Afford Anything - The Science of Rapid Learning, with Scott Young, author of Ultralearning

Episode Date: November 4, 2019

#224: Scott Young, author of Wall Street Journal best-selling book Ultralearning, talks about the 9 principles of Ultralearning, which can help you learn new skills, reinvent yourself, stay relevant, and adapt to whatever life throws at you. If you think you know the best way to learn something, think again. This book will challenge your assumptions. Whether you want to develop hard skills to become more valuable at your job, soft skills for your journey to self-improvement, or you want to honor your love for learning, these 9 principles will help you become more effective at developing new skills. If you enjoyed my interviews with James Clear or Cal Newport, you’ll enjoy this one. For more information, visit the show notes at https://affordanything.com/episode224  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You can afford anything, but you can't afford everything. Every choice that you make is a trade-off against something else. A yes-to-one thing is an implicit no to something else, and that doesn't just apply to your money. It applies to your time, your focus, your energy, your attention. It applies to anything in your life that's a limited resource that you need to manage. And that opens up two questions. Number one, what are your priorities? What do you value?

Number two, how do you make daily decisions that reflect those values and reflect the type life that you want to create. Now, answering these two questions is a lifetime practice, and that is what this podcast is here to explore. My name is Paula Pan. I'm the host of the Afford Anything podcast, and I am recording this intro from Quito Ecuador. I'm going to be in Ecuador for the next three and a half weeks, and I'm here to be with the financial independence community. So I'm here with a lot of podcast listeners, my blog readers, my Instagram community. I'm here with people from the afford anything community and people from the greater financial independence community to spend the next three weeks deep diving into conversations, workshops, exercises, speeches, presentations,

presentations around exactly what I just talked about, around these questions of what you value the most and how do you build a life in accordance with that? What are the next six months, five years, ten years of your life going to look like? And how do you optimize both your money and your time in such a way that you can live a life that's truly authentically yours, a life where you're doing a lot more than just punching the clock? And it is in the context of that. It's with that as the backdrop that I'm really happy to announce that the interview guest on today's show is a guy by the name of Scott Young, and he specializes in the topic of how to learn things really quickly, how to very rapidly learn new skills.

And that topic, I find to be extremely relevant to this bigger concept of living a life that you love. Because a life that you love is going to include a huge component of lifelong learning, self-directed lifelong learning. That is what Scott specializes in. Now, Scott is the author of the Wall Street Journal bestselling book, Ultra Learning, and he himself has some very impressive ultra-learning feats. For example, he finished a four-year MIT computer science curriculum in one year.

It's a four-year curriculum. He did it in a year. He also learned how to speak four languages fluently in one year, and learned how to draw portraits in 30 days. He's a writer, a programmer, a traveler, and an avid reader. And in the last decade, he's explored the question, what is the best way to learn? How do we learn how to learn? So he wrote this book, Ultra Learning, to answer that question.

And in today's episode, we chat about the nine principles of ultra learning. These nine principles can help you learn new skills, reinvent yourself, stay relevant, and adapt to whatever life throws at you. So if you think that you know the best way to learn something, this book might challenge some of your assumptions. So with that said, here is Scott Young to discuss. Ultra Learning, the art of rapidly learning new skills. Hi, Scott.

Oh, hey, how's it going? It's great. How are you doing? I'm doing well. I'm doing well. So, Scott, you wrote a book about ultra learning. What is ultra learning? Right. So ultra learning is the practice of teaching yourself hard skills. And so this, I think, is really important because often we don't have the ability to go back to school whenever we need to learn. something. And so it inevitably falls on us when we want to learn about a new subject, whether it's

personal finance, public speaking, programming. It often comes down to us in order to actually find our way to get good at this thing that we want to get good at. And so I managed to find a lot of people who have taken on these really interesting projects where they got really good at something in a fairly short period of time or using rather unconventional methods and wanted to use this as a basis point for exploring how ordinary people can get good at the things that they care about in their work and in their personal life. So this is like lifelong learning, but hyper optimized? Would that be an accurate description? Yeah. So one of the recurring features I've found, and this, we can talk about this because I know we're going to probably talk about some of the principles

underlying ultra learning is that often the thing that actually really works for learning. So the thing that will actually create, you know, memories, that will actually create skills, will actually make you good at things, is usually not the easiest thing. It's usually not the default thing that you would just do if you didn't really think about it. And so the ultra part of ultra learning really emphasizes how the people that I met who have done these incredible projects, very often were quite deliberate about choosing a path that would make them better at that skill, even if that sometimes was maybe a little bit more strenuous or maybe a little bit more frustrating or maybe a little bit more difficult at first. And I know that sounds a little bit scary when you're hearing

about it, but I think so many of us experience the opposite where we want to get good at something, but we get stuck. You know, we spend time and time and time again trying to become better public speakers, becoming better writers, becoming better at our jobs, and we just sort of stay where we are and we feel stuck. And so I think really, even though it can be a little bit challenging at first, this idea of ultra learning is also opens up a lot of possibilities because maybe you could get good it something that you really hadn't imagined was possible before. What are some examples of this? Like, what are various avenues in which people have applied ultra learning to the acquisition

of different types of skills? Yeah, so one of my favorite ones, and I was actually just talking with him just an hour before we started calling is my good friend Tristan to Montebello. And he did a very interesting project where he had very minimal public speaking experience, maybe done only a handful of speeches in his entire life, and through a very systematic approach and process over about seven months. He got good enough at public speaking to be a finalist for the world championship of public speaking, which is a competition put on by Toastmasters every year where I think it's about 32,000 people compete each year, kind of elimination style to go up to the top,

and he made it to the top 10. So that's an example of one area where it's worked. Other examples include Benny Lewis, who speaks about 10 plus languages and often goes to a new country and is able to start having conversations with people in as little as three months. He was sort of famously started these what he called fluent in three month projects where he was challenging himself to learn as much of a language in a short period of time. Or you have people like Nigel Richards who documented the book who became the French world Scrabble champion and he does not speak French. So he was just doing this simply through learning all of the words and being able to compete in the game. So I think some of these intellectual feats range from the kinds of things that maybe you'd like

to get a bit better at public speaking, or some of them are just kind of crazy, but they still form a good example to use to understand some of these principles that work at getting better at skills. And so when we talk about the principles of getting better at skills, essentially what we're doing here, even before we enter this conversation, is meta-learning. We're learning how to learn. Yes. Well, learning how to learn, I think, is very important, but particularly it's important if you're embarking on some project of your own to learn something. Because if you go to a school and you have a teacher and they're telling you exactly what to do and how to learn. That may have some inefficiencies. You may learn some things that you don't care about.

You may not understand why you're learning it. But a big advantage that the teacher has is that they already know the subject that you're learning. So that gives them kind of some sense of, well, if you wanted to start, you'd have to start here and then go here and then go there. And whereas if you just decided for yourself, okay, I want to get, I want to learn programming. I don't know how to do that. I want to make a career change and become a programmer. the big question is, well, how the heck do you do that? If you don't know programming already, it can seem very mysterious. And so meta learning is really the approach of before you start a project where you're trying

to get good at something, you spend some time doing research to figure out what is the strategy for getting good at it. This is something that can be as simple as doing some internet searches, spending an hour or two to figure out what are the popular books, what are the popular courses, popular resources, what are the methods people used? What did people say didn't work? if you talk about language learning and you look online, you'll hear lots of reviews of people saying, yep, I use Duolingo for six months and I can't speak any Spanish. Or I use this thing and I didn't

like it for reason X, Y, and Z. And so this is very valuable, but you can even go further than that. You can actually talk to people who have learned the skills and try to extract what was the process they used to get good at them. And this is often very valuable for nebulous skills, like if you wanted to get good at writing or marketing. Often you have to talk to people who are great writers and great marketers and look at sort of their trajectory in order to really figure that out. Do people who are great understand why they are great or what they did that got them to this point? Sometimes and sometimes not. So sometimes if we're talking about a skill that has a certain legibility that you can kind of say,

oh, okay, well, you took these classes and you read these books. That kind of makes sense. But sometimes people are good at things and it's not clear how they got good at them or it's not clear that they even understand themselves what they're good at and what the reason why is. However, I think one tool that you can often use is instead of just merely asking them for advice, so instead of, you know, picking your, you know, favorite entrepreneur or, you know, that person who has the career you admire and saying, well, what advice would you give to me in my position?

