Scott Young is renowned for his expertise in learning and productivity. He is the Wall Street Journal bestselling author of “Ultralearning” as well as his latest book, “Get Better at Anything.” Scott is known for his innovative learning challenges and his insights on mastering complex skills quickly. His work has been featured in the New York Times, Pocket, and Business Insider, on the BBC, and at TEDx among other outlets.
Scott joined host Robert Glazer on the Elevate Podcast to discuss his approach to mastering new things, how to improve your capacity for learning and growth, and more.
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Scott Young On How To Get Better At Anything
Introduction
Welcome to the Elevate Podcast. Our quote is from Albert Einstein, “Education is not the learning of facts, but the training of the mind to think.” My guest, Scott Young, is renowned for his expertise in learning and productivity. He is the Wall Street Journal bestselling author of Ultralearning: Master Hard Skills, Outsmart the Competition, and Accelerate Your Career, as well as his latest book, Get Better at Anything: 12 Maxims for Mastery. Scott is known for his innovative learning challenges and for his insights on mastering complex skills quickly. His work has been featured in The New York Times, Pocket, Business Insider, the BBC, and TEDx, among others. Scott, welcome to the Elevate Podcast.
Thanks for having me.
Let’s start a little bit with your background. I’m always interested to learn where interests came from. Share a little bit about childhood or early work experiences that would help you develop your interest in learning and productivity.
I have an unusual background, because I think what you would expect is like, “I went to school at Harvard, and I studied this for fifteen years. I’m telling you about all the things I did research on.”
I found it’s not usually a straight path, so a circuitous route.
I’ve always been interested in learning. My parents were school teachers. I think just, that’s in the water. When I was in high school, I got very interested in not only self-improvement topics but just learning about lots of stuff. I was the kind of person who would go to the nonfiction section of the bookstore and just pick random books on, like, physics, biology, this kind of thing. My interest in this space of efficient learning, or how to learn effectively, started when I was a university student. I was writing at the time, and my interest in personal productivity and self-improvement overlapped there with how do you study well? You’re like, you’re not spending all your time in the books, but you can still get good grades in college.
You’re studying hacks?
Yeah, like study hacks. You’ve got an exam, and we go, like, “What would be the right way to prepare for it so that you’re not actually just grinding it out?”
80-20 rule.
That was my starting point, and I was writing about that. That became the basis of my blog. My website was talking about a lot of studying advice, and then that turned into, after I graduated, I did some of these projects, which you alluded to in my generous introduction there. Things like the MIT Challenge, trying to learn MIT’s computer science curriculum using their free materials they post online.
I did another project with a friend where we went to learn languages over a year. We called it the Year Without English, because the idea was that when we would land in each country, we would only speak in the language we were trying to learn. These experiences culminated in my 2019 book, Ultralearning: Master Hard Skills, Outsmart the Competition, and Accelerate Your Career. If you think of my overall career, I’ve basically been talking and writing about learning for two decades. That’s been a major focus for me.
Your first book, Ultralearning: Master Hard Skills, Outsmart the Competition, and Accelerate Your Career, probably encapsulated a bunch of these things, introduced the concept of intense, self-directed learning. What was the inspiration behind that book, and did any of those personal experiences, or did some of the things you were talking about doing, really shape the concept?
Yeah, obviously the book was heavily drawn on my own experiences, but it was also like, I don’t know. I think my projects at that time period were also very much of the time and place of the internet. If you think about the early blogosphere, now we’re in a different era. I’m talking about things before, but it was a time period where people were doing stuff like this, and they had a lot of influence on me.
I’m thinking of people like Josh Kaufman, who had his Personal MBA project where he was like, “Could you create an MBA program without going to business school?” Benny Lewis was doing his Fluent in 3 Months: How Anyone at Any Age Can Learn to Speak Any Language from Anywhere in the World challenges, a very direct inspiration to my own language learning projects. Even Steve Pavlina, I remember him writing about how he did a double math and computer science major over three semesters by organizing his schedule. That was always an example that stuck out in my mind, people could do this if you were diligent and focused about it.
I think those examples had such an influence on me, but they were very much part of the background, online, internet, weird blogosphere niche that most people aren’t aware of. Bringing those examples, and then later, of course, my own stories together was a major motivation for writing Ultralearning: Master Hard Skills, Outsmart the Competition, and Accelerate Your Career, because for most people, the only time they’ve ever heard of someone learning something is they went to school and studied it for ten years. People doing these weird projects are very much on the periphery. I wanted to bring them out into the center and show why I think they’re cool.
