there is a sense in which a lot of the brute memorization of factual details is a little overrated nowadays.

• 1:03:09Speaker 00

  I'm not gonna go so far as to say that memorization or remembering things is all is 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 as a study and they show people trying to draw a bicycle. And I don't mean like some, you know,

• 1:03:49Speaker 00

  photorealistic rendering. I'm just talking about like, do you know where the chains connect and like where the pedals go and stuff? And you see some of these drawings and it's like completely non-functional bicycles, but the chain connects both the tires 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 diagrams 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't? 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 France? And if Paris doesn't immediately come into your mind or something else comes to your mind, well, it's not London, right?

• 1:04:32Speaker 00

  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'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, the story for that chapter was for Richard Feynman. Is that a lot of what his sort of magical intuition is, is really actually a lot of stored patterns in math and physics.

• 1:05:13Speaker 00

  Not just memorize things, but things that he was actively using and working with all the time. And so his Ability to just have this insight that 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 Naval, 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 wrote memorized 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

• 1:05:56Speaker 00

  patterns is a big part of the reason why you see expert performers or people who can do, you know, 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.

• 1:06:11Chris Williamson?

  Couldn't agree more about the comment on Naval. He is, he says it in the podcast with Joe, that 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 it himself, he's like, I read everything that was in the library from every magazine, every textbook, every like reference book, anything I could get my hands on. And you've struck on something that's very interesting there, that there is a foundation of knowledge that Naval 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

• 1:06:56Chris Williamson?

  nebulous, like out on a limb, pub and 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 going to start bouncing off a particular ceiling.

• 1:07:21Speaker 00

  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, amend someone else's words, what I would say that I would think differently is that I agree, it's not so much 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, I have 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.

• 1:08:06Speaker 00

  I, I run a little business and we, we sell products and we were supposed to be charging sales tax on top, so if it was a dollar, it was supposed to be like 14 cents more, but we weren't doing that, our 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 and he was like, "Oh, well, you know, if the sales tax is 14% and it was like a hundred dollars, then it's just 14 dollars." 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 gotta 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 as like,

• 1:08:49Speaker 00

  "1 plus x" and the algebra, "Oh, he knows how to solve it immediately," right? This is like grade eight math. The problem is that in this situation, he didn't recognize that that's what you have to do, that 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 memorized list somewhere.

• 1:09:29Chris Williamson?

  Moving forward through a life of prolonged learning as well, I'm going to guess that that will compound. I mean, there must be some people that you spoke to for the book who, like Feynman, I recently had Mario Livio on talking about his new book Curious. And in that, he like Feynman's his, he's got a bit of a bromance. You've got a bit of a bromance going on with Feynman. 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?

• 1:10:10Speaker 00

  Oh, well, there's, there's tons of people. There's tons of people that are just like extraordinarily brilliant and just have lots of different knowledge on topics. 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 whose blog I follow, Marshall Revolution, Tyler Cowen, 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 Feynman, who are kind of more specialized polymaths, that they have like, you know, real deep understanding of, let's say, physics, and that allows them to do incredible things. But in physics, you have people like Terrence Tallow 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,

• 1:10:51Speaker 00

  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 smart, or, 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

• 1:11:32Speaker 00

  compound and generate new ideas. So the, the real shame is, I think, the people who, you know, They themselves, well, I'm never going to learn that. So I'm never going to 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. Uh, yeah, by the time you're in your, um, you know, later years, you can have accumulated quite a bit of knowledge.

• 1:12:02Chris Williamson?

  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. The, that guy, that guy's breadth and, uh, understanding of across multiple fields is insane. I heard him talk with the same degree of, uh, uh, like resolution about maths, physics, jazz music and cephalopods in the space of like 10 minutes on a podcast the other day. Um, but yeah, sort of to, 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.

• 1:12:43Chris Williamson?

  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 going to commit. I'm going to make sure that my learning process has been well planned, that it's 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 going to guess, will continue to tumble.

• 1:13:23Chris Williamson?

  I also imagine as well, this is speaking as someone who hasn't done it, but I have to say has been quite, uh, romanticized by the, 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 public speaking project. Now he's decided that he's going to become a, a photographer. Oh my God, he's picked up the saxophone like.

• 1:13:50Speaker 00

  Well, you know, it's funny, I um, this is 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 is 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 wanted to just learn 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

• 1:14:32Speaker 00

  a lot of computer science and oh, studying is hard. It was this feeling of, wow, if you could, if I could do this, what else could I do? And that's a big reason I took on a lot of these other projects is that you're absolutely right, it really does become addictive. And not just in the intense, okay, I'm gonna 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 they say to themselves, well, this person must just be brilliant and super and talented. And you know what, they probably are. But the

• 1:15:14Speaker 00

  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 30 years, that they've just been accumulating more and more experiences. And so I'm hoping that for some people who want to tackle 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.

• 1:15:39Chris Williamson?

  That's awesome. Scott, I hope that we've inspired some people to begin an Ultra Learning project. 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 at ChrisWillX on all social media. I'll 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?

• 1:16:13Speaker 00

  So obviously, I would like it if they can read the book. If they want to check out my website, they can go to scotthyoung.com. And I have been writing for over a decade, so there's lots of articles about learning habits, goal setting and self-improvement.

• 1:16:27Chris Williamson?

  Amazing. I will also make sure that I link to Scott's Twitter. And if you've got any questions you want to get to in direct, then feel free to hassle him on there. Of course. But yeah, if you're going to undertake 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 going to try and get good at slacklining.

• 1:16:55Chris Williamson?

  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 we'll see.

• 1:17:04Speaker 00

  Well, best of luck to you. I hope that the ideas of Ultra Learning will help you there.

• 1:17:07Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, me too, man. I'm worried that I might not be salvageable on that thing, but I'll be giving it a crack. Scott, thank you so much for your time, man.

• 1:17:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, thanks for having me. It's been great chatting about this stuff.