And then they say something about like, you know, working hard or the important of making network or some other kind of fairly generic. Yeah, some generic advice that maybe isn't going to be that helpful. what I really recommend is asking them to walk through their career path. Because often when they start saying what they actually did, rather than giving you advice, then they frame it in terms of concrete details of the steps that they actually took. So you'll learn about, you know, where did they go to school? They worked at this position for a little while.

They went and they did this project. And then it turns out that project was a stepping stone to another project, to another project that led them to get to where they are today. And so it doesn't mean that you have to necessarily copy their specific trajectory, but if you understand how their trajectory worked, you'll get a lot of insight into how success works inside their field. And indeed, if you want to look at a more, a smaller scale of maybe, you know, just when they acquired a very particular skill that you care about, you can look at what kinds of things were happening before they got good at it. Yeah, because it strikes

me as you talk about following the trajectory of a person who is great or following the trajectory of a person whom you admire, two things strike me. One is the risk of over extrapolating from a narrow case study. The other is that that seems to be more of a bio of career development than a insight into specifically how to learn a particular skill that could then be transferable. So I think the career development is to chart someone's whole trajectory. If we're going to talk about a very specific skill, then you can just laser in on that specific approach that, you know, if someone, let's say became a programmer, if you're, let's use that as an example that you want to switch careers and you want to go into programming from where you are right now. That's a kind of

classic example of if you learn how to do programming, you probably could get a job, but it often feels difficult to know how to do this. So a good thing to look at is look at people who maybe have your kind of background who got into programming and what did they do. And so you'll often identify maybe concrete things. You know, maybe they took some classes, maybe they started working on side projects. But you'll also notice details. They'll say things like, well, I started doing this kind of work and then I moved into that kind of work and then I worked on this and you can kind of get a sense of oh, this is a sort of possible progression or trajectory

for me to also approach learning this skill. So I think you can look at about it at the big picture of how someone, you know, became very successful in their life overall. But you can also laser in on quite specific steps that they might have taken to, you know, becoming an author or becoming a programmer or becoming a great public speaker. You can kind of laser in on where were the,

Where were the projects and things they were doing before that that got them to that point? So let's talk about some of the principles of ultra learning because there are a lot of people who are listening to this who some may want to acquire a new skill set that will help them in their professional career. But there are others listening to this who may want to acquire a particular skill set for their personal life. Perhaps they've always had an interest in speaking a particular foreign language or in learning how to paint or in learning how to play the piano. and they may be retiring early, now they have the time to learn this, but where do they even start? So regardless of whether it's for professional or personal purposes, what are the unifying principles that bring this all together? I like to think about these principles in terms of how the brain works and in terms of

how your brain actually adapts to things in order to learn. Because I think if there are going to be any principles of learning, there are going to be sort of descriptions, if you will, of how the brain actually functions. And it turns out that we've actually learned a lot as a society. We've learned a lot in cognitive science about how the brain works and often in ways that go against our intuitions. So one of the examples that I think is really important for learning, but is often either underappreciated or even neglected, is the idea of directness.

And so the idea of directness is very simply that when we learn things, they tend to be quite specific, not only in terms of what we learn, but also in terms of what we learn, but also in terms of the context in which we activate and use that knowledge. And the downside of this is that when you teach people things in school, they often don't apply it to real life. And there's countless studies showing that you teach someone something and you expect it to transfer, meaning to have the knowledge that you learn in one thing, go and work in another area. You expect it to transfer to this very obvious application and yet it doesn't. So one of my favorite studies of this is that they studied economics problems. So problems that involve

economic reasoning and they tested economics majors and equally high-scoring students who were not economics majors and it turns out that studying economics didn't make a big difference, which is really disappointing because the whole point of studying economics, hopefully at least, is that you can reason better about economic problems. And similarly, they had a study that showed that taking a high school psychology class did not allow you to perform better at college level psychology, which again, you imagine learning a bit about a subject would prepare you to learn more. about the subject when you get to an advanced level. Turns out in this study that it didn't matter. Another study had honors level physics students were unable to solve problems that were just

superficially different from the ones that they had studied in school. So these were the best students in physics and they couldn't transfer knowing how to solve one kind of problem to doing a different kind of problem. And this isn't super bleak. It doesn't mean that you can't learn anything that's general, but it does mean that when you start learning things, it's very important to pay attention to the kinds of practice that you're doing. And very often what we do when we're learning is we don't pay that much attention to, well, where do I actually want to use this skill? In what kinds of situations am I going to have to use this thing that I'm learning? And as a result, we don't practice in those situations. And so the knowledge becomes inert. We've learned it,

even learned it maybe really successfully, like the honors physics students, but we can't transfer to those scenarios. And so I think this particularly applies with learning languages, which is one of the examples that you brought up in that a lot of the ways that we teach languages and a lot of the ways that students popularly try to learn languages on their own are very ineffective from a transfer perspective. So I mentioned kind of duolingo earlier that I'm not a huge fan of duolingo. And one of the reasons I'm not a huge fan of it is because a lot of the ways that the app considers teaching you learning a language is that it'll give you some sentence, let's say in English or in the language you're trying to learn. Let's say it's Italian. And then it gives you a word bank below where

you use your finger to tap the words to complete the sentence. And the problem from a transfer perspective is that as an actual activity you do with your mind, this is very different from speaking a language. And as a result, a lot of the ingredients that you need to actually successfully speak a language are not going to be there. And so if you're going to want to learn to speak a language, you actually have to practice speaking a language. Doesn't that lead to a bit of a chicken and egg issue in which if you don't have a sufficient knowledge base from which to draw from, you can't suddenly began to practice. Like I couldn't fly to Vietnam today and just start speaking Vietnamese in order to practice because I lack the foundational skill to be able to practice.

So there's two things about that. One, I would say that a lot of that is even just to hold over that people's expectations that, well, I have to actually be really good at this language in order to speak it. So in the particular case of language learning, I think it's often the case that people will do a lot of academic study before they do any genuine conversation practice. And so that delay is a major factor in slowing down. So Benny Lewis, the person I mentioned who speaks 10 plus languages, he actually has a speak from day one policy where he has a conversation, a very simple conversation using Google Translate and Dictionaries and stuff. But he has that the very first day that he starts learning, which is maybe too

early for some people, but I think it shows that that assumption that it's not possible to have any kind of communication with someone until you spend months and months studying it. is probably false. But the other thing, and I think the point that you bring up, which is quite valid, is that it is very hard to try to speak to someone if you don't know anything. And you do need to have some knowledge. Otherwise, what they're saying doesn't make any sense, and you have no idea how to respond. And so a lot of what the work is, is how do you do something that is sufficiently similar to that, that when you're learning it, it will actually make progress towards your goal of being able to have natural, fluent sounding conversations. But at the same time, you're acquiring those early

skills. So in the cases of learning a language, one of the things that I really recommend doing is actually trying to have your conversation where you use Google Translate. The other person uses Google Translate as well if they need it from you. And you can try to communicate with them with simple sentences. If you don't understand something, you get them to write it down, you copy and paste, you put it into Google Translate, and you get the practice of pronouncing it. Now, this isn't the only thing that you need to do to learn language. You still need to practice with grammar and vocabulary and learn some of those basic expressions, but it means that when you learn one of those basic expressions, when you learn how to say hello or I'd like a glass of water, please, you actually

use it with someone and that person actually listens to you and you get that feedback and they're actually communicating with you. And so the opposite of this approach is you just learn hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of phrases, but you never actually use them with someone and then only find out when you're speaking to people that they don't understand you or that the way that you learned it isn't maybe the way that they say it, or even that you're not able to think of the right word in the right situation, even though you somehow are able to do it when you're using the app. Right, right. And all of those would be examples of issues of transfer in which the way in which you're learning is so highly context dependent that you can't transfer it to a different context.