Concept Of Ultra Learning
Explain, on a high level, the concept of ultra learning and how it differs from traditional learning methods.
Ultra learning, I just use in almost an umbrella sense to refer to projects that are both self-directed and intense. Self-directed meaning that you are the one planning, designing, choosing what you want to learn. It doesn’t necessarily mean you’re entirely self-taught, or you’re avoiding teachers or even school in some cases, but just that it’s very much a goal that you’ve set, you’re planning it, you’re doing it. In this design, even Steve Pavlina’s doing a formal degree in three semesters would very much count because, even though he’s taking the classes at school, the project and the decision to do it this way is very much his own.
I was very much drawn to the self-directed nature of learning because it’s just unfortunate, but our higher education system is often very ill-suited for what we’re actually trying to accomplish. You’re in the middle of your career, you need to learn a little bit about X, but going back and studying for another two years at some extremely expensive program that’s going to force you to quit your job and stuff is just not realistic for a lot of people. While I would never discourage someone from going to college and having that experience, it’s also pretty clear that it doesn’t apply that broadly. The self-directed stuff really interested me, and I thought it was a really interesting lens considering most of learning and educational research is very much focused on what goes on inside students.
Let’s get more specific. When you say self-directed, is that a pull, not push? We understand the concept, but if you’re double-clicking on what does that look like in learning?
Yeah, you could say self-directed would be anytime you set out, I’m going to learn X, and you make the decision. Whether that’s, “I want to really understand personal finance,” you go and buy a bunch of books that’s self-directed, as opposed to, “I’m taking this class because it’s one of my degree requirements and they told me to show up here.”
There’s interest. I think we all learn better with interest. I understand the value of prerequisites. I have a freshman in college next year, and we’re trying to figure out, looking at the schedule, how do you check off all these things he’s not interested in but needs to do? You want to dip into these things, and it’s probably a little bit different these days in that there’s not a lot of things that, if you didn’t want exposure to, you would have had them. You would have not had it because of the different types of learning versus, you might’ve never even heard of this topic before.
I think it can come from a lot of different places. Some of the people that I interviewed when I was doing the research for the book were very much motivated by the subject or skill itself. They just wanted to be good at that thing. For other people, it was instrumental. It was just, the project required this intensive learning in order to succeed at something else. You can think about the person who wants to launch a startup, and then they learn how to code because they’ve got to make their own website. An example I talk about in the book is Eric Barone, who wanted to make his own video game, but he wasn’t a good artist. He spent tons of time learning that skill instrumentally. I think the self-directedness is just to put it in contrast with, I would say, most of our formal experience learning things in school, where someone’s telling you what to do and how to do it, and you don’t really have a lot of autonomy over the process.
Most of our learning experiences is in school where someone is telling you what to do and how to do it. We do not have a lot of autonomy over the process.
You also discuss a debate in there about whether it’s better for people to learn, find answers themselves rather than being shown a particular way. Do you have a specific side of that debate? I think the past year for me has really illustrated the danger in teaching people narratives rather than teaching them to think, a lot of the stuff that’s being parroted that people just don’t even understand. They’re just repeating something that someone else told them is true.
I tend to go back and forth on it because, on the one hand, I think that you’re absolutely right. We need to think, and we need to solve problems, and we need to challenge ourselves. I think, especially if you’re looking in this self-directed learning context, if you are just doing exactly what you’re told, and you don’t know why or you’re not thinking about it, you’re not going to learn very well.
I also think, and this is maybe a little bit of tension or some paradox here, that often, when you’re doing self-directed learning, one of the major challenges is you don’t know how to do things, and you don’t have good examples to follow. That can lead to a lot of frustration, a lot of banging your head. The people that I thought of that were most focused on, like, “What’s going to be the efficient way to do this?” They tended to, “I’m going to set a project to learn this,” and then they really figured out how other people learn it. They really tried to learn as much from other people as possible.
I think you need to have that spark. You need to have that self-direction. Once you have that self-direction, it’s like, “I’ve got this really difficult problem. How do other people solve it? How do other people think about this?” The people who I think are really good at learning from other people often get very quickly up to, you’re using the best processes or practices or strategies, as opposed to the people who are like, “I’m going to do it my own way,” and then they can get stuck sometimes in some cul-de-sacs.
Do you think we’re missing a little bit the concept of debate team, where you take the other side and the other perspective, and you learn how to argue it just as a skill?
Yeah. I definitely think there’s one problem with, I think, a lot of educational practices, that we serve up facts like this is what it is. This is just the knowledge. We don’t really realize how much debate, conflict, and compromise is going on behind the scenes to get to there. I don’t know how you best teach that because I think one of the major challenges of teaching anything is just, there’s so much to learn. Every time you say, we should teach this, you’re implicitly saying we should not teach something else. Definitely for someone who is self-directed, I think you have to have this sense of things, that you’re reading something, but you know that’s not the whole story. I think that taste to like, read a book, which is written by an expert who knows more than you, and you’re like, I know this isn’t the whole story. To have that curiosity to keep asking questions, I think that’s very hard to do because very often we’re just like, you read one book on a topic and you’re like, that person was a total expert.
I almost think it should come in pairs. What is the opposite argument? When you watch a debate, and you feel like one person’s got facts and logic and the other is screaming and trying to just win over it, a lot of times that will change my opinion on the topic greatly.
I think part of the problem is that it’s hard to think of the opposite side in a debate if you don’t have that experience. If I’m going to pick up a topic I don’t know very much about or I’m not an expert in, and then I read a book and I’m like, that sounded very authoritative and plausible. For me to try to come up with, what are the counterarguments for this? I just can’t. Especially because a lot of the counterarguments are going to depend on data, evidence, science, and experiments that I don’t know about. I think it’s often very helpful to have almost this like, how can I find source the opposing viewpoints? Even when I’m reading books, especially in fields that I know are somewhat contentious, like nutrition or learning theory or educational theory, you can try to figure out, what are the best arguments against this? You can look for them.
If you search for them, you can find people who are like, this is what people say is wrong about this idea. Very often when you see both sides, you get a much better picture. Even if you end up agreeing with the first person that you read, you really see what they’re basing it on and what are the ways people have tried to attack it in the past. I think that makes your understanding of it more robust.
There’s probably some principle on this. I’ve seen it, but I don’t know the academic literature on it. Is there a bias towards the first side of something that you hear because that becomes your set, and then when you hear the other thing, it has to move you off that set?
I think so. This is probably related to Kahneman’s confirmation bias, the idea of confirmation of things. Even that is a little bit controversial. There’s a whole literature about whether or not it’s actually a confirmation bias or not. The idea, I think, is that when you learn things, you form mental models or mental pictures. When you encounter information that doesn’t fit in with that pattern, it’s harder to retain, harder to latch on.
When you learn things, you form mental modes and pictures. When you encounter information that does not fit with those patterns, it is much harder to retain.
I think you can see this with academic experts, especially in fields where there’s schools of thought. Meet an economist who went to study at University of Chicago or MIT, I can tell you what they believe about economics for the most part. We’re talking about smart people. They know the other side, they know the other arguments, but if you went to University of Chicago, you probably believe in free markets. You’re probably a little bit libertarian. If you went to MIT, you’re probably Keynesian and you believe in a strong role for the federal government and monetary policy.
Which shows you, your learning is influenced by your learning environment.
That’s one of the things that I think is hard, though. If you were just to do a lottery system, and you give people one of two books to read first on a topic that they don’t know that much about, I do think it can be very profound.
If I read flat earth books, like ten of them as a seven-year-old, then you might have to convince me that the world’s round.
You’re also equipped for all those devious tricks the round-earthers use to convince you that it’s actually round. It’s funny, if you go into real crank corners of the internet where people are talking about stuff that you know is false, it’s almost incredible how much rationality and gears are turning for people to say things that are just plainly false. I think definitely, if you don’t have a strong opinion coming into something, you’re very influenced by some of the first things you read about.
Let’s talk about the latest book, Get Better at Anything: 12 Maxims for Mastery, which certainly would appeal to many people. What was the inspiration behind this book?
After I wrote Ultralearning: Master Hard Skills, Outsmart the Competition, and Accelerate Your Career, I wanted to write another book. I wasn’t thinking I was going to write another book just about learning, but as I started going into the research, I saw all these factors and facets that didn’t really fit into the old book. One of the biggest ones I was talking about before is this importance of learning from other people. This was something that, again, when you’re encountering the research and you’re looking at little things, like I talk about some of John Sweller’s work in the book about, like, if you’re looking at a worked example or if you’re solving a problem, which is more efficient for learning, these are fairly minor effects.
The thing that really struck me was just that in so many real-life domains, like where you actually want to have skill, how much not being able to learn from other people is a bottleneck for getting good at it. Even just thinking about my own pursuits as a writer and entrepreneur, these are areas where, if you have the right social connections and you know what people who are good at these things are doing, you just don’t make the same mistakes that people who don’t have that do.