Yeah, and I think just paying attention to that context. So we're talking about language learning, but obviously if we're going to be reading, let's say, a business book or you're going to reading a personal finance book, it's often the case that maybe you'll learn about some particular example or some particular situation. And it does have a connection with your real life, but you maybe don't make that connection right away. And so if you pick up that book and you say, you know what, I'm going to use this book to do X, Y, or Z in my life, it's good to have that intention and to start to make some little inroads of starting to do that while you're actually reading it. Otherwise, it may be the case that you can remember the book when someone asks you

what's in the book, but it doesn't actually translate into changes in your behavior. Right. In your book, you talk about the categories of concepts, facts, and procedures, and you articulate why each of these need to be approached in a different and intentional manner as we think about how to learn any given new skill. Can you talk about that a little? Sure. So the way that I think about this is that there are clearly different approaches that will work for learning something like law or something like languages versus, let's say, learning physics or versus, let's say, skiing. We have this intuition that you could be really good at trigonometry and have some great math studying skills and then not apply that to becoming really good at basketball.

And part of this underlies different kinds of processes that go into learning. So when I talk about procedures, I'm talking about things that you have to actually be able to do. And this is particularly prevalent with like sports and music, but it even applies to something like mathematics where when you're, you know, doing algebra, you actually have to get used to the same procedures of moving the variables around and doing different things in order to solve the problem. And I think if you are aware of what kinds of learning predominate in the thing that you're going to actually have to tackle, then you can invest in very specific tools that help with those particular challenges. So, classic example of this is if you know that the subject you're learning involves a lot of memory,

Languages involve a lot of memory, law involves a lot of memory, biology involves a lot of memory. If you're studying medicine involves a lot of memory, if you know that what you're learning involves, I have to memorize tons and tons of details in order to be successful at this, then you can invest in something like a space repetition system. So there's free software, such as Anki, which allows you to organize flashcards. And it is very good for having huge amounts of data, maybe thousands or even tens of thousands of individual facts that you will be able to keep in your memory through using. this system. Now, that system maybe is not going to work very well if you want to learn a sport or if you want to learn physics. And so I think recognizing how subjects break down into different types of knowledge, not just whether they're about physics or whether they're about biology, but how you actually

learn them and how you use them is very important in the long run for optimizing your strategies for learning it. And so part of the approach to learning a given topic is to understand the way in which you will need to learn that topic. Yeah. Yeah, what I would do, like, if I were learning a language right now and I were thinking about it, well, I would think that, okay, there are multiple, you know, not to say that everything is quite as simple as I'm breaking it down right now, but a lot of learning a language breaks down to you have to learn pronunciation, meaning you have to move your mouth to make the right

sounds, and a lot of that is a kind of procedural skill, which means you have to learn it through repetition and practice and feedback, and maybe a little bit of understanding how moving your tongue makes different sounds. You have to learn grammar, which is a little bit more on the end of you have to understand how it works. It's a little bit more conceptual than just memorizing a grammatical pattern because you have to know, okay, well, this actually has to match the gender of this thing or when I'm conjugating this, I have to make sure it matches this thing. So there's a bit of understanding there.

And also, again, you have to have some practice. And then, of course, obviously the big thing that really, I think, defines much of learning a language, is you have to learn a lot of words. You have to know how to say a lot of things in the language. And this is a memorization task that is quite extensive. And so if you see it breaking down that way, you can already start to see, okay, well, given that memorization is going to be really important, then obviously retaining it and for dealing with forgetting and these kinds of things are going to be important.

So as I talk about in the book, I talk about sort of specific strategies that work for these areas. And if you know that the thing that you're trying to learn involves a lot of a particular type of learning, whether it's memory or procedural or concept-based, then you can alter your strategies to try to deal with that particular obstacle. And so let's say that you're trying to learn something that's highly concept-based, for example. How would you alter your strategy to deal with that? Yeah. So if we're talking about, let's say, something like physics, physics is very concept-based,

although there is still equations to memorize and there's still procedures in terms of solving problems to apply, a lot of being able to solve a physics problem is be able to look at the problem and understand what's going on and understand the principles of physics and how they apply to that problem. And so one of the things that you're going to do is, well, obviously, we're going to do direct practice as we just talked about as a principle. You're going to do actual problems that are similar to the ones that you want to be able to solve. But then on top of that, you can use techniques like I have a technique that I call the Feynman technique. And basically, it is a method of trying to deepen your understanding. So if you don't really understand, let's say, what voltage is, you're learning

about physics and you know there's this V symbol everywhere and you know it has something to do with electricity but you don't understand what it is. You could write on a piece of paper at the top. You could say understanding voltage and then try to create an explanation of voltage as if you were teaching into someone else. And what I found is that when you do this, a couple things happen. The first thing is when you try to write out this explanation, simply the act of writing it helps organize your thoughts. Our minds have a very limited workspace and as a result when you put new things in, other things fall off the workspace. But when you write it down, you can organize a larger amount of thoughts and put them in some sort of order and organization without having to keep it all in

your head at the same time. So very often just writing that explanation will be like, oh, I didn't know what was so confusing about it. It makes sense now. But when that doesn't happen and you still don't understand it when you try to write about it, very often you get a much more specific question about what you don't understand about voltage that maybe you were sort of just kind of generally confused about the concept and now you're more confused about like well why is it the case that you know every part of the wire has the same voltage and then and then you can go back to the textbook or you can ask a teacher or another peer or student what would be the right explanation for this particular idea and so a lot of improving your conceptual understanding is this process

of explaining something to yourself and then isolating more specific questions that highlight the things that you don't understand. So refining the question is a big component of grasping a highly conceptual topic. Definitely. And I think one of the major challenges of learning conceptual topics is that we also don't usually get a lot of feedback on our concept. So there's a really interesting phenomenon known as the illusion of explanatory depth that I just think is really fascinating. And in this particular experiment, one of the researchers who was studying this phenomenon, asked people to draw pictures of a bicycle. And I'm not talking about artistic renderings, you know, it doesn't have to be, you know, some beautiful watercolor or

anything like that. Just can you put the tires, the chain and the pedals and the handles and everything? Can you put them in the right location when you're drawing the bicycle? Okay, I'm doing this right now, by the way. So the hilarious thing is that a lot of people cannot, and they draw completely non-functional bicycles. They'll draw things like the chain attaches to both of the wheels, which if you think about how gears work, that would mean the wheels rotate in the opposite direction so you wouldn't make any progress. Or they'll like lock the wheels together so that they won't be able to steer or various things like this. And the funny thing is, is if you ask people, do you understand bicycles? They would probably say yes. You know, they know how to ride a

bicycle. They see them every day. And so despite that familiarity, we don't really understand them. And so for the person who is able to successfully draw the bicycle, I'll do you one up. So the harder version of this problem if the bicycle one was too easy is, can you explain how a can opener works? And I think that one, I myself, I was like, how many, how many gears are there? How does the blade cut the can? That's very difficult to do. And yet, we're all very familiar and comfortable with can openers. And so the idea of improving conceptual understanding is, first of all, to expose yourself to these situations where you can probe the depth of your understanding. So you can see just how deeply you understand it. And then also so that you can get feedback

on him. And so part of doing this Feynman technique is to get feedback on where when you try to give an explanation does it start to sound like nonsense. And so a lot of people, you know, you'll read a book and you'll be like, yeah, yeah, I understood that. I understood that. And then if I could ask you, okay, well, what was the main idea in the book? And then you're like, well, it was something about this and that and it's, can be hard to do. And so this approach to testing your understanding, probing it. And then once you know what is missing, it's often easy to do it. So once you are confused at, well, actually, I don't know where the gears attached to the pedals. You can look at a picture of a bicycle and find that out. Or if you don't understand something, you can go and investigate that now that you know which