Let me ask you in that, because this could be confusing in our world. When you say learn from other people, is that a mentorship? Is that a conversation? Is that watching a YouTube video where you espoused all of your thoughts on something? What does that look like?
Everything. I think it’s a general category. For certain skills, if I’m watching someone, I want to watch, get information about how to repair a dishwasher. I think YouTube is probably ideal for that, but sometimes it’s not that. Something like right now, for instance, I’m in a WhatsApp group with other authors, and people are swapping, like, inside industry information about sales and marketing, book writing, and what’s working, what’s not. The amount of knowledge that, I would never have guessed these things, but it’s surfacing to me, is really important. This isn’t like a mentorship relationship.
It’s like the value of a mastermind group. Right?
Yeah. I think of the more general category as that problem solving, to some extent, is not quite a trial-and-error process. It’s more intelligent than that, but it involves a certain amount of, like, you have to try a lot of things. There’s a lot of combinations you have to go through to get the right answer, to get methods that work. If you can tap onto a larger network of people’s intelligence, you can extract, like, someone’s already done this work, and this turns out to be the best method, or this is in the direction of the best method. When you experiment for yourself, you’re closer to where you need to be.
It seems like on those groups, it’s a lot of know what you don’t know. They’re sharing a lot of things where you’re like, I didn’t even know to ask this question.
You also don’t know, like, again, and using the real-world example, it’s very easy to be like, for math or Spanish or something, there’s just so many books, so many YouTube videos. We’re inundated with information. That’s not the bottleneck for someone learning math, it’s not like someone explaining how addition works. Certainly, for like, how do you raise money as a startup? There are things online about that, but certainly, people know this, they’re not communicating it widely.
They know, this firm is doing this, and you need to know so-and-so and this kind of stuff. I feel like there’s an iceberg problem, that the knowledge that’s well codified, written in books, it’s easy to just, like, get the YouTube video, click it, and you can learn it, is the tip of the much larger iceberg of passive and informal knowledge that actually underpins people’s skill in many domains.
Mind Is Not A Muscle
Got it. The book has a bunch of different maxims. One of them is the mind is not a muscle. What do you mean by that?
This is a very popular conception of how the mind works, that if you train it with something that’s mentally taxing in some way, so like Sudoku puzzles or crossword puzzles or doing some mental game, that you will make it smarter in some general way. It’ll help you in school and daily work. This is the idea behind brain training, but it’s also behind the idea of teaching kids subjects that are not particularly useful, but the idea that they’re just mentally challenging enough that they will make them better in other things. I’ve heard this argument that we should be teaching every kid to code, even though they’re not going to be programmers, because learning to program encourages logical thinking.
It turns out there’s not a lot of evidence to support this. There’s a lot of actually good evidence against this idea. I think metaphors are important because if you have the wrong metaphor or something, again, going back to that seed idea, it just has all these downstream implications on what kinds of activities you pursue, how you go forward with things. I feel a much stronger metaphor for how the mind works is that the mind is a collection of tools made out of knowledge, so that if you want to be generally skilled, you need to acquire a diverse repertoire of skills and knowledge and give them practice. It’s a bit of a different way of thinking about learning problems in education in general.
There’s like an engagement issue too where we still have a system, and we’ll get into the education system, that’s designed to produce state workers. That’s originally where the kindergarten impression is, like, if you’re fidgety or you have ADD, it’s like, sit down and learn this useless stuff that you’ll never use. Knowing a lot of ADD kids and adults and people, they love learning. They just didn’t like what they were learning. Once they figured out something they wanted to learn, they dove in headfirst to it. It seems like the muscle argument is let’s just do this to do it versus if you find a construct or something that someone really wants to learn, they tend to lean into it.
I think also the mind muscle analogy is also this, someone who’s really excited about some subject that isn’t particularly useful or popular, they like to fall back on this argument because it suggests, I know you aren’t interested in, let’s say, Latin, and Latin isn’t particularly useful for what you’re going to do in life, but you should still learn it for this reason.
Helps you with the ACT.
I don’t want to be totally dismissive. There probably are some motivational effects, like someone who really works on mastering the violin in their teenage years is learning something about self-regulation and some discipline, but they could have also done that with something that they are more interested in or find more useful too.
That’s interesting. Another concept you talked about that I thought was interesting, which I think relates to this, what is variable practice over rote repetition?
This is an interesting idea, but one of the initial findings that led to this idea was that if you practice multiple different variations of the skill in a random order, so if, let’s say, you’re doing tennis and you’re practicing the forehand and the backhand, then what happens, what we typically see is that your acquisition of the skill is slower. It looks like it’s not working as well, but if you give the person either a delayed test or you give them a test to learn something new, they actually perform better. This results in this counterintuitive idea that something that’s actually slowing learning down in the moment, that it’s actually making it harder, or apparently harder, for you to learn, is actually better preparing you for future learning or in making the skill more durable in the future.
I think this is probably one of the most underused ideas that have come out of cognitive science because so many teachers, they’re teaching math, and they know that students are struggling with the math. When they’re testing the students, they’re like, “We’re going to do the unit one test now,” and then the students study unit one, and then they do the unit one test. “Now we’re going to do the unit two test,” and it’s only questions from unit two. We’ve forgotten about unit one, and unit three, and so on. They know that if they mixed it up, the test scores would be worse, it would be harder, the students wouldn’t be learning it but if you take them outside of the classroom, they’ll probably remember it better. They’ll probably be able to apply it better. I think this is a very good example of what the psychologist Robert Burke calls a desirable difficulty, something that seems to make learning slower but actually makes it better and more robust in the long term.
I think the durability is interesting. You think about class, you cram for the midterm, and then you never look at it again. You cram for the final. It sounds like the rote repetition memorization, it’s better in the short term, and it’s worse in the long term in terms of retention. Your mastery of the subject is lower in general.
I think one mental model that I found very useful for thinking about this is that basically your long-term memory, so your memory of all your experiences in life, is incredibly vast. You can just remember an enormous amount of information in total, but you can only think of a few things at once. The real problem of education is that you might learn something, and it’s somewhere in your brain, but then you’re in a situation where it’s useful, and it just doesn’t come to you.
The variable practice idea is that a lot of what you’re practicing when you’re in an uncertain environment, or you’re in an environment that has less regularity, is practicing bringing up the right skill at the right time. That, it turns out, is, I think, maybe an even more important bottleneck for learning than simply getting information into your head. That also can be challenging, as students know when they’re cramming for a test, but certainly the opposite problem of you’re in some situation, and you learned this ten years ago in school, and you just remember it, and it solves the problem, the fact that that happens with such infrequency, I think it just shows that that’s a major problem.
If you think about a book, or I go to a lot of speakers and personal development events and stuff, and there’s pages of notes. The thing I try to do after each session is pull up the 1 or 2 things, and then, even after all the sessions, pull up the 1 or 2 to 3 things that I want to walk away with, because I guess I intuitively know I’m going to lose it. I just picked up a book I read two weeks ago, and I was going to copy some of my notes, and I was like, “I completely forgot all these great points.” There’s just only so much you can load in at once.
I think definitely when you’re dealing with something that you want to make an impact on practical skills, you’re in a self-improvement seminar, and they’re like trying to tell you, this is what you should do, as opposed to just, like, here’s how you should think about this particular topic. If you’re trying to get it in action, it’s pretty clear that sitting in a seminar for three days straight, and then going off, and you’ve just got all these notes, and then you’re going to try to apply it, is a pretty inefficient way to teach that. The right way to teach it would be to drip it out, to give you a little bit of knowledge. You go and do something. You start to proceduralize the skill. You start to implement it, and then you do another thing, and you implement it.
You have to have this cycle of hearing the information and getting practice. If you just do a huge cram session where you’re just in the audience, and someone’s giving you business advice, and there’s 400 pieces of advice, and then you come home, unless you’re extremely deliberate about taking your notes and actively working on it, which no one does, then, you’re right. You might only have 1 or 2 takeaways because that’s all you can actually retain. I think there’s definitely a lot of designs that take place in the real world for learning things that are just wildly inefficient, because it’s good for the three-day seminar, just for the speakers and organizing the event and whatnot, but for a learner experience, it’s probably pretty bad.
Talk about the concept that I think you brought up in one or both of the books, seven plus or minus two. What’s the relevance to learning and improvement?
This was a famous paper that was by George Miller, and he was finding that the actual amount of things that you can keep in your mind at one time is quite limited. This is not something that just shows up when you’re memorizing lists of words, but it shows up in all weird places, too. It affects how many different smells you can discriminate, or the saltiness of water. There were all these weird experiments where it turns out there’s about the same amount that you can actively discriminate. He suggested this was a universal bottleneck. The number that he had was seven plus or minus two.
There’s very careful scientific research that suggests that the actual number is maybe slightly less than that, because even with his experiments, people were using some tricks to maybe expand the amount that they could keep track of. I think the psychologists think the number is closer to four. Four plus or minus one is probably what our working memory actually is. This idea that this short-term memory is very limited just suggests immediately this major constraint on our learning. If you can only keep track of a very small amount of things, it means that any argument that’s more complicated has more elements than that. Any information I show you, any idea, unless you’re able to convert it into longer-term memory storage, it’s just out the windows, in one ear and out the other.