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And the three out of those nine that we've touched on are meta-learning, directness, and intuition. Can you briefly wrap those up before we move on to the next six? Sure. So meta learning was the idea that we talked about before about doing your homework, doing your research before you start, and that involves doing Google searches and also talking to other experts to figure out how to learn the thing that you care about. Directness, of course, is related to this problem of transfer, this difficulty we have in taking things we learned in one context and transferring them to a very different context, and thus the importance of doing direct practice when you learn something. And then intuition is related to this idea of building deep conceptual

understandings and not only at factors here is the illusion of explanatory depth, but also using techniques like the Feynman technique to probe those depths and really understand things better. Perfect. And the fact that we've just gone through all of that could assist with recall. Right, right. So retrieval, and it's a related term recall, you know, there's a really fascinating study. So I'll just open with this. And this was a study done by Jeffrey Carpicki and Janelle Plunt, I believe out of the University of Purdue. And what they did is, they divided, subjects into different groups and gave them different studying techniques that they were supposed to use for a text that they were going to later have a test on. And so one of the groups they got to do

repeated review, which is a very common way of studying a text, which you read it, that after you're finished reading it, you read it again, and you read it again until time's up. And then another group they got to do what they call free recall. So free recall is where you read the text, and then once it's done, you shut the book and you try to recall everything that you can from memory. And it's called free recall because you don't have any questions. So it's in contrast to what is known as Q'd recall or question raised recall where you are given a question and have to give the answer. This is just you're just trying to remember as much as you can. There's no questions.

And right after they did this test, they asked the participants, how well do you think you learn the information? Like, did you learn enough to do well on the test? And those who did repeat review gave themselves really high marks. They thought that they had really understood and mastered the material. In contrast, those who did free recall were like, oh, wow, that was really difficult. I don't remember anything from the text. I'm going to do really badly on the test. Funny thing is, you actually test them, the situation in reverse.

Those who did free recall scored much better on the test than those who did repeated review. And I think this is, so this is a fairly general principle, but the first and obvious implication of this is that the way most students study is terrible. Most students, what they do is they have the book open and they look at their notes. And maybe they copy their notes onto something else and maybe they use colored highlighters and pens, but they always have the book open and they're looking at what they're trying to study. The right way to study is to close the book and ask yourself questions about it and try to recall it without looking at it.

And only when you can't look at it, you can't recall the information to go open it up and see what you missed. And so this idea of retrieval is that if you want to be able to remember something, let's say it's on a test, maybe you're getting a big speech, maybe it's just some book that you read and you want to be able to apply it to your life without having to go to the book and opening that chapter again, then you need to practice remembering it, not practice reviewing it. And so this is a fairly deep psychological principle. So it doesn't only apply to studying, but also to public speaking. If you're going to give a speech, how do most people practice

their speeches? Well, they've got their cue cards in front of them and they just read their cue cards over and over again. This is a terrible way to memorize the speech. Put the cue cards down, face down, try to give your speech. And when it's difficult, which it is, and you get stuck, then look at your cue cards and look at what you're missing. But this act of trying to remember it is actually much more successful in actually memorizing a speech or really learning anything. How does this apply if a person wants to learn, let's say, playing the piano, playing the guitar, learning how to paint, learning how to do a handstand? How does this apply in those more physical dimensions? So I don't know whether retrieval applies as much with procedural memory.

And the simple reason is that when we're talking about retrieval, we're usually retrieving what psychologists would call semantic or explicit memory, which is not an ability of how to do something, but knowing that you have to do something. So when we're talking again about doing a handstand, then you're kind of just doing the handstand. It's not really a process of like, I have to remember to do the handstand. But at the same time, most skills that involve procedural components also have a explicit component. They also have a part of the memory that you have to recall. It uses, the same parts of semantic memory processing that you would do for remembering, let's say, a language or studying for a test. So, for instance, if you want to be able to play a song on the

piano by rote without having the sheet music in front of you, then you have to practice retrieval because that works for that memory system. Similarly, if you are doing, let's say, a complicated skill, like let's say you are working on programming, for instance, then if you want to be able to memorize the syntax, you will do better by first trying to put in the syntax and then looking up the code rather than always looking it up as soon as you do it. Otherwise, you're not going to train yourself to really remember it deep down. And so this is a, this is funny little implications because even little things like, do you remember your credit card number or do you remember your passport number when

you're traveling? These are little things that if you always open it up and look at it when you write it down, it will take you much, much longer to memorize those numbers than if you were to try to recall it, type it in. And then, okay, well, what was it in double check? That will actually lead to more durable long-term memories. That is a great tip because you need your passport number so often when you travel. And it's a huge hassle to fish through the bottom of your bag and get it out.

And I have long been frustrated by my inability to just memorize that number. Yeah, you know, where this came up is actually I was traveling with a friend and he has all of his numbers memorized. And I would always, you know, I wouldn't want to make a mistake. So I would always make sure I opened them up and double checked. and he's looking at me, we're about to land in the country, and we're filling in one of these forms, and he's like, you don't know your passport number? And I'm like, you know your passport number? And he's like, yeah, of course. Of course. I memorized it immediately. Most people when they would see this situation would say, oh, well, he must just have a fantastic memory and I don't. But having

learned what I've learned about psychology and stuff, I realize that what he's doing is he's practicing retrieval every time he was doing it. And so very quickly he was having it memorized, whereas for me, I would never actually go through that particular process. I'd always just, well, I'll just open it up and look at it. And transcribing, copying it from one location or the other, it turns out that doesn't actually make as much an impact on your memory as you would think. That absolutely makes sense. I can recall the first three digits of my passport number

and then I recall two other digits that are in there somewhere, but I'm not quite sure where. So yes, the issue is that I'm doing exactly what you're doing. I'm opening it up and then transcribing it. and I do that frequently, but I never try to retrieve it from memory. And I mean, it's okay for something like a passport number to maybe just look it up. But when we're talking about, let's say, you've read a book, and there was a lot of interesting ideas in the book that maybe you could improve your life,

and you don't actually remember them when they come up in your life where you need to apply them. Well, then now's actually now a worrying situation. And so in this case, one of the things you can do is after you finish a chapter of the book, close the book and spend 30 seconds, what was discussed in that chapter, what were the big ideas, if they made an argument or the points they used to back up the argument. Just doing this little exercise is going to improve your recall. So at this point, we've discussed four of the nine principles. We've discussed meta-learning, directness, intuition, and retrieval. Let's talk about the fifth. Right. So one of the other principles that I have in the book is drill. And this is an idea

that comes from the study of deliberate practice, Canders Erickson, who has studied how people become really, really good at skills. And the basic idea is that when you want to learn something, obviously direct practice is super important. So we were using the language example when I was talking about that, that if you are conversing with someone, that will actually allow you to store those things that you're learning, those little skills. Not only will you learn the little skills that are important for you to actually be able to have conversations, but when you learn words, and phrases, they will be learned in that context, which makes them much easier to remember later. However, as most people know, just having conversations with people, and particularly when you

don't know how to have conversations with people, it's probably not enough. That's probably not enough to be good at the language, and your intuition is probably correct. That it's not enough to just speak to someone. And the reason why it's usually not enough is because when you're speaking to someone, there's way too much going on. You have to make the correct sounds, you have to conjugate those verbs. You have to understand what they're saying. You have to formulate what you're saying. You know, sometimes you make the wrong expression, but you're, you know, you're just trying to order a cup of coffee. So whatever, you got the cup of coffee, it's fine. And so the idea behind drill is that most skills are like this, that there's many, many different things going on at once,

and it's difficult to juggle it all simultaneously. And so the idea behind drill is if you, once you've done some direct practice, if you figure out what you're weak at or figure out what is an area that you could improve on and you isolate it and you do some practice in isolation on that component, it gives you more attention span to focus on that component to actually get better at it. So in this case, if you are focusing on learning vocabulary when the only thing in front of you is a vocabulary word that you're trying to recall, like you have the word and you're trying to recall it, then that will be easier to concentrate all of your mental resources on that than if you're trying to do it while everything else is going on.