One thing that’s interesting about this, that this was not George’s particular point, but it was related to this, was that if you have experience in a domain, so if you have more skill learning, there’s ways you can work around that bottleneck. Miller talked about this idea of chunking, which is that if you take, let’s say, just a random string of letters, you may have a hard time remembering more than about nine. That would be up to the upper limit of the amount of letters you can remember. If they were reorganized into familiar acronyms, like MBA, FBI, CIA, something like that, you can easily remember it, because it’s only three things you have to remember.
This suggests that people who have more experience in a domain assemble these patterns of information, and because they have these patterns of information, they essentially improve their effective working memory capacity. This has been demonstrated in many fields. I’m using the acronyms as an example, but it has direct implications. Chess grandmasters can play nine games blindfolded because, in their head, they’re only having to keep track of a relatively few number of board positions, because they have these great pattern libraries of these are the board positions that occur in chess. Whereas a novice, you take all the pieces off, they can barely remember what was on the board, because everything is new, everything is random to them. That shows, again, this learning process is largely a process of assembling these chunks, assembling these patterns, so that you can overcome this constraint.
Learning is largely a process of assembling chunks and patterns to overcome a particular constraint.
I saw a memory expert speak years ago, and he remembered everyone’s name in the room and all this stuff. The trick to do it was, again, it was an anchoring trick. It was interesting. It was to pick a house in your room, pick a whole bunch of objects that you already knew, and then start assigning the things to the object. You start with your sink. The sink was this part of the speech. It was super interesting as a way of, it sounds like a version of chunking.
This is another idea that we have this. There’s another theory, which is like retrieval cues, which is basically that you are, and this is what the memory expert would be doing, but it turns out that a lot of people do something similar.
It’s like a locker.
You come up with some already memorized structure, and then you have to make an association between the structure that’s already been memorized and some of the arbitrary information you’re including. The thing is that this association is pretty fast. There are actually really interesting experiments of exactly how long it takes to do this thing. Someone who’s memorizing a deck of cards, it takes them probably about a minute to go through it.
This is the upper limit of how fast you can make each of these individual links. If you did it in ten seconds, it would be too fast. You don’t have enough time to make the associations. If you are well-practiced, you can do it fast enough that it’s basically the speed that you can flip through the cards. You can memorize the entire order. Again, this is also like a very specific honed skill. Most of us don’t need to memorize every single person’s name this way.
We’ve alluded to this. Obviously, there’s a big debate over education, especially in America. It seems we’re focused particularly more on achievement than the learning, which I think is one of our biggest challenges. I even see it with my kids, that Rate My Professor. They’re, like, grade-shopping professors rather than who am I going to learn the most from? From your research and books, what would you like to see administrators consider or teams that you think would improve the learning outcome? It sounds like this could be the last half hour of the podcast.
I don’t want to be overly pessimistic, but I think one of the major problems with our educational system is that the things people want or are intuitively drawn to are not always the same things as maybe what they should be getting from a learning experience. A good example of professor ratings, professor ratings are not correlated with how much you learn. In some cases, they’re actually anti-correlate. Students dislike professors that are better teachers because they like the professor that gives entertaining stories and doesn’t ask them to do much hard homework. The teacher who’s like, “I’m going to be setting up a rigorous class.”
It’s like the coach. The best coach you ever had was not easy on you, right?
Yeah. There’s also evidence that if you let people choose their own learning activities, they choose ones that are easier for them but worse for learning. There are tons of these examples where I feel like the consumer impulse here in learning, the consumer impulse in education, is not to learn. It’s to do something else. I don’t know whether that’s just an innate part of our hard wiring, that we’re hardwired to like to find a way to avoid learning if it’s possible, like maybe in the same way that we avoid unnecessary physical exertion. We avoid unnecessary mental exertion. I don’t know whether there’s something related there, but it definitely seems to be a feature of how we do things. It’s that, “I’m going to give you a learning task.” Your brain is going to find the lowest effort solution to that problem, even if the lowest effort solution neatly bypasses learning the skill that you are actually trying to do in the first place.
We are hardwired to avoid learning whenever possible, the same way we avoid unnecessary physical exertion.
The class that was, you got a B minus on, but you were so enamored with the subject that you ended up going into that career, right?