So to learn real skills, you need to have both. You need to have the direct practice, but then you also need to isolate and bring things apart to drill them. If you only have one, if you only have the drills, you have this transfer problem that we had before, that it's difficult sometimes to transfer what you learned in an isolated setting to real life. On the other hand, if you only do the direct practice, if you never do drills, you never learn any theory, you never learn why certain verbs get conjugated the way they are, then you often don't have the ability to really get good at some of those small components because there's too many things going on and it's too difficult to focus your mental resources. We'll come back to this episode in just a minute.

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Head to rothies.com slash paula today. Rothes.com slash paula. How do you know that the types of drills that you are practicing are efficient? Let's say that you're trying to learn how to play the piano. and there's a particular aspect of piano playing in which you recognize your own weakness. How, assuming a context in which you don't have a coach or a piano tutor who's there with you to provide that immediate feedback, how do you know if the drills that you're practicing are propelling you forward as compared with ingraining bad habits? True, true.

So there's two ways to think about this. So one way is that I like to do the direct practice. first and I like to have some practice that is, again, this kind of simulation of what you might eventually want to do. So maybe you're just starting programming and obviously you can't build the next Facebook because you don't even know how to write a single line of code, but you might have in the back of your head, okay, I'm trying to build a website and that's sort of your kind of starting little toy project as you get better of programming. And I usually like to start with, even if you can't do everything in that direct contest, start with some

kind of direct context just because we want to avoid this transfer problem. We want to avoid doing a lot of learning and then trying to shift it over to somewhere else later. It's a lot better if we can kind of organically grow the things we learn off of the location and context that we want to use it. And then once you've done that, you can start to figure out, okay, when you're using the skill, what kinds of things are difficult? What kinds of things are you struggling with? And designing drills is not always the easiest, but again, we can go back to my understanding of the concepts, facts, and procedures. Even just that kind of analysis can help you break apart a skill in two parts. So if we're again, looking at a language, we know that there's vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation.

So even at that fairly rough, you know, division of labor right there, you can already say, okay, maybe my pronunciation isn't very good. Maybe I need to do something to improve my pronunciation. Then there's a little bit of an art to how do you design skills that will improve your design drills rather, that will improve that particular aspect of the skill. And sometimes this can be fairly obvious. So again, improving vocabulary, flashcards are a good way for improving vocabulary. Grammar, there's grammar drills, pronunciation. You know, you can try to make the sounds and have a native speaker judge you on how well

you're approximating it and they can give you a little, no, that doesn't sound quite right. You know, if you're trying to, you get that rolling R in Spanish or something. That is a good way of working on those skills. For other skills, sometimes you need to be a little bit more creative and then involves more experimentation. So for improving our writing, for instance, we might decide that research is important, but we don't really know how to get better at research. So maybe one way of doing it is just to, for the next article you write, spending a lot of time doing research. And then just adding more time on that aspect of the skill is going to give you a little bit more space to work on it.

And so what I usually recommend is that you not only need to design these drills, you not only need to work on them, but you need to be monitoring your feedback. And so your feedback is going to give you some kind of indication of, are you getting better at this or are you not? And if you're not getting better at it, that's obviously a sign that, okay, maybe the drill needs reworking. Maybe you didn't identify the right sub-skill. Maybe you thought that this was really important and it turns out it doesn't really matter that much. Or maybe the way that you design the skill isn't really isolating what's difficult about that. So sometimes this involves a bit of trial and error, but I think if you're monitoring your feedback and you kind of understand how the whole approach of going between

direct cracks and drills works, you usually don't stray too, too far from the path. Now, in your answer, you mentioned monitoring feedback. Feedback itself is another principle of ultra learning. Can you tell us about it? Most people, I think, would recognize that feedback is important for learning. We just talked about one way that feedback is important for learning to monitor whether or not the things you're doing are actually making progress. But the interesting thing about feedback is that you would expect, you know, feedback, obviously, I need feedback to learn well. that if you go in and look at the scientific research, it's going to be, yep, feedback's really good. You need to have feedback all the time.

What was really interesting for me in digging into some of the science of this is that this isn't actually the case. And so one of the, I would say, one of the more famous meta-analyses, which took hundreds of different studies on feedback and compiled them together and looked at their impact done by Abraham, Kluja, and Angelo Denezi, found that in almost 40% of cases, feedback actually had a negative effect, meaning giving people feedback made them perform worse at the learning activity in question. So this is rather surprising, and it's kind of a sort of disconcerting idea that, you know, we need to get feedback, but a lot of times it doesn't work. And so there's a very

important lesson here that it's not just important to get a lot of feedback, although it is important to get a lot of feedback, but it's very important what kind of feedback you get. And it's also important to filter the feedback you're getting and not just respond to every single little piece of feedback that you're getting. So the first thing that's important is to recognize that the most valuable feedback is feedback that comes at the level of the task that you're doing. And what they found in this meta analysis is that when feedback tended to have a negative effect is when it wasn't really so much a commentary on the thing that you're performing, but maybe you as a person. So I think we can all think of the example of, you know, maybe you were in high school and your

English teacher said, oh, you know, this essay is so awful. You should just give up all together. Well, okay, that's feedback, but it doesn't really motivate you to be. become the next Hemingway. And similarly, if you get feedback that is about you as a person, it tends to have a negative impact on your results. And this is even true, even if the feedback is positive. So we all like to receive praise. We all like to be told how smart and how good we are. But it turns out that this actually also makes people learn worse. And the reason it seems to be that if you think that you're so great, you don't try as hard to do better. And so if we are giving feedback to other people and trying to receive it ourselves, it's usually good to guide that feedback

towards the actual activities. Another aspect of feedback that's really important that I think often gets missed is that feedback really matters what kind of feedback you can actually get from people. So one of the things that a lot of people, when they're starting a new business, we'll find, is that they will have a customer and they'll use their product and you'll say, okay, what do you think? And the person goes, eh, you know, it's pretty good. And then you say, okay, well, what did you like about it? What did you not like about it? it. And the problem is that this person maybe can't tell you what they like and don't like about it. Maybe they just have some overall impression of the product that they're using and asking them

what they like or don't like about very specific things may backfire because they're just going to give a random opinion. And so one of the things that I really stress in the book is recognizing when the feedback you're getting is actually going to give you the information you want. So one of the stories I use in the book is of Chris Rock using small comedy clubs to improve his feedback and improve his comedy. And one of the things he can get from the audience is he can tell whether or not a joke is funny, but the audience probably can't tell him how to make it funnier if it wasn't very funny. And so that's an important discretion to learn when you're actually learning things because a lot of people will, you know, make that mistake of trying to ask someone to make a correction for them when really they can only tell you yes or no.

And the Chris Rock example, that's an example of immediate informational feedback, right? You also use the example in your book of if you give a speech and there's a particular part of your speech where everybody just gets up and walks out. You know that you've said something to piss them off. That would be a pretty devastating feedback. I must say, yes. But that is the example that you share in your book is, sure, that is very specific informational feedback about the thing that you said in your book. about the thing that you said in your speech that pissed everybody off or the joke that you told in your comedy routine that either made everybody laugh or didn't. It's very specific, but the perhaps more effective feedback would be to actually have someone with a high skill level who could give a much more nuanced and in-depth a level of critique on the overall body of work that you've shown. Right. So that would be what we would call corrective feedback. So the idea of corrective feedback is that you're not just saying good or bad. You're also saying here's how you fix it. And corrective feedback is very useful. There's no doubt about it. I know that one of the researchers who wrote a book on feedback and learning made the point that feedback ought to be corrective to be maximally useful. But the problem, as you just mentioned, is that corrective feedback usually requires a teacher, coach, or expert. And even then often it's just their opinion, right?

If you're a great painter and someone says, no, you should do it this way, well, maybe they're right. Maybe they're giving you corrective feedback or maybe they're giving you their opinion about what a good painting looks like. And so similarly, I think while corrective feedback is great when you have it, there are many learning situations where you won't have it and it doesn't mean you can't improve. You can improve often without a lot of feedback and you can also improve even without having such a high degree of feedback.

So again, I really recommend getting corrective feedback. when you can get it. But I think it's more important to recognize when the feedback you're getting is not suitable for corrective feedback. So again, the Chris Rock example is perfect there that there probably aren't that many people around Chris Rock who can tell him how to be funnier. However, he can know when a joke is funny. And so that feedback is still very useful. You also describe the importance of focus. Can you tell us about this? Focus is a very important principle because if you want to be able to actually actually We learn things you have to put in the time.

You actually have to be able to allocate time and more importantly, your attention in order to learn. And I think there's a side effect of this as well because obviously we know that in our modern day it's very hard to stay focused. There's a million little pings and whistles on your phone. There's people interrupting you. It's very difficult to stay concentrated. But at the same time, I think this is particularly true for learning and particularly true

for ultra learning, like the kind of really effective learning that I want to talk about in the book. because in order to really learn effectively, it requires your complete attention. So multitasking is out, trying to do 10 things at once. That's out. If you really want to be able to learn well, you have to focus. And so I try to, in the book, cover some ways of thinking about focusing. And in my mind, I think the problems that we have with focusing tend to break down into

three different categories. So the first category is failing to start focusing. So you want to do some learning. You want to work on it, but you don't get started. obviously another word for this is procrastination. And one of the reasons I think we recognize this is that we often think about, well, I don't have enough time to do this. And, you know, that is sometimes true. I don't want to say that your priorities are always going to align with ultra learning and you're always going to have tons of time to do this.

But at the same time, I think that it's particularly the case that when you're doing something difficult, when you're doing something that involves direct practice, when it involves retrieval, when it involves getting harsh feedback, we often have a little bit of an emotional reaction to that. So, okay, yeah, I know that what I should really be doing to get better at, you know, speaking Spanish is finally set up that tutoring session online so that I can have a little conversation with someone. But that sounds like a lot of work. That sounds kind of scary. Maybe I'm not going to do that. And so what I recommend in this case is you need to chunk off and break off smaller parts so that you can actually just get started with it. So if having a half an hour conversation with someone is terrifying, maybe.

a five-minute conversation you can do, or maybe even just a one-minute conversation. Maybe you just have a 30-second interaction with someone to get you started. Because very often, once you do get started, then the ball is rolling, then it's easier to actually continue. So that's the first problem of focus. Second problem is obviously when you're in the middle of working on something, you get distracted. And so part of this, you can combat by, you know, changing your environment. So there's fewer distractions, so it's easier to focus. But then there's also steps you can take to avoid those internal distractions, that kind of, oh, you know, I'm tired of doing this. I should, you know, open up Facebook or open up Twitter or, oh, you know what, I wonder what so-and-so is doing. Maybe I should send them a text message.

And the way to avoid these impulses in some ways is to recognize that they're natural, just like procrastination. They're dealing with emotional responses. And I think similarly, if you structure your time and your approach the right way, you can often get through them. So one of the things that I noticed, and it was a little observation, is that when I was learning languages and I had to memorize a lot of words, I was using a flash card program to do this. And when I would get a word wrong, so I would remember it incorrectly and I would get the flash card wrong, I would immediately have this pang of, ugh, I'm tired of this. Let's just like stop. Let's take a break. Now it's time for a break. And I think this happens for a lot of people. When you experience a little bit of frustration,

you want to give up. And so in order to overcome this urge to distract myself, I gave myself a little rule that I could give up, I could take a break, but I had to get the last question. right. So if I just got one wrong, I had to do another one until I got one right in order to take my break. And the funny thing is, as soon as you get one right again, you are kind of refilled with that little drop of confidence. You're like, oh, this isn't so bad. I actually do remember quite a few things and you keep going. And so the funny thing is how temporary a lot of these urges are. And so if you can just create little rules for yourself to just persist maybe another 30 seconds, maybe another minute or two, very often that will be enough to carry you forward

so that the urge will disappear and you'll be able to keep focusing. And the final one that I talk about in the book is just the ability to maximize your environment for the type of focus. And it turns out that having a more diffuse focus, one that's not quite as laser sharp and alert is actually a little bit better for creative problem solving. All right. So the three problems of focus. One is procrastination, and that happens at the beginning.

The next is distraction, including internal and impulsive distractions. And that often happens in the middle of what you're doing. And then the third is applying the right type of focus to the right type of project. So more diffuse focus for conceptual thinking or creative thinking versus isolated specific focus on a particular problem for solving something that's isolated and hard. Absolutely. Let's talk about principle eight out of nine in no particular order. And this is the principle of retention, which is distinct from retrieval. can you tell us about retention? Right. So obviously, if we're spending a lot of time learning something, we need to actually

be able to retain it. And so retention is one of the principles that outlined. And this is one, I think, that is incredibly important because the reality is often very difficult that we forget most of the things that we read. We probably forget most of the things that we studied in school. We forget things all the time. And so combating forgetting is really a central problem to learning, because if you learn a bunch of things and then you forget it, you know, whether it's a day or month or a year later, that is actually, you know, it's a loss of progress. The idea here behind retention is that there are different things that we know that will increase the longevity of our memories. And so for some projects, and we mentioned kind of memory intensive projects like learning a language,

this is a problem almost immediately. So as you start learning a language, you need to have a system in place so that all the words you learn don't just immediately fall out the other end when you hear them, which is the constant problem people have when they're learning a language, is that it is the case that you often don't just have to learn something once to remember it forever. You have to learn it several times, maybe even a dozen or more times before it really sticks. So there's a couple ways that we can account for that. One of them is a principle of psychology known as spacing. Spacing basically says that if you give someone multiple exposures to the same idea, that they will retain it far longer than if you take the same amount of time, but massing.

all those exposures in one sitting or one particular studying session. And so there seems to be a couple reasons for this. One of them might be that each time you think about the idea, you have to kind of reactivate it in your brain. And so if you've activated it once and then you see it again very soon after, it is sort of, it doesn't take as much work to activate it. So that kind of activation cost is only happening once, even though you're covering the material multiple times. And the other thing has to do with memory consolidation. So when we first learn things, it stays in our short-term memory. And then in order for it to actually be accessible, it has to move to long-term memory and then eventually get consolidated. And so this actually involves some fairly

time-consuming processes that involve sleep and maybe several hours and actually to create the proteins in your nervous system in order to actually make the memory somewhat more durable and permanent. And so in this case, if you do a bunch of exposures within that same time period, it has a sort of diminishing effect compared to if you did them over several instances. And so for a memory intensive subject like languages, a really good way of doing that is just to have something like a space repetition system where it will give you exposures to the same vocabulary on a particular schedule so that you will be able to retain it much, much longer for the same amount of input time. But then also for things that you're learning in your regular life, you can approach this same way as well, that if you want to really understand what the ideas are from the book, if you review the book every month or every six months, you will be. able to retain the ideas a lot longer than if you just read it once and then that was it. And so I think this is also something that you can think of as valuable if you want to go forward

with learning lots of subjects. So let's say that there is a book or a particular set of books that have some great concepts in it may be a great set of business books or a great set of personal finance books. And you want to be able to retain a lot of the information that's in it. what would be the optimal amount of time to leave between rereadings or reviews of a given book in order to maximize retention with minimal time input? This is a very interesting question, which is actually a topic studied under research. So I mentioned some software, this space repetition software.