Yeah. I even think about this in terms of consumer education apps, like Duolingo and stuff. I think there’s probably a lot of ways that Duolingo could be made to be a more effective product for language learning. It would probably make it less appealing as a fun app that you can play while you’re sitting on the bus. Those are in tension, those goals. I think that’s something that runs deep through education. I think the only thing you can do is try to educate people about how learning works.
This is going to be the tricks that your brain is going to try to pull to avoid actually learning something, and how you can design your learning efforts to avoid it a little bit. If you’re at the gym, you have to know a little bit about how the muscles and body adapt so that you can avoid just plateauing forever because your body is going to quickly adapt to what you’re training on.
They need a lot of consultants these days, but if Harvard brought you in and they said, “In the context of learning and helping people get better, should we change how we conduct our curriculum here?” What would your answer be?
Harvard’s a very interesting case because it’s one of the leading examples of also the grade inflation. I know that in achievement and stuff. First of all, Harvard’s selecting a fairly rarefied era of students here. In some ways, it’s unfair looking at Harvard because it’s always easier teaching the best students. I guess what I’m trying to say is, a school being like, “We’re the best educator,” but you also pick the smartest kids. It’s also, in some ways, a little bit unfair.
I don’t know. Personally, I think for an elite school like Harvard, whatever they want to do in their package is their prerogative. I think where it’s more interesting to focus on is on the schools that have middling prestige or they’re not that prestigious. It’s like, “How do we actually get students who are maybe not as bright, maybe not as motivated? How do you prepare them to learn well or to have the educational outcomes you want, whether those are vocational or having a skill or this kind of thing?”
In that case, I tend to lean a lot closer to the work of direct instruction and the idea that we want to systematically understand what we’re teaching. We want to break it down into components, teach the components, build it up, get lots of practice, lots of examples. I think that is probably, for most people, a more effective way to learn skills. Whether that’s exactly what would work best in the rarefied era of Massachusetts, I don’t know, but I think that is one thing that I would look at.
Impact Of AI On Learning
It’s hard to talk about learning without talking about AI. What do you think the implication on learning is? I have a real fear that there’ll be this self-fulfilling prophecy where if people don’t use AI to learn and they just use it to do all their work, then they’ll become useless and then lose out to AI. How do you use it to get better? What are the not-good ways to use it from a learning standpoint?
It is really interesting. I definitely think that fear has some weight. I think if you don’t have a skill or you don’t have enough grounding in a skill and you get ChatGPT to just do it for you, it seems like it’s unlikely you’re going to learn much from it. If I don’t know how to program and I just get ChatGPT to write little programs for me to do the things that I want, I’m probably not going to learn to program that way. On the other hand, if I already know some programming, ChatGPT can be an incredible tool. I don’t do as much programming as I used to, but a few weeks ago, I was doing a little minor programming project. I wanted to split some transcription for something. I was like, “Everyone I know who programs is raving about ChatGPT. Let’s try it out.”
Programming with ChatGPT on the side was just such a fundamentally different experience that I’ve had compared to doing it before because it used to be you’d spend most of your time trying to figure out what was the thing that you did wrong. You had the general idea, but you’re like, “Where’s the bug? Why is this not compiling? Why is this giving me an error?” You’d go down all these rabbit holes and then you’d be like, “I forgot a period here,” or something trivial. You just didn’t understand how a library worked or this kind of thing.
Now you can just copy and be like, “What’s wrong with this code?” ChatGPT is like, “You made this mistake here, and you did this.” I don’t know. Personally, I think ChatGPT as an educational tool is going to exacerbate what we’re already seeing with other forms of information technology. YouTube means you can learn everything, but it also means you can just waste tons of time and not learn anything. Social media is like that. The fact that Google exists and all these things, basically, the opportunity, the ceiling, has gone up. If you are motivated and interested, if you have this ultra-learning spark, to use the term from before, then I think it’s incredible. You could probably acquire skills more rapidly.
Definitely with language learning, this tool didn’t exist when I was learning languages before. The opportunities to get practice and to get feedback and stuff are just things that you couldn’t have done even with an expensive tutor. You can do it with the machine. At the same time, there’s all these ways to cop out and to not actually learn things. I think probably it’s going to be the case, like, 95% of people, or 90% of people, are going to use it to avoid learning something. That small sliver is going to use it to increase their lead or increase what they’re learning over others.
My friend Whitney Johnson did some work on the S-curve of learning, saying it’s most dangerous as you go towards mastery because when you’re on the steep part, you’re interested in learning, getting better. As you get to mastery, you start coasting. Do you have thoughts on that, on how to know where, when in the process you need to keep going versus when you can ease off, or where you run danger of thinking you’re master at something? Things change so quickly these days.