It uses an algorithm to increase the amount of time between intervals. So it's not a fixed amount of time. Rather, what happens is you review it once, and then it reminds us. you again in five minutes and then in 10 minutes and then it reminds you in one day and then three days and then a week and then longer and longer and longer. And this particular algorithm, I think, works well from a convenience point of view because it means that if you had the exact same amount, so every single fact you just remembered every three days, then you'd get to this situation where all the things that you're reviewing would quickly swamp all the new stuff

you're trying to learn. So there is a sort of convenience to this particular algorithm and that's why I suggested. But in terms of actual memory effect, the research doesn't seem to show that this is much more effective than, let's say, just doing, you know, every five days you check the book or every six months you check the book, just a fixed amount of time in between. One thing that I worked on a guide to memory with a cognitive science, PhD student, and what we found was that it's just sort of a rule of thumb, but one way of looking at it if you wanted to think about studying for a particular exam or some particular situation where you're going to use that information. So it's not just forever, but you wanted to be able to make sure you had it for this

particular point, is to try to think about covering the information five times from when you first cover it to when you actually have to use it fairly evenly spaced. So if you're covering unit one, you can cover unit one. Again, not in full. It doesn't have to be as much time as the first time. You can just do a quick reminder, quick refresher, a few retrieval questions instead of just rereading the text. But if you space that out five times, you will have a much, much stronger memory, even if it's just evenly spaced in time. Let's talk about the ninth principle, experimentation. Right. So the last principle I call experimentation. The reason experimentation is important is really twofold. So the first reason is that, and part of the difficulty is when you explain things in terms of

principles like this, people see it as a recipe. They want the step-by-step formula. Okay, first do this, and then you do this and then you do that. And the problem is that most of the people that are really documented who are really successful at learning things well don't approach it like a recipe. Rather, what they see is that these principles are tools that they can use in different situations, but you actually have to try things out. You actually have to have some experimental trial and error. And so the first way to think about experimentation is that there are no fixed rules.

You have to try it out. You get a little bit of feedback and then you adjust your approach. So maybe you start using some approach. to learning a language and you find it. You know what, actually, this isn't working for me. I've got to try a different method or I've got to try a different resource. And so the people who are the best learners are the most flexible and the most eager and able to experiment. And the other reason experimentation is very important is that as you get better at a skill, and this is the reason I included it last in the book, is that as you get better and better,

there are fewer and fewer paths laid out for you. So when you start learning a skill, there are tons of books and guides and courses and resources and tutorials and everyone in their dog can tell you where to start with learning that skill. But as you get really good at it, the air gets thinner and it's a lot harder to find those seasoned guides who have trekked the path ahead of you. And so what I recommend in this situation is that you have to have this experimental mindset where you are really plotting a course onto the unknown and you have to decide, okay, well, maybe I should get better at this aspect of this skill. And then you work on that for a little while and then you work on something else. And the example I used for this particular chapter was

Vincent Van Gogh, because not only was he largely self-taught as a painter, but you can see how his experimentation and exploration was part of the reason he was able to develop such a unique style that made him, you know, really one of the best painters of all time. It seems to me that experimentation and feedback would be closely related. Feedback is very important, and I think that it is obviously related to experimentation, because as you get feedback on what you're doing, you change your approach, you change where you're working on things. I think the idea behind experimentation is also to not, again, not treat things as a fixed step by

step, but treat things as, okay, I have a hypothesis. I think that if I work on this, that will make some progress. You work on that for a while. And then you see what happens. You see what the outcome is. And so again, this is particularly important as you get towards mastery where, again, you're not maybe going to know exactly what you should do next to improve. But if you understand these principles as kind of raw ingredients, you can sort of put them together and sort of say, okay, well, maybe let's try doing this and let's try doing it in this way. You work on it for a little while and then you see the results. Well, thank you so much for spending this time with us. Are there any final key takeaways that you would like to emphasize? Yeah, I think the final

takeaway I would like to put is just simply that learning is important and it's a fundamental process to our lives. So we often think about learning as something that impacts us in school or maybe if we're just trying to learn a particular skill. And we don't really think about how every single moment of our lives we're learning. Our brain is an organ of learning. It's always adapting to things that are happening. And the more you can understand the fundamental processes at work, things like the ideas of directness, things like retrieval, the more you can start to spot these little

situations where they apply to your life. And so I think that regardless of whether you plan on doing an intensive ultra-learning project or you just want to get a little bit better at something, paying attention and understanding those processes is important. Well, thank you so much. Where can people find you if they would like to know more about you and your work? Thanks. So you can find my book, wherever books are sold.

You can an Amazon, Barnes & Noble, also in Audible. It's ultra-learning. And you can also find many articles and more things about the book on my website at Scott H-Y-Y-O-N-G.com. Thank you, Scott. What are some of the key takeaways that we got from this conversation? Well, let's go over the nine principles of ultra-learning that Scott described. Principle number one, meta-learning.

Meta-learning is learning how to learn. So before you begin learning a new skill, regardless of whether you want to learn investing or a musical instrument or another language or how to code or skills related to basic carpentry, a van life conversion, like regardless of whatever it is that you want to learn, before you dive into it, first pause and ask yourself how, strategically, how people can best learn this skill? Meta learning is really the approach of before you start a project where you're trying to get good at something, you spend some time doing research to figure out what is the

strategy for getting good at it. This is something that can be as simple as doing some internet searches, spending an hour or two to figure out what are the popular books, what are the popular courses, popular resources, what are the methods people used? What do people say didn't work? So meta-learning is learning a strategy for learning. And meta-learning can be very effective for figuring out where to start, especially when starting seems overwhelming. Scott recommends talking to people who have already learned the skill that you want in order to extract their learning process. Now, there are some people who are great at things who may not understand why they're great at things, or they may not understand how they developed the skill in question.

For those people, you could ask them to walk you through what they did, walk you through their career path or their skill development path, that will give you a narrative, but beware of the risk of over-extrapolating from a narrow case study. If you are able to instead ask them at a bigger level, how did they learn this thing, that will be more valuable than asking for their case study specifically. But asking for their case study is helpful in the event that they can't talk to you about bigger picture conceptual ideas. So that is key takeaway number one, meta-learning. Before you dive into something, learn how to learn about it. Principle number two, directness. Directness. Directness. Directness. Directness.

is the concept of learning something in such a way that it is transferable. Oftentimes, people learn something in one context, but then they can't transfer from the context in which they learned it to other real-world applications. So, for example, you might be better at a language on Duolingo on the app than you are in real life. Because on the app, you have a multiple choice questionnaire of words to choose from. and in real life, you don't have that. You don't have that screen with multiple choices that you can tap.

One of the examples that is really important for learning, but is often either underappreciated or even neglected, is the idea of directness. And so the idea of directness is very simply that when we learn things, they tend to be quite specific, not only in terms of what we learn, but also in terms of the context in which we activate and use that knowledge. So I'm sure many of you can relate to

learning material in school that is difficult to apply to real life. Sometimes a lot of what you learn in school is forgotten because we learn it passively so we can recite the material but we don't know how to apply it in ways that will benefit us. And these transfer issues block our learning or block the expansiveness of our learning. So the solution to this is that instead of just trying to learn things, become active in your learning by asking yourself how you want to use the material in what kinds of situations will this knowledge benefit you, and then try to learn that new skill in a way that is most applicable to the way in which you want to apply it.

So for example, if you're learning a new language, don't just memorize the vocabulary and learn how to read it. You need to learn how to speak it actively. So having conversations with people in this new language, no matter how imperfect those conversations may be, will help you put that knowledge into practice. So that is principle number two, directness and transferability. Principle number three, intuition. I'll let Scott explain exactly what intuition is. Intuition is related to this idea of building deep conceptual understandings,

and not only at factors here is the illusion of explanatory depth, but also using techniques like the Feynman technique to probe those depths and really understand things better. If you're learning something that's conceptual, try to explain it to somebody else so that you can find the holes within your own understanding of it. So for example, let's say that you're trying to figure out what are mutual funds. Write down your own working definition of a mutual fund and then try to explain it as if you are trying to explain to a friend what that is. Where do you stumble? What parts are you unsure of?

Where does your explanation start to break down and sound like nonsense? Essentially, what you're doing is that you're refining the question in order to more fully grasp this conceptual topic. And once you have fully grasped the conceptual topic, then you will have a deeper, more intuitive understanding of it. The idea of improving conceptual understanding is, first of all, to expose yourself to these situations where you can probe the depth of your understanding. So you can see just how deeply you understand it. And then also so that you can get feedback on him. And so part of doing this Feynman technique is to get feedback.

on where when you try to give an explanation does it start to sound like nonsense? And so that is principle number three. Intuition and refining your conceptual understanding of a topic. Principle number four, retrieval. Retrieval is a concept that most of us are familiar with from our school days. At a very basic level, retrieval might be repeatedly reviewing material over and over, such as cramming for a test. But as Scott described in the interview, research has shown that this

is actually an awful way of trying to retain information. Repeatedly reviewing something over and over is less effective than, in essence, quizzing yourself. So repetition is not as effective as actively trying to recall information and actively trying to retrieve information from your mind. Asking yourself questions that cause you to dig up that information. So rather than just repeatedly reading something over and over and over, quiz yourself, ask yourself those questions. That will give you a much higher likelihood of being able to retrieve that information when you need it. And this doesn't just apply to trying to learn facts. This can apply in many real-world situations, including public speaking.

So this is a fairly deep psychological principle. So it doesn't only apply to studying, but also to public speaking. If you're going to give a speech, how do most people practice? their speeches. Well, they've got their cue cards in front of them and they just read their cue cards over and over again. This is a terrible way to memorize the speech. Put the cue cards down, face down, try to give your speech. And when it's difficult, which it is, and you get stuck, then look at your cue cards and look at what you're missing. But this act of trying to remember it is actually much more successful in actually memorizing a speech or really learning

anything. And so the overall takeaway is not to be so quick at looking things up or repeatedly reviewing things. Only do that when you absolutely need. need it. Instead, take a more active role in trying to retrieve information from your mind. That is principle number four, retrieval. Principle number five, drill. A drill is exactly what it sounds like, a study of deliberate practice. In drilling, you break down a particular skill into its subcomponents and then you work on each of those components. So for example, let's say that you want to learn photography. Well, you could break that down into many of the components that go into being a better photographer, such as choosing the right camera settings. You could drill

on that one day, and then on a different day you could drill on composition and how to frame a shot. And so by separating out these subcomponents and focusing on each of them individually, you're able to refine your skills on each of these so that then you can fuse that all together. The idea behind drill is once you've done some direct practice, if you figure out what you're weak at or figure out what is an area that you could improve on and you isolate it and you do some practice and isolation on that component, it gives you more attention span to focus on that component to actually get better at it. So how do you know that drills are efficient?

First, try some direct practice with the thing that you're trying to learn. So let's say you're trying to build a website. Start by trying to build a website. And as you do so, you'll spot the areas in which you're getting. stuck, and you can design drills around that. Same goes for if you're trying to learn a foreign language or you're trying to learn how to write. If you want to learn how to write, maybe you need to drill down on researching for a period of time, and then you can drill down on grammar and punctuation and the basics of that for a period of time, and then you can drill down on

more compelling or descriptive intros for a period of time, right? These are all subcomponents under the greater umbrella of being a better writer. If you're trying to learn a foreign language, maybe you need to improve your vocabulary. Maybe you need to improve your pronunciation. Those are all subcomponents. You won't know which subcomponents you need additional practice on until you first practiced the thing as a whole.

So try the thing as a whole. If you want to be a better writer, try writing an article. If you want to be better at a foreign language, try having a conversation. If you want to be better at building websites, try building a very, very basic website. And then once you've done that, you'll see the sub-components in which you're struggling and you can start designing drills around those. So that is principle number five, drilling. Principle number six, feedback.

Not surprisingly, feedback is essential for learning. It allows you to monitor whether or not you're actually making progress. But be careful where that feedback. comes from because in some cases, feedback actually has a negative effect. If the feedback is coming from the wrong source or if it's from an inappropriate source, then people actually can perform worse at the activity in question. There's a very important lesson here that it's not just important to get a lot of feedback, although it is important to get a lot of feedback, but it's very important what kind of feedback you get. And it's also important to filter the feedback you're

getting and not just respond to every single little piece of feedback that you're getting. So the type of feedback that you're looking for must be appropriate based on who is giving it. So for example, Scott used the example of a comedian like Chris Rock. Chris Rock can go on stage and attempt a handful of jokes. And based on whether or not those jokes get laughs, he can figure out whether or not the audience thought the joke was funny. but the audience is not comprised of professional comedy writers, which means the audience cannot tell him how to make that joke funnier. So it's a mistake to ask people to correct things

for you or to, in the world of business, ask people, how can this product be improved? They may be able to offer some ideas, but oftentimes people don't know or they can't perfectly articulate what it is that they actually want. So remember as you're searching for feedback that there is a difference between immediate informational feedback, such as whether or not your jokes get laughs. There's a difference between that type of informational feedback versus corrective feedback, which shows you specifically how to fix a problem. And that corrective feedback usually requires an expert, a teacher, a coach, some type of an expert who can offer a more sophisticated degree of feedback. That is how you can separate critical analysis from comments from the

peanut gallery. So that is principle number six, feedback. Principle number seven, focus. And I will let Scott explain what focus is and why it's important. In order to really learn effectively, it requires your complete attention. So multitasking is out, trying to do 10 things at once. That's out. If you really want to be able to learn well, you have to focus. Clearly focusing on something is important if you want to be able to learn it. But there are three problems with focusing. One is failure to start. You want to learn, but you don't get started. And that's procrastination. The solution is to chunk off and break it down into smaller parts in order to get started. Because once you initially get started, that momentum can often keep you going. So reduce the friction to getting

started, and oftentimes that's what gets you through. So that is how to address one of the problems of focus. Another issue with focus is distraction. Sometimes these distractions are internal and emotional responses. So for example, when Scott was learning a new language and he got a word wrong, he immediately felt frustrated and then wanted to take a break, meaning he wanted to give up. So in order to overcome it, he made himself a rule that he could take a break, but he had to get the last question right. That way, he could not take a break as an emotional response to the frustration that he felt when he got something wrong. And that is a way that he was able to battle the internal distractions that he wanted to give into. So that is another way in which he could

address focus. And finally, the third issue that comes up when people are trying to focus more, is that the environment or time of day in which they're working on a task isn't right for the task that they're working on. So, for example, diffused focus is better for big picture creative problem solving. Laser sharp focus, on the other hand, is better for narrow, specific hard problems. So make sure that your environment and the time of day in which you're doing something align with what you're working on. Principle number eight, retention. There are two strategies that can help you improve retention. One is spacing, which means getting multiple exposures to the same idea. The other is reasoning, which means that you have to

think about an idea such that you can reactivate it in your mind. One easy to implement action item that Scott offered is to make sure that you have looked at a piece of information at least five times. And to make sure that those five times are evenly spaced between when you first encounter it and when you need to use it. I worked on a guide to memory with a cognitive science PhD student. And what we found was that it's just sort of a rule of thumb, but one way of looking at it if you wanted to think about studying for a particular exam or some particular situation where you're going to use that information. So it's not just forever, but you wanted to be able to make sure you had it for this particular point, is to try to think about covering the information

five times from when you first cover it to when you actually have to use it fairly evenly space. And so that is principle number eight, retention. Finally, principle number nine, experimentation. Remember, these principles are tools that you can use in different situations. So be flexible. Know that there aren't any fixed rules and that getting better at skills is itself a skill. So try a lot of things and see what works.

What I recommend in this situation is that you have to have this experimental mindset where you are really plotting a course onto the unknown and you have to decide, okay, well, maybe I should get better at this aspect of the skill. And then you work on that for a little while and then you work on something else. And the example I used for this particular chapter was Vincent Van Gogh, because not only was he largely self-taught as a painter, but you can see how his experimentation and exploration was part of the reason he was able to develop such a unique style that made him really one of the best painters of all time.

And so those are the nine principles of ultra-learning that we covered in this conversation with Scott Young. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. If you did enjoy today's episode, please leave us a review on whatever app you're using to listen to this podcast. You can also go to afford anything.com slash, iTunes, and that will redirect you to the page on the Apple Podcast website where you can leave us a rating and a review.

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