You mean with ChatGPT or just learning?
I meant learning in general.
I think this happens because one of the ideas that I thought was really interesting from reading all the research is, what is actually happening when you practice? Because everyone knows that you need to practice a lot to get good at things, but like, what’s actually happening? I think one of the most compelling accounts is that largely what you’re doing when you’re practicing is you’re making whatever you’ve already learned in some other way more fluent, more automatic, more effortless. That’s very important for acquiring skills. Certainly, for a skill like speaking another language, you want to be maximally fluent, or if you’re driving a car, you don’t want to be like, “Where’s the brake and the gas?” when you’re hurtling down the highway. Those things, fluency really matters.
As you continue to practice, it follows this power law curve. You get a lot of gains in fluency in the beginning, and then it gets slower and slower and slower. It turns out it doesn’t actually peak at any particular point. You can keep getting better. There was one study of cigar rollers where after 30 years, they were still getting faster. Here’s the thing, the gains are so small that they’re almost imperceptible after a certain point. I think that’s where you get the S-curve idea.
Juice isn’t worth the squeeze at some point.
It’s this S-curve idea where, in the beginning, maybe there’s a lot of figuring out of what even is the skill that you’re trying to learn, what is the method, this kind of thing. There’s the practice phase where you rapidly get to that point of fluency, and then you plateau. I think what’s dangerous with a lot of skills is that, if you were going for mastery, you want to be as good as you possibly could be. The problem is that where you choose to become maximally fluent may not be the best way to do that particular skill.
You can get into these problems. I don’t want to say that’s the only problem in learning, there are other reasons why things can stall and other issues, but definitely, it seems that can be a factor. You develop, not bad habits, but you get really good at doing something slightly suboptimally, and that prevents you from being world-class at it.
The dangerous thing with mastering a lot of skills is choosing to become maximally fluid. It may not be the best way to do that particular skill.
Mistakes And Learning
That’s a fair point. For the last question, I always like to say this is multivariant. It could be singular or repeated or personal or professional, but what’s a mistake you’ve made that you’ve learned the most from?
I’m trying to figure out which one I want to talk about.
Take your time.
I think one mistake that I made, and this is a mistake that I made as one of the bumps on my head while I was learning how to do research, was picking a topic and then starting to do research and focusing on that area. Just not doing what you were talking about before, about actively seeking, “What’s wrong with this idea? Why do people not like this idea?” Because I feel like you do eventually get to those voices, but sometimes you’ve become really invested in a concept before you realize, “This is why it doesn’t work.”
I think if I were to tell my younger self what I should be doing differently for learning than what I was doing naturally, it would be that. It would be like, “The references in the book are all going to support the book that you picked. It’s the references they’re not citing that you have to find out.” I think that it is possible to find those even now. With ChatGPT, it’s super easy to be like, “What are the criticisms of this book?” Even if they’re not 100% valid, at least you know what to search for.
What study would disprove this concept, right?
Yeah, what are the people who disagree with this? What is the controversy on this? I read Peter Attia’s book, Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity, and it’s a very popular book and it’s good, but I’m like, “What are people who are medical experts saying? What do they disagree with?” It was very interesting to see like, this is the stuff where he’s more out on a limb, that I wouldn’t have been maybe aware of reading that book. I think that’s a practice that I came to belatedly, and I’ve had my lumps because of it in my writing career.
Awesome. Scott, where can people learn more about your books and your work and you?
You can find the books Get Better at Anything: 12 Maxims for Mastery and Ultralearning: Master Hard Skills, Outsmart the Competition, and Accelerate Your Career on Amazon, Audible, wherever you get your books. I also recommend checking out my website, ScottHYoung.com. I have thousands of articles, free eBooks, things like that. Even if you’re just interested more in this topic, you can check it out.
Scott, thanks for joining us and getting us a little bit smarter about learning.
Thank you so much.
To our listeners, thanks for tuning into the Elevate podcast. We’ll include links to Scott and his work on the detailed episode page at RobertGlazer.com. If you enjoyed this episode and you’re a new listener to the show, I’d really appreciate if you could leave us a review as it helps new users discover the show. Until next time, keep elevating.
Important Links
- Robert Glazer
- Scott H. Young
- Ultralearning: Master Hard Skills, Outsmart the Competition, and Accelerate Your Career
- Get Better at Anything: 12 Maxims for Mastery
- Fluent in 3 Months: How Anyone at Any Age Can Learn to Speak Any Language from Anywhere in the World
- Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity
