Zack Arnold

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How to Master the Metaskill of ‘Ultralearning’ | with Scott Young

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About Episode

In today’s freelance economy where knowledge is a ubiquitous commodity and employees are essentially disposable and replaceable within days (we are…let’s admit it), there is perhaps no more important skill than having the ability to learn new (and difficult) technology VERY quickly. Throw some gasoline on that fire for knowledge, and you’ve got yourself ULTRALEARNING.

Today’s conversation is with Scott Young, the author of the (soon-to-be bestselling) book Ultralearning. He’s also a writer & blogger, a programmer, traveler, and as he puts it, “an avid reader of interesting things.” For the last ten years Scott has been experimenting to find out how to learn and think better. He is known for learning the 4 year curriculum at MIT (one of the toughest schools for science and technology in the world) in under 12 months without taking any classes there. He’s also traveled the world and at one point challenged himself to go a year without English and in the process learned four languages in that year: Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, and Korean.

Needless to say, Scott knows a thing or two about undertaking incredibly difficult learning challenges. And in our conversation Scott and I discuss the principles he outlines in his new book Ultralearning that you can follow to develop and master this skill and thus become better (and more effective) at learning just about anything you want or need to in order to achieve your most important goals.

Transcript

Zack Arnold: I’m here today with Scott Young, who is a writer that undertakes interesting self-education projects, and I’m going to put “interesting” in quotes, because that is a vast understatement. And he has done things such as attempting to learn MIT’s four-year computer science curriculum in just 12 months. He’s also learned four languages in a year. He’s also the co-instructor of the online program Top Performer, which he developed with one of my fellow productivity spirit animals, Cal Newport, and most importantly, the reason that Scott is here with me today is we’re going to talk about his brand new book, Ultra Learning: Master Hard Skills, Outsmart the Competition, and Accelerate Your Career. Scott, you have no idea how ready I am and excited I am to geek out with you today.

Scott Young: Oh, I’m super excited for it.

Zack Arnold: So, I have a feeling that even though we’ve only scheduled a little over an hour, I’m going to really need you to reign me in, because I have a feeling with 400 dog-eared pages and the three highlighters I had to go through with your book, this could take a while. Your book is really in-depth, there’s a whole lot of various principles and ideas and takeaways. So, the first thing I’m going to tell my audience, it’s for the love of all that is holy. Don’t think that this podcast interview is even remotely enough. You’ve got to check this book out. We’ll talk more about that in the end, but I think before getting to the book itself, we need context. I always want to understand not just the message, but the messenger, and the messenger that’s teaching us about alter learning, in this case, you has a really, really interesting story that led to the development of this process and writing this book. So, what the hell is going on with doing MIT’s program and 12 months and learning four languages? Like, how did you get into this in the first place?

Scott Young: Yeah, so as I talk about in the book, the kind of real initiator for me was actually from struggling with learning. So, I was living in France, I was in college, and I was going on exchange, and I was trying to learn French, and I was working really hard at it. I wouldn’t say that, you know, I was terrible by any means, but it was definitely the feeling that a lot of people do when they go and they start learning another language, so you’re like, oh, well, you know, most people speak to me in English all the time, including my French friends, and you know, I’m.. it’s just takes a long time to learn these languages, and I was sort of complaining about this situation with a friend from home, and he said, “Well, have you heard of Benny Lewis? And I was like, “Who’s Benny Lewis? And he told me about this guy’s website, and he was doing these projects, which he called these fluent in three months challenges, where he’d go to a new destination and try to learn as much as possible of the language in three months, often reaching fairly impressive levels, and so I was kind of blown away. I was sort of like, well, what’s what’s up with this guy? Like, I’m working really hard, I’ve been here for longer than three months, I’m not anywhere close to what I would consider to be fluent. So, what is this guy doing, and how does he understand learning languages in a way that I don’t? And so I actually got to meet him. This was sort of early on. Now he’s fairly famous, but at the time he was still fairly unknown, and I got to meet him. And the thing that I discovered was it wasn’t just some kind of method or tactic, and I’m sure we’re going to talk about a lot of those, because there are lots of little methods and tactics, but moreover it was just a philosophy of how he approached learning in a particular language learning, where he just approached it by taking these sort of aggressive projects, compressing a lot of learning into a short period of time, but also he was sort of fearless, he was just jumping into having conversations very early on, whereas for most of us, you know, we spend years in the classroom studying learning vocabulary before we timidly try to have that first conversation with someone, and so this was sort of one of my first exposures to this world of ultra learning, or you know, as I sort of described in the book, of people who take on difficult self-directed learning projects, often with kind of crazy and impressive results, and so I sort of talk in the book a little bit about this sort of initial inspiration, not only of him learning languages and approaching it with this kind of intensity, but also this whole idea of kind of doing challenges in the first place, like this had just never occurred to me before, that you could try out, you know, some kind of challenge where you set some timeframe, some particular goal for yourself, you do some research, you figure out how you’re going to do it, and then you go out and do it, and so the first big project I did was the one that you mentioned, this am I. Challenge, which was right after I graduated from university, I decided that I wanted to learn computer science, but instead of going back to school and learning computer programming and spending another four years and taking out student loans and living in a dorm room and blah blah blah, I just decided, you know what, I would like to do instead is MIT has posted a lot of their classes, the resources for their classes, so the lectures, the assignments, the exams, the solution keys online for free. So I thought it would be exciting to try to do it a different way, in this case, by trying to learn it using their free material online, and I set myself sort of somewhat, somewhat ambitious target of trying to do it in 12 months. So this was sort of my starting point with this, and having done that project, it really convinced me that a lot of the ways we’ve been taught to think about learning and how to approach projects, that there’s a lot of things that we can do that maybe we haven’t had that personal experience, so we just think it’s impossible for us, and so writing this book was trying to synthesize not only my own story but stories from other people like Benny Lewis, and other people have done way crazier projects than mine, and try to figure out, well, what are the principles behind learning like this, so that other people can do stuff like this too.

Zack Arnold: I find it funny that when you’re talking about the specifically the project of learning MIT’s four year computer science curriculum, and you know, a year, you kind of laughed it off, and said, well, you know, it’s somewhat of an ambitious goal. I’m like, somewhat seriously, like doing MIT in four years is crazy for most people, and there’s such a tiny percentage of people that could ever do that period. You’re like, “No, I’m going to do it in 25% of the time. And then you’re, you know, so humble. Oh yeah, it was.. it was somewhat, you know, ambitious. Sure, whatever.

Scott Young: Well, one thing I will say, so I’ll make two little points about that, just to make it clear that it’s not just false modesty. So, the first thing is that a lot of people think that because only a small percentage of people get into MIT, that only a small percentage of people could learn MIT’s curriculum. Those are not necessarily the same facts. So, MIT is extremely selective at who they admit, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you couldn’t learn from an MIT class, even if you were an average student. Now, whether or not you could do it fast or slower, that’s going to really depend on your background and your aptitude, and all sorts of other factors, including the method that you’re using. But I think it’s a misnomer that just because MIT students are super, super smart means that you need to be super, super smart to necessarily learn the content that is taught at MIT. The second thing that I would say, as a little absurd addition to that, is that part of the reason I was able to do it in a shorter period of time was because of how I decided to approach it. So, if I were a traditional MIT student with all the constraints that went with it, I think it would have been very difficult for me to complete it in the time frame that I did. So, part of the reason that I was able to complete it faster is because the program that I was doing, the approach that I took, basically reduced and boiled down the curriculum to its essence. So my goal was to pass the final exams and do the programming projects, but that also meant that, you know, I could watch the lectures at one and a half times the speed, and if I got stuck, I could pause and rewind, and if I was doing assignments, I didn’t have to do them perfectly and send them in for grading and get feedback a week later. I could do them one question at a time, following along with the solution to quickly learn from examples. So there were a number of ways that I think that if you take on these sort of ultra learning projects or self-directed learning projects, you can kind of challenge some of the assumptions that you have about how you have to learn things, and that can sometimes mean that you’re able to either get what you want faster by omitting things that you don’t care about, or even just covering the same material and learning it a bit faster, because you can do something in a more flexible way.

Zack Arnold: Well, and I think it’s interesting to bring up the word assumptions as well, because when you first hear about this, if it let’s say that we’re in a blurb, right, and people didn’t have the opportunity to hear your voice and kind of hear the preamble and understand the context, they say, “Oh, man, Scott Young must be a genius and Benny Lewis must be a genius. That’s amazing that they were able to do that in such a short period of time, but I can’t do that, I’m not that smart, right? So, talk to me a little bit about that, because I don’t want the question for somebody to have, which is the wrong question. Oh, how did you learn MIT in 12 months? It’s, how can I take those principles and apply them to what I want to learn, and they first need to understand they can do it.

Scott Young: Yeah, so I think you, you’re absolutely right, you’ve hit the nail on the head. If we’re ever talking about a specific project, well, of course, there’s going to be mixtures of talent and intelligence and things that you can’t control, you know? Maybe someone has the opportunity to, you know, spend a bunch of money on tutors, and you can’t afford that, so it’s not going to work for you, or maybe someone is, you know, just born really, really smart, and so they’re going to be able to do things a little better. But one of the things that I found when I was researching this book is that there are a lot of common principles of learning that really apply to anyone. So these are human universals, these are just how our brain works, and it just turns out to me that sometimes by chance and sometimes by design, when you look at these people who are very effective learners, they are just.. it happens, it turns out they are following a lot of these principles. So, yes, it can be the case that someone is, you know, a little better than you, and that’s why they’ll learn a little faster, and I think that’s particularly true if you have to hold every single constraint. Constant, so if you have to do it exactly the same as someone else, well, then obviously the difference is probably going to be based on your intelligence, but in real life, because there’s so many different ways that you can pursue learning skills, often the method you choose does really matter, and so the best example of that I can give is the language learning. So I was talking about how I kind of came to this in this moment of frustration, where I was struggling with French, and I’ve been working on it for a while, and I was studying hard, and certainly I’m the same person. I wasn’t any less intelligent or more intelligent there, but I was having difficulty with it, and it was recognizing, oh, there were some strategic mistakes I made in how I kind of not only was approaching learning generally with learning French, but also approaching my environment that were holding me back, and so that led to this other project, which you mentioned briefly, which is that I went with a friend, and this friend had no experience learning languages through traveling before, and the two of us, we went to four different countries, and basically did what I did in France, but instead of spending a year doing sort of, you know, trying to learn it the normal way of learning a language, we were only spending three months in each country trying to learn the language, and the way that we were more successful with it is that we used an approach I called the no English rule, which meant that when we landed in a country, we would only speak in the language we’re trying to learn with the people we met and with each other, and essentially what that meant is that put us on a different path? So, when you normally go into a country, you spend most your time speaking to people in English, and that forms a network of friends and people around you that just speak to you in English all the time. And then that means every single time you want to practice, you have to push outside this bubble or push against what is most natural. Whereas, if you just go with immersion from day one, you go on a different path, where everyone speaks to you in the language you’re trying to learn, and really you’re amassing tons and tons of practice, but it’s a lot easier. So, these are these kind of little tweaks and adjustments that you can make, and it’s not that I was any more or less intelligent learning Spanish than French, but in reality I probably learned as much Spanish or more in that three month period of time than I did in a whole year in France, so it wasn’t that I got four times smarter, I just used a more effective method.

Zack Arnold: Well, and clearly the only reason it was more effective is because it was another Romance language, so it’s not like you could use this and apply to, I don’t know, like Mandarin Chinese, right?

Scott Young: Well, yeah, we actually, so what we did is we went to Spain and then we went to Brazil to learn Portuguese, China to learn Mandarin Chinese, and create a learn Korean, and of course, if you’re learning Mandarin Chinese, it’s going to be different than learning Spanish, and so I’m not there to quit, equate every language and the difficulty therein, but this basic method, this basic strategy of how to approach learning it proved useful, even there, and that’s a situation where I think it’s even easier to get into that English bubble, like I know people that have lived in Spain or France, and they’ve lived there for like four or five years, and they’re like, “Oh, yeah, you know, I should have been doing this when I let.. when I first moved here. You know, I would tell them of online project, and they’re like, “Well, now I can speak Spanish, but it took me a long time. It took me a couple years, whereas I went to China and Korea, and you tell people this, and they’re like, “I’ve been here for two decades, and I still don’t speak the language, so there’s, there’s some. In some cases, using the right method is not just about doing something more efficiently, but it’s the difference between being able to do it at all and not being able to do it. So, this is again, I think a lot of people will focus on talent and focus on intelligence, but really missing out how much diversity there is in the method that you apply to learn something,

Zack Arnold: yeah. And method is the key word here, and this is the reason that I was so excited about this. And to be honest, it’s a little embarrassing if I had, like, a webcam that captured this. You sent the email, and I get a lot of emails from authors and bloggers and whatever, and I’m sure you get a lot of the same. You have a much larger audience than I do, so you know what it’s like to get all these cold solicitations. But I got yours, I’m like, oh my god, Scott Young wants me to read his book. Oh my god, just like respond, it was like a little girl, right? Because I love systematizing everything, that’s kind of my key, is like I really enjoy helping people figure out what does the path look like to achieve really difficult goals, and what I realized going through your book is I’m like, oh my god, this is basically what I’ve been doing my whole life, and I thought I was this crazy outlier, but there’s no way I could have explained it as clearly as succinctly as you. And what I realized is that my entire life right now is a giant ultra learning project, and my ultra learning projects, for almost the last two years now, has been training to become an American Ninja Warrior, so I decided around the age of 38 little after my 38th birthday, with no gymnastics experience, parkour experience, ninja experience of any time. I just had found out that I was a little bit over 200 pounds for the first time in my life. 39 inch waist, two young kids working behind a computer for roughly 50 to 60 plus hours a week. I know it would be a good idea. I’m American Ninja Warrior. Yeah, let’s do that right. And what I realized is that I was systematically breaking this giant picture, this giant vision that seemed impossible, into these little tiny steps. And as I started to go through your book, I’m like, holy crap, this is the exact system I’m using. Thing, I just didn’t know that this is what I was doing, right? So I really want to get into the what, and I want to get into the how, but because I’m a verified, and I’ve talked about this with Gretchen Rubin, I’m a questioner. The first question I always want to answer is why, and there’s a little brief section of your book that really stood out to me that I think is going to be really big for my audience specifically, and it applies to most people nowadays, but this is a huge complaint that I have from people that work in Hollywood and work in creative industries, and you say that a four-year degree used to be an assurance of a decent job, but now it’s barely a foot in the door. The best careers demand sophisticated skills that you’re unlikely to stumble upon by chance, and I know people that spend hundreds of 1000s of dollars for film degrees from USC and AFI, and I went to University of Michigan, and they walk out and they’re like, I never actually learned anything that’s going to get me a job, so it’s on you to educate yourself. So, let’s explain why the process of ultra learning is so important.

Scott Young: The way that I think about it, is that there’s kind of what I’ll call the head case and the heart case for why to care about this, and so I’ll start with the, the sort of logical, you know, rational kind of approach of why this is important, because you know, for a lot of people, when you say learning, they think back to that unpleasant experience that they had in school, and they’re like, ooh, you know, maybe, maybe that’s something that’s for someone else, that’s not for me. And the reason I want to stress, no, it is for you, is because this is not something that is just affecting one person or one industry. This is something that’s affecting the entire world. And so there is this really interesting set of research done by the MIT economist David Autor on what he calls skill polarization. So we all know that income inequality is rising, that you know the rich are getting richer. This is something that we hear on the news every single day, but Arter has dug into the research and finds that there’s actually a little bit of a more nuanced picture, starting from I believe it was around the 1980s but it might be even a little later than that, where what is happening is that instead of just having, you know, just inequality across the board, we’re actually seeing two different effects, where at the bottom part of the income spectrum it’s getting compressed and at the top it’s getting stretched out, and the right way to think about this is that if you imagine just some sort of, like, you know, curve of all the people earning different incomes, it’s kind of like the middle has just gotten squeezed out, so there are people who were previously earning middle class jobs doing things that you already know are like jobs that are disappearing, things like, you know, factory workers and travel agents and bookkeepers, and all these sorts of jobs that required a middle amount of skills, maybe knowledge work, but they are, you know, not something that is extremely, extremely hard to get, and what’s happening is that these are being replaced by computers, they’re being outsourced overseas, they’re being sent elsewhere, and what’s happening is that the jobs that remain tend to be one of either two types, either it’s a job that requires low skills and is lowly paid, so it’s, you know, something like being a cashier or being a customer service agent, where you have to actually interact with people, you can’t just replace that with a computer, but at the same time, it’s not going to be a great career for you to pursue. It’s not going to be something as super lucrative or rewarding. And on the other hand, the new jobs that are being created are increasingly complicated. They require more skills, they require more technology, more software. You need to be good at a lot of things that are rapidly changing in a way that they weren’t in your parents or your parents’ parents’ generation, and so this is sort of creating a picture where the economist Tyler Cowen calls it averages over, where being in the middle and this kind of whole idea we have of, you know, the American dream, and just you can just go to college and graduate, and if you just work hard, you’re going to have, you know, the nice house and the two cars, and the, you know, leave it to beaver kids, and this picture is kind of evaporating, because what has been replaced with it is you must either work really hard and be in a position where learning is constant, or you’re going to fall out and fall into the bottom, and so this is a little bit of a bleak picture, but I hoped with the book that it might kind of sound the alarm that there is some kind of hope, and that hope is that if you take advantage of your own capacity to learn and you learn how to teach yourself hard skills, then you can kind of stay above water and maybe even thrive in this new environment, and so this is sort of the rational case for why someone should consider ultra learning, is because this kind of ability to teach yourself hard skills is going to be essential. It’s not going to be an option for people who want to have a great career, but then on top of that, I feel like the ability to teach yourself new things, the ability to again take that self-image of yourself, like you just discussed, about, you know, you’re overweight and you’re you’re out of shape, and you’re sitting behind a computer all day, and you’re going to be like, you know what, I’m going to become an American Ninja Warrior, or similarly, you know what, learning another language, or learning a skill like public speaking, or programming, or art, or all of these things that you feel like are difficult for you to do, or you don’t see yourself as being able to do them, once you accomplish them, once you’re able to learn that. Skill, the world just opens up for you, and so for me, in selling this book, and talking about the message that you know I’ve really devoted my last 10 years of my life to, it’s been this: it’s not just been, you know, how do you learn some practical skills to improve your career, but how do you approach things in a way where the world opens up to you, and it’s not just something that you have to go to school and spend 10s of 1000s of dollars for, but something that you can really learn anything you want to, and get good at anything you want to, if you have the right approach.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and like you say in the book, it’s like those things will bring you deep satisfaction, they’ll bring you self-confidence. And I think that for me, when I first started, the vision was, want to be on the show, how cool that be? You know, I can be on, like, I don’t really care about the whole being on TV thing, that was never really what it was about, but there it was more about the end goal, and then all right, well, the process is going to help me teach new things that I learn along the way to my audience, and what I realized is the more and more I did it, I really was enjoying the process so much I didn’t care about the outcome at all, but the biggest takeaway that I’ve gotten from it, which I think is really in alignment with what you say, the head case versus the heart case, is as I start, and I haven’t been on the show, but I’ve been on the course as the tester, so I didn’t get picked from the casting department, but that’s really more about am I a TV personality, not am I athletically ready for the show, but I ran on the actual course as a tester, I didn’t do great, but I mean after watching the show I did better than a lot of people on the show, but what I realized is that as I started accomplishing these things that two years ago would have been a pipe dream, I kept asking myself the same question, What else have I been telling myself my whole life that I can’t do, and that question pervades every area of my life, because once I overcome something really difficult that I would have said, “Oh, I could never do that. Wait a second, I’ve been lying to myself this whole time. What else can I do now? And that has completely changed my perspective on my entire life, not just, “Oh, look, I’ve lost some weight, or “I can now do an eight foot lachee. It’s, I can become a completely different person, and I have the tools set to do it. That’s what’s so exciting to me about this process?

Scott Young: Yeah, and you know what, it’s so funny because you said this to me when before we started the show, and I thought that was so interesting, is that you said when you were reading, you’re like, oh wow, you know, this is something that I’m doing, and this is really what I want to stress, is because when I was doing the research and finding these principles, these are not, you know, completely alien techniques and methods, I mean, some of them are a little bit extreme or a little bit unusual, or maybe not the thing that you would do by default, but what I found again and again is that people often read the book and they say, oh, you know what, when I was learning X, that they got really good at, I was doing this, and so what I try to do with the book is not really to tell you something that is completely outside the scope of anything you’ve ever experienced before, and it’s something for you, totally for other people, but rather to show people you know, you know, those projects that you did, or those things that you learned in the past that you were really good at, whether it was, you know, dancing, or music, or you know, you learned guitar, or you learned art, or you learned, you know, some skill that you were able to be successful with. What were the principles? Why were you successful with it? So that maybe you can apply to things that you find challenging right now, or you’re not quite sure how to tackle. So it was really funny having this conversation with James Clear, who I know that you’ve discussed before, and he was telling me about how you know he was going through this approach. He’s like, “Oh, wow, this is exactly what I was doing as I was improving my writing skill, like, I just didn’t conceptualize it this way, and so my hope is that people will go through the book, they’ll see the principles, and they’ll see them just as these fundamental ingredients they can use at the process of getting better at anything, not just something you know that they can apply to learn some weird subject that doesn’t matter for their life.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and that’s why I wanted to bring that up, because I think it can listening to your story, like, again, talking about this idea of, oh, they must be geniuses, these people that are doing it. This is actually very accessible, and I think a lot of people that are interested in furthering their learning skills, and I think for most of my audience it would be some form of technical or creative skill, software, whether it’s learning Abbott or Adobe Premiere, or, you know, like graphic software, being a colorist or whatever it is, I know that we constantly have to keep learning new technology and software because it’s always changing, but at its core we’re all storytellers, so it’s about how can I learn this specific tool to get better at what I’m doing. So, if you build homes, well, damn it, they keep coming out with new hammers and new saws, and I’m still a home builder, and that’s what I do, and who I am, but for the love of God, every week it’s a new tool, right? And it’s just really hard to keep up with all of it, unless you have the system, right? And what I love about this process is it’s very accessible, and I think most people would say, oh, in some way, shape, or form, I’m I’m kind of doing a little bit of this, but this is going to make me better, because I understand it now, right, so that’s why I think it’s so important to go into this, and also mention where you say it’s principles, it’s not steps, and I like that even better, because if somebody were to say, “Wait, he says step four is this, that doesn’t work for me, “Oh crap, this is not the right system, but because it’s principles, you can adapt it to whatever makes the most sense, so when I looked at. My journey of Ninja Warrior, and I kind of took it as a transparency and overlaid it over your principles. I was like, most of this applies a couple of things, maybe don’t apply one to one, but it’s enough that it really makes sense. And I think that for just about anybody, it doesn’t matter what it is that you want to learn. I think your first principle is one of the most, if not the important one, and that is meta learning, or drawing the map to actually understand what it is that you’re going to be doing. So, I want to talk next about the meta skill of meta learning, and what the hell does it mean every time people add the word meta on top of something.

Scott Young: Yeah, so meta learning just is a kind of fancy way of saying learning about learning, and in this case, in this particular principle, the way I’m talking about is kind of in two different ways. So, one is a really simple thing that you can do right now, which is, whenever you’re going to learn something, spend, you know, maybe an hour or two, depends on the length of the project you’re considering, or the thing you’re undertaking. Spend a little bit of time online and just ask, you know, what’s the best way to learn it? What books are out there? What classes are out there? What resources could I use? What are the methods to learn it? What do people say about applying different methods, and it’s amazing to me how many people gravitate towards the first thing that comes to mind. So, they don’t do any research, they just do the first thing that comes to mind, and sometimes that’s a really good method. And then they learn it really well, and they just happen to have a great teacher, textbook, or instructor, or, you know, set of tutorials online, and they were successful, and they’re, you know, great. I’m so smart. And then other times people just end up with a dud, or they end up with something that doesn’t work for them, and then they say, “Oh, I can’t learn this. And so one of the first things to do is just to do a little bit of research. The way I like to think of it is a little bit like packing a suitcase for a trip. You don’t have to pack your entire house, you don’t have like 18 bags when you’re going for a weekend getaway, but in the same sense, if you show up and you’ve got a month-long trip ahead of you and you haven’t packed a single item in your suitcase, then you have to buy everything on the road, and that itself can be a frustrating and discouraging process in the experience of traveling. So that would be the first step. The second thing I like to talk about, and I talk about it in the book, is how you can draw a map of what is actually involved in learning this skill, so if we’re going to look at something like learning a language, how does it actually break down? What are the things I’m going to have to like learn and remember, and what are the things that I’m going to have to get good at? What are the things I’m going to have to understand? What are the procedures I’m going to have to do? So you might start breaking it down into, okay, there’s some grammar here, there’s some vocabulary learning, there’s some pronunciation, and you start breaking down, and as you map things out, you start to get a lay of the land, you start to get, figure out, oh, this thing that I thought was so difficult and nebulous, and I had no idea how to learn it, it starts breaking down into something that’s actually manageable, and that’s particularly true if the thing you’re trying to get better at is itself kind of abstract, so you were talking about how you know a lot of the people listening here see themselves as storytellers, that that is a big part of what they’re fundamentally trying to do, whether or not it’s through some, you know, specific technical aspect, but getting better at the art of telling stories is itself a skill, and so how does that break down, and what are the tools that would be useful for it? What are the components of that skill that you can improve that you can work on, and so drawing that map is sort of in part it’s trying to identify resources and things that you can use, and then it’s also this process of breaking down this sort of impossible task of getting better at something that seems really difficult and complex into something where you can say, oh, I just have to do this, this, and this, and I will get better with time.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and I see this over and over and over in my coaching practice, in my online courses. And, frankly, if people knew how to do this, I wouldn’t have a business, because my entire business model is helping people identify the path to where they want to get. So, they say, I know I need to learn this, and this, and this, but I also need a mentor, and I need to talk to this person, but I need to learn this skill. But should I do this first or that first? I’m like, everybody take a breath, slow down. We can do one thing at a time. So let’s work on prioritizing all these things that need to get done, because when you’re looking at something specific, like, you know, American Ninja Warrior, for example, everybody’s path to get there is different. Same thing in my industry, where people will always say and be so discouraged by the fact that it’s so easy to become a doctor or a lawyer, because you know exactly what you need to do. If you go into Google, how to become a doctor, you’re going to get five bullet points to tell you the entire map done, no research necessary, you just need to work your ass off, and it’s going to cost you a boatload of money. But it’s a really, really simple, easy to draw map, and everybody knows what it looks like in a creative industry. There is no map, and people become very overwhelmed by that. So, I help them take this giant vision and this concept to break it down into very, very small, manageable steps, so you don’t get terrified by the elephant. You eat it one tiny bite at a time, and this meta learning process helps you do that. And what is this kind of goes back to the question, why is meta learning and ultra learning so important. This is a perfect example, where just yesterday somebody in my coaching program that I’ve been working with for a couple of months now, they had sent me a Slack message saying, hey, there’s this course on Avid, and Avid Media Composer is the leading piece of software for editors in my industry, and I’m sure I’m. Gonna get multiple messages saying Avid’s not the leader, Adobe Premier is a leader, like, whatever. I’m not getting into semantics, people know what I’m talking about. But he said, ‘Listen, I think my next step is probably taking this course on Avid ACSR tech certification. It’s a $3,000 course that’s 24 hours of instruction, and because that was kind of the next shiny object, well, certainly this is going to move me forwards, and all I had to do is send one single Slack message that said nobody on this side of our industry cares about that certification, that’s if you want to become a tech expert in customer service and you want to work for companies and be their troubleshooting expert, but had he not reached out to an expert like me, and I mean he’s in my mentorship program, so that’s what I’m there for, but Hadi just said, “Oh, this looks good. This is the first thing I came across. Sure, $3,000 this is going to be amazing for my career, but you have to reach out to people and make sure you’re understanding what does your path look like, what does this other person’s path look like, what are the fundamental steps that are in that are similar, and how can I create my own path that’s still kind of doing the same things

Scott Young: Well, and this is a big reason why I decided to write the book in terms of these principles, or sort of these fundamental concepts of learning that people can understand and apply to different situations, because a lot of times what is the right way to learn something really depends on what you’re trying to accomplish and where you are already, and so part of the thing that I find challenging is that people want to find tactics, they want to know, okay, what are the, you know, top 10 things that I should do to learn x, and the problem is that it’s really hard to say, for instance, that you know x is always bad for learning this subject, or y is always good, because it really depends on the order in which you learn things, and often I find what makes someone a successful earner or an unsuccessful learner is the order they do things. So, you know, we’re talking about mastering skills. Often it is not just, okay, well, I have to get good at everything, right? So it doesn’t matter what I start with, because I have to get good at everything. Often, what really matters is what was the thing you got good at first that allows you to do that other thing that allows you to do that other thing, and so that is why when we’re talking about, let’s say, learning a language, well, you might say to yourself, “Well, if I want to become fluent, I’m going to have to learn all the words anyway. So, why does it matter which order I learn them? Well, the reason why is, if you learn them in the wrong order, you learn them in the wrong contexts, you’re not going to be able to either activate the knowledge when you need it, or you might have to be learning for years or decades before you can even have your first practice situation, so a lot of learning is this sort of bootstrapping process of figuring out, okay, how do I build that foundation, how do I get to the next step?

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and that’s something that I go through with people over and over and over again when we figure out the sequencing process, which is actually something I want to do an even deeper dive into here, because I don’t think that it’s something you go into super deep in the book, but I kind of want it to be like a value-added bonus, and that’s some of the material that you talk about in your top performer course, because what you’ve also systematized is the process of reaching out to experts and doing email outreach and doing these interviews, which I was already building into an entire online course, and I’ve been teaching it to people. I’m like, oh, this is interesting. Scott Young reached out to me and wanted me to learn about his book, so let me do kind of a deep dive into top performer. Holy crap, this is exactly what I’m working on, right? So it’s like it’s just like this brain brain meld, right? And I think that this is a, this is so important for people to understand that if you sequence it in the wrong order, sometimes you can be incredibly efficient with your time, but dear Lord, are you being ineffective, right? So, if somebody says, “I want to learn something, who is it that I’m reaching out to, and how do I actually start getting the right information in the first place, and why would they ever respond to me?

Scott Young: So, one of the things that now, as you’re, as you mentioned, this is a big part of our top performer course, especially because we’re focused on how do you get better at kind of nebulous career skills, and so very often the big question is just figuring out what is the thing that you’re supposed to learn that you know when you deal with someone to quote one of the people who get went through our course, how do you, how do you do deliberate practice to get better at work when what you do is just, you know, deal with emails all day. What is the.. what is the.. to quote another person, what are the like the music scales that you practice, the musician? What is the equivalent of that if you were a knowledge worker? And I think this is not a trivial question to answer. So, when we were doing early pilots of that course, one of the big mistakes that we saw people making is that they would pursue what we call kind of like fun hobby projects, where they’d go off and they learn some skill, but that it doesn’t really have a direct connection with performance of their job, and it was just because it was kind of low hanging fruit, they could reach out and pluck off and say, oh, you know, I’m going to read these 18 books on design because I’m an architect and I want to get better at architecture, whereas if they had really dug into talking to architects and figured out how their career work, they might identify a completely different set of skills. So, this isn’t to scare people, this isn’t to say, well, you know, if you pick the wrong thing to learn, you’re, you know, you’re going to ruin your entire life, but rather, because obviously I feel like just learning things in general and cultivating this learning mindset is what’s important, but at the same time one. The techniques that I do talk about in the book is what we call the expert interview method, and basically the advice is pretty simple. If you want to accomplish some goal, so whether that’s reach a certain career milestone or learn a particular set of skills, it makes sense to spend a little bit of time talking to someone who’s done it before, and this is useful for a couple reasons: one, it can dispel some illusions about things that matter and things that don’t. So, one of the things that I think a lot of people can get stuck with is that obviously we’re talking about learning a lot of technical skills, and that’s very important, I think, early on in your career, because that’s often what people will hire you to do, is to work with technical things, but as you get better in your skills, often the thing that you need to do is a little bit more abstract. It often involves communicating and working with other people and being able to deliver certain results in a more abstract way. So, it’s a little bit harder to say, you know, when you’re already in your career. Okay, what do I need to get good at? Okay, I need to get good at this software. And so, what we recommend doing is this expert interview method, where you can kind of look at what is the actual career trajectory of the people you’re interested in, and then see what kinds of projects did they do, what were the jobs they had before, what were the skills that they would have had to get good at to progress along in their career, or to progress along in whatever thing that they’re a master at now. And so I’ve done this myself. So before I wrote this book, I had some interviews with Cal Newport, who is, you know, someone that I’ve worked with a lot, but also someone who has written a lot more books than I’ve have, and has become recently quite successful with some of his more recent books, and so I wanted to figure out, okay, what was his career path for writing, and to be a very successful writer that people take seriously, and so that was very instructive for me, because it helped me avoid a lot of pitfalls in writing my book, in making sure that you know I did the work that I needed to do, and make sure I improve the skills that need to be improved in my own career as a writer. So, this process of sequencing, of deciding which order to learn things, is very important, and although I don’t talk too, too much about the expert interview method, that is something that we mentioned as a tactic, but it’s probably only a couple pages in the book. One thing that I do talk about with sequencing in the book, which I think is incredibly important, is this principle of directness, which is basically that if you are going to learn something, it really makes sense to not only think of how you’re going to use it, but start applying it in a concrete situation, really close to the beginning of when you start learning a skill, which a lot of people don’t do, and so they spend years studying something in a formal classroom environment, never apply it, and then you get the situation that we talked about earlier, where you spent hundreds of 1000s of dollars on a fancy education, and then employers are like, yeah, but you can’t do anything important, so we won’t hire you,

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and it’s funny because directness, if I were to pull out one principle where I wanted the bulk of our interview to be about one, it’s probably a combination of directness and meta learning, and I want to jump into directness, but I want to say one other small thing first about this expert interview process, because I think this is so important, and this is yet another one of those areas where I really felt special, because I thought I had found this super, super secret ingredient that nobody knew about, where I was teaching people that part of their process of sequencing what they needed to do was not just learn the skills, but they had to research the lifestyle of the person that they wanted to emulate. I was like, this is brilliant. Oh, wait, this is lesson three in your course, I’m not as smart as I thought I was. So, let’s talk a little bit more about that, because a big part of meta learning and moving a career forwards, or you know, this whole process is, do I actually want to do this on a day to day basis, or do I just want the result.

Scott Young: Well, it’s funny, we were talking about education, and it just seems to me that there’s so many things about our educational system that are either embedded at a cultural level or practically institutionalized, which are so contrary to how I think we ought to do things, so one of them is simply that we expect students, we expect people when they’re 18 to decide what they want to do with their life without having any exposure to what that means, and so people choose majors because they liked a teacher in their first year of university, but that actually has nothing to do with whether you’re going to like the jobs that result or whether even that’s a good thing to measure, and whether there even are jobs that will result from it. And so I think it’s unfortunate because a lot of people don’t do that prior research, they don’t actually look into what is the job actually going to be like. And so one of the things that we talk about in our course is identifying people and examining their lifestyle, not just so that you can choose which industry to enter, which job to get, but also so that you can kind of get a sense of not only what are your options, but how you can build the skills to be able to negotiate that kind of lifestyle. See, the thing I feel a lot of people do, and this is particularly true in kind of corporate or office environments, is that they dangle these little promotions at you, so you know you’re, you’re a manager now. Well, okay. Well, now you’re going to be a regional manager, you’re going to be a vice president, or you’re going to be this, and they dangle these things, which have a little bit of a pay increase, but usually a lot more responsibility, a lot more hours, and people never really think about what kind of life they want to lead, they don’t really think about what kind of career they want to. Make what kind of work they want to do, what their lasting impact they want to be is, as well as you know, trivial things like how much money do you make and how often do you have vacation and what kind of lifestyle you have, and so I find that the people who do have these really enviable lifestyles, and we talked a bit about it a little bit in top performer as well as in my book, where people, you know, they work for themselves, or they work from home. Or I remember talking with one software engineer, and he was saying, you know, what, I can work for three months of the year and take the other nine months off if I wanted to, and that would be enough to earn enough money to live on this. And this is the kind of thing that people think is crazy. How can you take nine months of vacation a year? But these things are possible if you have skills that are valuable enough to be able to kind of command that respect in the marketplace, and the people who say, “Oh, that’s impossible, it’s usually because they’re doing a skill or they have a skill level which is easily commodified and replaceable, and so, yeah, they do get treated badly by people, because the idea is that, well, we could find someone else to fill your shoes immediately if you don’t want to do this this work,

Zack Arnold: And this is a process that I’ve gone through, both on a superficial, everyday level, but also on a very emotional level, and it’s really kind of the core foundation of this whole program, and I’ve told the story more than once, but I spent my whole life, from basically about nine years old, saying I want to work in the movies, that would be so cool to work on movies, and then I got to college and started to learn about directing and writing and editing, and like, ooh, editing, that seems like it’s a good fit. And at the time, I didn’t realize that it aligned very well with my personality, because I’m very introverted, I can get into states of hyper focus fairly easily, and I kind of like to be left alone to do my own thing on my own schedule. So, being an editor is perfect, and I’m also very much a high achiever and a recovering workaholic, and for me it was well, if I’m going to be an editor, well, then I just need to be the best editor ever and win all the Oscars, right? That was kind of the image in my mind, but as I started to get more sophisticated, get more success, and get to fairly high levels in this industry, I started to meet more people that were in that place, where if I had said, you know what, in 10 or 15 years I can be that person, I started to learn about their lifestyle, and I said, “Oh my god, I don’t want to do this anymore. I would rather see my kids grow up. If my choices are, I can be at my kids’ high school graduation and say, ‘Wow, they have an amazing tuition fund, but I don’t think I saw them more than 10 days for the last 10 years. That’s not the lifestyle that I want. What I want us to be available to my kids. I want to see them grow up. I want to be home when they get home from school, help them with their piano homework. Well, what the hell does that mean about me as a person? That’s not even my identity. I’m supposed to be the guy that wins the Oscar. That was a huge emotional shift for me. But then I said, let me define the lifestyle. All right, well, it seems like if I’m really big into trying to find some level of work-life balance, and this is something I talk about a lot on this program. What’s a way for me to still make a living, and like you said, that nine months and three months thing? I’m now at the place where I edit for four to five months a year, and only take on projects that I’m really passionate about. So, the current show that I’m doing, Cobra Kai, is one that I pursued and said, “Oh my god, I would love to work on that show, and I only do it for four to five months a year. The rest of the year spent doing the online courses, the online coaching, but even when the online program started, I said, What is the lifestyle of this look like? And I had an opportunity to get a fair amount of venture capital and really start to grow this thing, and I had this horrible pit in my stomach, thinking, Wow, I’m about to get hundreds of 1000s of dollars, potentially, to really build this and build a team and start to do marketing publicity. Why do I feel like such.. oh, because this isn’t aligned with the reason I did this in the first place. Because I wanted the freedom and the lifestyle of my time, and it slowed everything to a halt until I really accept that, oh, it isn’t about the money or the success, it’s about the lifestyle, and the more that people do this lifestyle research that I’m working with, they come to these conclusions that, oh, you know, what I thought I wanted to do this, but I don’t, so it’s a really, really huge overlooked part of this process that’s so important.

Scott Young: Well, and the other thing that I also recommend, and so I was talking about this with Cal Newport, because obviously being an academic, which is, you know, one half of his twin careers in writing and academia is a job that is sort of famously stressful, particularly pre-tenure, is something that you know people go crazy working insane hours, these are really smart people, in order to get that, you know, final prize at the end of the tunnel, and what he was saying is he was talking about, I don’t remember her name, but it was this academic who basically, she wrote this sort of confessional, almost, that she wasn’t doing a lot of the things that other people thought that you needed to do, that she wasn’t traveling 80 times a year to present in conferences, she wasn’t doing everything like that, she was quite limited and conservative with how she used her time, and what I think is kind of interesting from that is that there are always the people who are, you know, grinding and working hard and being workaholics, and they often define the culture in their most visible examples, but sort of you’ll talk and you dig in a little bit more, and you’ll meet people who kind of sheepishly admit, oh yeah, no, I didn’t do any of that, and then they’re still quite successful, which to me is really an indicator that it’s not just about how many hours you work or how much faith. Time you make or help you know that you take every single meeting or every call or every little opportunity, but can you really produce remarkable work? And if you can produce remarkable work, you can often translate that into like what you said, where you have a sort of enviable position where you get to do the kinds of projects that you want to work on, and maybe people don’t even realize that you have that lifestyle, because again, the culture that surrounds you really promotes this workaholism. So, for me, a big incentive for ultra learning and doing this kind of work is also focusing people on how do you actually deliver remarkable value in ways that don’t just involve you working 80 hour work weeks. How can you be a value contributor, because you can do things other people can’t do, not just because you will work harder than everyone else.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and that’s one of the things that I hate about the kind of the productivity industry in general, I guess, for lack of a better word, is it’s always about increased efficiency and better systems and getting more done, but it’s never really about being effective, and for some people it is about being effective, but for most it’s about being efficient, and like you said, you look at somebody from the outside and they just assume, oh, well, you’re the Trello guy, and you teach all these Trello courses on systems, and you work on all these shows. Like, how do you balance it all? It’s like, well, because I only edit for four months a year. Like, with television, it’s not like they’re seeing the process, they’re just seeing the end result. They don’t realize that I’m actually spacing this out, and for example, like, kind of one of my secrets, and it’s not a secret at all, because I share as part of my productivity system in general, is that I batch everything. So you’re the fourth podcast that I’ve recorded this week, I’m going to do another five or six next week, and then I’m probably not recording for months, but I’m going to release them one week after another, after another. So again, if somebody were to interview me about the lifestyle of being a podcaster and an online coach and an editor all at the same time. I don’t do them all at the same time. That’s kind of the key, and again, it’s why I keep harping on this idea that the research and interviewing potential mentors, researching experts that have done what you have before you have, is so vitally important, and the skill of being able to reach out to them and get them to respond to you is another huge overlooked skill that people just assume, well, you just send them an email, but there’s so much more to it, you know. But where I want to go now is what we kind of alluded to before, because I think this is one of the biggest areas that, again, is overlooked, and it’s this idea of directness, and this is one where I, if you don’t mind, I’d love you to kind of paraphrase the story that you have in here, because I swear to God, if you replace the word architect with film editor, it’s the exact same thing I see in my industry, so I can’t pronounce his last name, but is it Vatsal?

Scott Young: That, well, he goes by that, that basketball,

Zack Arnold: Okay? So, yes, I would love you to kind of paraphrase his story, because every film editor be like, oh my god, I totally get this problem.

Scott Young: So, this is so funny, because this is like this is a good friend of mine. This isn’t like some, you know, this isn’t some person I trekked in the jungles to find. This is just, you know, I know this story so well because I was there when it was happening about a decade ago. And so, this, my good friend, he was actually the person who went on the trip to learn languages with me. So, there’s a little weird little synchronicity there as well, because we’re quite good friends, and he, he had studied architecture in school, and he had graduated, and it was right at the peak of the Great Recession, and he couldn’t find a job, and so he’s, you know, he came from India, he’s living in Canada, he needs to get a job, or his, you know, work visa will expire, and they’ll deport him, and he’s just sort of like, well, you know, I’ve been studying here, I’ve spent all this money to go to school, and nothing to show for it. And he was very kind of depressed about this, but he’s a, he’s a tenacious person, and so he decided to do something, which a lot of people wouldn’t do. So he sent his resume to hundreds of different places, no response. So he’s like, you know, what, I’m just gonna hustle it, I’m just gonna show up at people’s offices and just be like, hey, I’m gonna speak to whoever’s in charge, and he would tell me stories about how he would go to these people’s offices and the secretary would say, oh yeah, well, he’s not in right now, and he’s like, okay, I’ll just wait, and he would wait in the reception for like hours for the principal of the architecture firm to return, so he’d be like, oh, hey, can you look at my portfolio? Would you hire me? And he went and did this for a couple months, no results. So, I think a lot of people who are in this situation would just be like, oh, you know what, it’s just the economy, it’s just the industry, you just can’t get a job. And this is a very comforting belief to have, because when he looked at all of the people he graduated with, none of them had found jobs yet. All of them had either gotten jobs out of the field, or they’d moved back in with their parents, or they were going to pursue a master’s, so they could kind of kick the can down the road, and like hopefully when the master’s is done, they’ll be able to get a job. And so, and admittedly, this is a bit of an unusual situation. This was the peak of the recession, there were massive layoffs, so it’s not to say that it’s always like this, but you know it is a difficult time, and what he found was when he was talking to people, the sort of little bits of feedback he gets, he realized that the issue wasn’t just that, oh, you know, we’re not hiring, but rather that a lot of these firms were saying, well, we don’t have the luxury of hiring someone that’s going. To be three to six to nine months out of producing valuable work, we need someone who can get on the job and just do the job immediately, because our budgets are tight and we have deadlines, and we’ve already laid off people, so we’re already under a lot of pressure, and so what he decided to do is, you know, what I’m going to get really good at the skills that they actually practice in the architecture firm, so forget what I learned in school, I’m going to actually figure out what matters, and so the first thing he did was he got a job working at a large form print shop. This is the kind of place that makes blueprints, and being able to see blueprints every day, he got quickly to learn. Okay, how did the architects actually put together buildings? How do they do the drawings? What codes do they use? All these little details, and then he spent some time training himself on the software that you use to design buildings, which in this case is the software Revit, and so using that kind of joint knowledge, he made a new portfolio, and this time his, it was a, it was built with the software they actually used, and he made the blueprint, I mean, it was his own design, but he made the blueprint look like the blueprints that they actually make, so when he gave his portfolio, and they opened it up, they were like, oh yeah, this is exactly what we do here. And so he took that portfolio, and he applied to just two jobs, and they gave him a job immediately. They hired him on immediately, and it just goes to show in my mind that a lot of us think, oh, you know, no one will give a chance on me, the market’s really hard, and they never take that introspective stance of why don’t people think I’m valuable, why don’t they think that I would be a useful hire, and that if you go out and acquire those skills, it will make you a useful hire. There’s always people who want to hire you, and it’s just the issue that sometimes you don’t have the skills that people really care about. So this was the story that kind of led into this discussion of directness, which is basically asking a question of, you know, if he did this project was so successful, you know, why didn’t he have an architecture job after four years of school? Like, what was he learning in school to get to that point? So, I think this directness piece of learning the skills that you actually need is so often missing in our discussions of education and career development.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and I don’t want to go too deep into the politics, but I do want to go maybe one lateral or tiny layer deeper to talk about education’s dirty little secrets, because I think this is really, really important for so many people, not just that are starting out, but in my industry specifically, that’s always the excuse, oh, they said that they need this skill and this skill and that skill, but nobody’s teaching that, or that’s not what I learned in school, right? Like you said, it’s very comfortable to use that as an excuse, but the strategy that I teach is most people are going out into the world trying to find a job or build a career using a shotgun. They’re taking the shotgun approach. I teach people how to become snipers, how to use a sniper rifle and get so laser sharp specific that you are wrong for every job except the one that you are perfect for, and they’re like, oh my god, where did you come from? You’re perfect. That’s how I’ve made all of my transitions from various sectors of the industry, where everybody says, oh, you can’t make a transition from trailers to doing features, you can’t go from doing features to TV, you certainly can’t go from being a TV editor to being a health and wellness resource, like that’s crazy. Oh, wait, you’ve done all that. Oh, never mind. But it’s because I use this sniper approach, and I’m so specific. So, let’s talk about what education’s dirty little secret is, and how it applies to directness.

Scott Young: So, this was actually one of, you know, obviously, when you look into research, sometimes you find a study or two that supports a finding. This was just amazing, because I had read this great book by Robert Haskell, I believe the title is called The Transfer to Cognitive Skill, and it just goes through over hundreds of pages, just countless studies, which show that something we expect of learning, that if you learn something in one context, you will be able to transfer it to another context, that this is much harder than most people think, and we have decades of research and study, basically attesting to that fact. So, one of my favorite studies of this is that one study found that students who are economics majors did not do better on questions of economic reasoning than non-economics majors, and I mean, this isn’t even really far transfer, I’m not saying you know how to expect economic students to apply it to, you know, I don’t know, working at a company or saying we’re just talking about can you even reason with the mental tools that you’ve been taught in school, and so this lack of transfer, this difficulty of transfer is pervasive throughout it, and the reason why I believe is that we kind of have the wrong mental metaphor when we think about learning in the first place, so this actually goes back about 100 years, and you know that in the old days, often what they would teach is not terribly useful subjects in school, things like Latin, geometry – these were the common subjects of the day, and it’s easy to laugh at that, like, why teach Latin, it’s, you know, being a tradition and whatnot, but really it was, I did actually have a hypothesis behind it, and the hypothesis was that it didn’t matter what you taught people, that the brain was like a muscle, and if you lift weights with the muscle, you can go lift other things, and so the idea is that if you teach kids how to learn Latin, they will be better at learning other languages, or better at memory, or better at reasoning, and this was. A sort of so-called formal discipline approach to learning, and what we found is that actually learning is extremely specific, so when you learn something, it tends to not only be very specific, so that it doesn’t transfer to other facts or areas very easily, but also that it tends to get stuck in the context that you learn it, so even if it’s exactly the same skill, if it is a different context, you may not activate the knowledge in that situation. So one example I like to point out, which is, you know, pretty trivial, but I think really illustrates this difference, is that I was working with someone, and they weren’t a trained accountant, and we had this issue where we were supposed to be charging sales tax on top of our purchases, but our software wouldn’t let us do that, so we had to kind of like work backwards and calculate what sales tax we should have owed, and it was a little bit complicated, and he was saying, okay, well, the sales tax, let’s say, is 12% he was saying, well, 12% so if we charge $100 then that meant the sales tax was $12 and I was like, well, no, actually not, because you have to do that kind of like one plus x is equal to the thing is equal to $12 and then sort of divide it out, because really the purchase price is a little less than that, so it’s not actually, it’s a little bit more than $88 it’s a little bit less than $12 we have to admit, and the thing was, as soon as you write out the little math formula, he knows algebra, this is something you did in grade eight, and he could just figure out what the exact price is. The difference is that he didn’t recognize that he needed to use that knowledge in this situation, and so a lot of transfer is that our knowledge, even when it is useful in that other context, it stays welded to the situation that we first learned it in, and it’s difficult to pry it off, and so very often when someone has achieved mastery or achieved this level where they can just see hidden connections between things and apply knowledge to diverse domains. It’s often because they’ve actually learned tons and tons of specific things, and so when we’re talking about directness, the right way to think about it is that whatever skill you’re trying to master, you need to pin it down to a concrete situation that you actually care about or very likely it will stay inert in that kind of chamber of knowledge where it doesn’t actually impact the real world or the real work that you’re doing.

Zack Arnold: Well, and I think the other trap that people fall into is the difference between acquiring knowledge and actually practicing and creating skills, right? And that’s kind of what this whole idea of directness is, and the parallel once again, going back to Ninja Warrior, it would be no different than me saying, well, I’m going to read these 10 books that talk all about the process of training for difficult sports. All right, I think I’m ready to go, as opposed to I’ve got no flipping idea how to do this, but I think what I’m going to do is I’m just going to start going to ninja gyms, and I’m going to watch the ninjas train, and then I’m going to approach one of the ninjas and say, “Hey, how did you get here? Right, so going back to this expert interview process, but instead of him just giving me a bullet point list of all of his skills, I started training with him every single week, but it wasn’t a matter of, “Oh, wow, this is too hard for me, I can’t do it. It was, “Hey, I can’t do this yet. Break this down into small pieces, and then I would train every single one of those pieces very directly, which kind of takes us to this next idea of drilling, right? So, you want to drill specific skills, as opposed to I’m training for a ninja warrior, it’s like, no, actually I’m not. Right now, all I’m doing is drilling skills that are going to give me more forearm strength in my left hand, that’s it, right? So, let’s talk a little bit more about drilling, because I think this is a huge part of the directness approach.

Scott Young: Absolutely, so there’s an interesting interplay between the idea of directness and drilling. So, the analogy I’d like to think of is it like directness in basketball is playing basketball games, and drill is doing layup drills, or passing drills, or shooting drills, and the problem is not that, again, this goes back to our idea of sequencing, very, very important is that you can go to a classroom that what they are doing is effectively giving you a kind of drill, right? Like you can think about language classes where they get you to work through grammar exercises, and so it’s easy and tempting, perhaps, to say, “Oh, you know, Scott, I remember that podcast, he said that we have to learn directly, so I should never do a grammar exercise, and that’s not really the lesson I want you to take from this podcast. The idea is that if you only do the grammar exercises and you never do any work to try to integrate it back into the real situation, you might have this kind of inert little bubble of grammar knowledge that never makes way into your speaking and never makes way into your actual ability to use the language you’re learning, and so one of the things I want to stress when I’m talking about this is that you know books and classes and learning from those kinds of static resources, there’s nothing wrong with that. The important thing is just to view them as being supplementary activities that allow you to get better at practicing rather than being the entire activity of learning, and so when we’re talking about drills. This is again an important point that often you might be learning a new skill, and you might find, you know, what actually I could really benefit from a tutorial, or I could really benefit from learning this concept or theory that would help me make sense of these things that I’m trying to do. But again, it’s about sequencing and ordering. So one of the people that I studied. For this book with Benny Lewis, and Benny Lewis told me that one of his major approaches for learning a language is that he would start with a phrase book, so he would just start with a phrase book and just read things out, and that only later, once he had been practicing for a while, would he try to dig into understanding the grammar of why that phrase is set up the way it is, and this is very interesting to me, because how a lot of schools will teach is that they will focus on teaching you the grammar and making you master every little detail, even though you’ve never been in a situation where you’ve had to use it yet, and so I really see drills as being this kind of interplay that you do some direct practice, you actually use the skill in a concrete situation, and then when you struggle with it, you go back to the drawing board and Kate, how can I isolate off components of this? How can I improve my weaknesses? How can I separate out the things that are difficult, get better at them? Okay, now let’s try to reintegrate and see what new problems we come up.

Zack Arnold: And one thing that I want to add to this, and I’m not even sure this is something you talk about too much in the book, but this is a conversation that I think goes right along with this, and I hear this all the time in my industry, and I’m sure it applies to many others, where people say, ‘Oh, you don’t understand, I’ve been doing this for 20 years, right? Well, just because you’ve been playing basketball for 20 years, or editing for 20 years, that doesn’t mean that you’re really good at the individual skills. It just means that practice makes permanent. Practice doesn’t necessarily make perfect, right? Just because I’ve been typing for 30 years doesn’t mean that my word per minute count goes any higher unless I drill the skill of being a more effective and efficient typer. So one way to break this down for people specifically in my industry, when somebody says, How is it that you are such a fast editor, they’ll watch me and they’ll say, You’re so like efficient and like I can barely keep up with what you’re doing on the screen in your fingers, and I say it’s because I drilled specifically all of the keystrokes. Can I remember where they all are? Do it over and over and over and over. Not because I was editing a project, my sole purpose was to get better at those individual keystrokes that I use 500 times a day. How can I better organize my folders and do a deep dive just into organization, which is its own meta skill? How do I organize to be super fast and efficient? So, it wasn’t a matter of, well, the more I edit, the faster I get. Well, no, the more you edit, the more permanent your current skills become, unless you drill specific skills, which both comes back to expert research and the directness approach in doing the drilling. All of these different various principles all meld together, and I’m really hoping helps somebody understand. Oh, I’m starting to see how all of this really starts to gel. Right,

Scott Young: Well, really, what you’re discussing is related to the deliberate practice research by Kay Anders Erickson, where basically he finds that actually spending a lot of time doing something does not make you an expert performer. So, there’s somewhat of an irony that he’s become associated with this 10,000 hour rule that you know to be successful is something we just requires 10,000 hours, where his actual research shows almost the opposite, that plateaus in skill are the default, that while it may require many, many hours, in some cases maybe as many as 10,000 hours to become really good, that just doing something for 10,000 hours doesn’t necessarily make you an expert at it, and so one of the reasons for this, and this is sort of my own kind of private sort of understanding of this theory, is that our brains don’t really like to learn that what we like to do is have some sort of adapted solution that works for us, and when it works and there’s no major problem with what we’re doing, we just kind of stay in that zone of adequacy, so that means that you often, when you’re learning a new skill, there is a sharp learning curve in the beginning as you are not doing it adequately, but then once you are doing it adequately, you tend to just kind of stay on this plateau for a long period of time, and that it’s only through new environments or new positions or new requirements that you get provoked up to new areas, or as we are talking about right now, new drills, or ways of isolating it and focusing on this kind of deliberate practice or deliberate improvement. And so I think the wrong lesson to draw from directness is that, well, you know, again, Scott says work on that skill, so I should just do that skill entirely for the rest of my life, and I will be an expert at it, because while that’s certainly very important, and that’s a key foundational ingredient, it’s also not the case that just by doing something over and over again you get better, because if what you’re doing is adequate, very often improvement doesn’t follow, because you can kind of just get away with the ineffective way of doing it, and you don’t actually have to break it down and do something harder, so drilling is definitely an important part of that step. Although there are other things that are important, I think, for reaching that next level.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and I see this every single day in my industry. This happens all the time, where I jump from show to show to show, and I’ll work with multiple people on a team, and I’m certainly not going to name any names, but I will have people where I’ll see the name on the team, and I’m like, oh my god, I can’t believe I get to work with this person. They’ve worked on some awesome shows, and then I start to see their process, or even see the results of their process before other people have given them notes and improved it, and I’m like, oh my god, you’re a mess, like what in the world, and it’s just because. They continue practicing the same things over and over and over, but they’re not honing them, refining them, and drilling them right. So, that’s just that’s just kind of an aside. So, all of this is fantastic, but there’s one secret ingredient, what I, which I think is really the meta skill that everybody should learn, no matter what it is that they want to do in their life, whatever the goals they want to achieve. And really, the biggest reason that I took on American Ninja Warrior was not for the goal itself, but to learn the process. What do you have to do to become hyper-focused on something that seems so seemingly difficult? There’s no real practical way to get there. And focus happens to be your second principle. This isn’t something we have to go into super extensively, because I have more than two hours worth of podcast interviews with your partner in crime, Cal Newport. We talk about deep work, and I also have an entire one hour long master class mini course where I go into deep work itself, and I talk about the habits to perform deep work, how to set up your environment. So, I don’t want to go into this too extensively, because I have a lot of other resources I can help people with, but if we were to do all this research, we understand here are the skills that I have to learn. I’m going to be direct and I’m going to drill. None of that really matters if you’re distracted and scattered all the time. So, let’s talk about sharpening the knife,

Scott Young: Right? So, yeah, obviously, if you’re going to learn something, you need to devote time to it, and I think, especially for the kind of learning that I talk about in ultra learning, where you are doing things that are somewhat cognitively more difficult, and that this is often much more effective, so you will get results more quickly. However, it’s also something that’s incompatible with, you know, well, I’m going to do some ultra learning while I’m also doing eight other things. I’ve got the television on in the background, I’m juggling three other tasks, I’m only using 30% of my mental bandwidth to actually do it, and so I found that, you know, obviously we can talk a lot about how you can eliminate distractions and schedule your time, and I think a lot of your listeners probably are already aware of that. Instead, I’d like to focus on two ideas that maybe they hadn’t thought about as much, but I think are super important. So, the first is the role that emotions play in focusing, because when we’re talking about focusing, very often it’s that we know we need to focus, but we don’t, so we procrastinate, or well, in the middle of doing something that we’re learning hard and we’re working on it, and then we get distracted and we don’t pick it up, and so the real skill that I’d like to develop is thinking about your own emotions and your own feelings about learning, and how these can often impede you and prevent you from getting started, or prevent you from continuing, and so when we’re talking about these, one of the things that I think is a very important tool is to create systems in your life that will encourage you to do the things that you care about, so an example, when you’re learning a lot of skills, very often the most difficult part, or the most frustrating part, is getting set up. So, this is certainly true if you’re learning, let’s say, a programming language. If you’re learning to speak a new language, if you are learning something like painting, for instance, you actually have to buy the paints and get everything set up in the easel, and put out the paper, and get the brushes, and whatnot. And so, very often, set up can be a barrier to actually working on the skill you care about, so one good thing to do is to either get all that setup done at once, so make a concrete position your schedule and say, you know what, I know it’s going to be frustrating, but I’m going to spend a couple hours just grinding through this setup process, so that I’ll have the software, I’ll have everything set up, so I can start practicing, and then the other thing too is that when you have to get upset, set up multiple times to make sure that that process is automated and streamlined in a way, so that it doesn’t become a big barrier for you actually doing practice. So that’s that’s just one example. Other examples are where sometimes dips in the process of while you’re learning a skill can be the thing that is the actual obstacle. So to give a quick example, when I was learning Chinese. I was doing a lot of flashcards, and when you’re doing flashcards, sometimes you will get one of them wrong. And whenever I would get one of them wrong, I would immediately have this kind of pang of frustration. And this is particularly true because the software I was using for the flash cards, if you’re doing one that’s a review, meaning it’s an older flashcard, and you get it wrong, it kind of totally resets all the progress you’ve made, so can be extra frustrating, because, like, oh, if I’d gotten this right, I wouldn’t have had to see it again for a couple months, but now I have to see it again, like, three times in the next few days, just because I screwed it up one time, and so this pang of frustration would often mean that when it would occur, while I was doing some studying or doing some practice, I would want to quit right then. I wouldn’t want to keep going, and what I found is that if I made a rule for myself that I could only stop, I could stop whenever I wanted to take a break, but I had to have gotten the last question right, meaning I had to get the most recent flash credit had to be correct immediately. My persistence on doing flashcards went up by a huge amount, and the reason why is simple, because if you feel that pang of frustration, it actually only lasts for a very short period of time. So, if you can resist it for, you know, the length of time it takes to do one more flash card, you will get much more persistent with your studies. And so, this is something you can think about for yourself, is where are the little points of frustration, and if you can make a rule for yourself. Self, that’s okay. When those consistent points of frustration happen, I won’t give up right at that moment. You can very often focus for much longer. So, the affective thing, the idea that your emotions are constantly playing this tug of war with your attention, is, I think, very important. The other little tidbit that I think is interesting, which came up from the research, which I think also sort of can inform your process is how broad or narrow your focus also can influence your ability to perform things cognitively. So one of the things I thought was really interesting is they did this study that involves subjects, and some of the subjects were sleep deprived, and some of them were well rested, and the interesting they found is that having a loud noise in the background made the well-rested subjects perform worse, and it made the sleepy subjects perform better. And what this essentially means is that arousal, or things that keep you energized, can kind of focus and sharpen your focus, but if you have too much of these things, it can create sort of problems if you’re otherwise mentally well functioning, and so one of the advantages that you have is if you’re doing particularly creative work, or if you’re doing work that involves lateral thinking and lots of problem solving, it can often be beneficial to actually inject breaks, so inject moments where you’re not thinking too consciously about the work that you’re doing, because it allows some of those creative connections to foster, so one of the things that I did a lot during the MIT Challenge is an idea I call smart breaks. So, most people take breaks, and breaks are great. You need to take breaks every once in a while, but one of the things I would try to do is do a break that is mentally not very tiring, but is also not something that you’re likely to get totally involved in. So, it’s very difficult to get back to the work you’re doing, so things like, you know, going on a short walk, or sitting quietly for a little bit with your eyes closed, or having a glass of water. These aren’t super exciting activities. They allow your sort of mental space to kind of broaden, open up a little bit, so you can solve some problems that require creative thinking. But at the same time, you’re not going to be on your phone, and then, like, an hour goes by, and you should really get back to work. So, these two ideas of controlling sort of the breadth of your focus by, you know, taking breaks or monitoring your environment, as well as the emotional side of focus, I think are two important aspects to this that are often, often not discussed.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, I couldn’t agree with that more, and that’s something that I talk about in the three part mini course that I have, all about building the habit of deep work, and by the way, I use Cal’s name, and I have links to his books everywhere, so I don’t want you to think, wait a second, is he trying to teach deep work? Like, no, I am evangelizing Cal and not trying to kind of repurpose this, but one of the things that I talk about is how important it is to prime your brain for creativity during these breaks, and he talks about something called productive meditation, which is essentially what you’re talking about, and one of the things that I do during these breaks, and if I were to have a webcam set up and somebody watched me for 12 hours a day, they say you spend like 30 or days just staring out the window, you don’t do anything, I thought you were mr. Productivity, I’m like, you don’t understand, that’s the secret to productivity, is that I’m treating it like I’m a marathon runner, and I’m pacing myself, and part of pacing myself is just staring out the window, giving my brain that rebooting process, and that’s where a lot of my creative ideas come from, and I’m sure the same thing happens with you, where you can just kind of sit with your eyes closed, or take a quick break, take a quick walk, and all of a sudden you’re like, oh, there’s an idea, and then, bam, 3000 words later, you’ve got it down on paper, right?

Scott Young: Absolutely, absolutely,

Zack Arnold: yeah. So, I think that that’s a really important part of the process, is making sure that you are focused on whatever the skills are, and you’re not trying to multitask. The last real quick thing that I want to extract, and we don’t have to go too deep into this, but I would say you need to trademark this, and you need to sell it as a bumper sticker, because this is essentially what is the heart and the soul of my entire program, and that’s where you say, in one sentence, knowing that you are going down the wrong road in life can interfere with your motivation, and my whole philosophy of procrastination, inability to focus, inability to move your life forwards, is that you lack confidence that the next action on your calendar is the right action, and I think that going through this entire process, working through the principles that we’ve talked about, and also the five additional amazing principles that we didn’t even get a chance to talk about, we’re like 90 minutes into this interview, but I feel like knowing what that next action is on your calendar and having that confidence, that’s the difference to being able to focus or not being able to focus, and that’s why I think these principles are so important.

Scott Young: Absolutely, and you know, I think that’s one of the things that can often impact people, is there’s always going to be uncertainty and doubt. You’re never going to have 100% confidence that you’re doing the right thing or that you’re doing things the right way, but I think it’s often useful, like we talked about lots of different ideas, like this expert interview method, and doing some meta learning research, and other tools like this, that if you stay in touch with books and ideas, and you are informed about a lot of these things, it can give you kind of this space that it can give you that confidence that, well, even if the thing that you’re doing right now is not necessarily the person. Thing that’s going to make everything work out for you, you’ve at least done your homework, and so I think that that’s true, whether you’re embarking on a big learning project or a big move for your career, is that if you know you’ve, you know, done your homework, you’ve read some books, you have some ideas, you have a good basis for what you’re working on, doesn’t mean that everything is always going to work out for you, and it doesn’t mean that you’re not going to make any mistakes, but it does mean that you have a lot more confidence in what you’re doing, which I think makes it a lot easier to work on it.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, could not agree with that more. I’ve basically devoted the next direction, or the next period of my life, to going in the direction of helping people find that clarity, doing that sequencing, designing the path, finding the right people, connecting with them. So, obviously, I’m in complete agreement with you. We have nine principles. We just finished talking about four of them, so I want to emphasize to my audience that there’s way more to learn than we’ve talked about in this interview. So my goal was, I want somebody to listen to this and say, “Oh my god, this blew my mind. Then they go buy the book, and they’re like, “Holy crap, there’s so much more they didn’t even talk about, like, just this process alone can be a game changer for anybody that’s struggling, and saying, I feel like I’m doing all the wrong things. Why am I not moving forward? I’m sending all these resumes, I’m taking all these meetings, I’m not getting anywhere. Maybe it’s just a matter of applying the ultra learning process to doing the right things at the right time, and then meeting the right people, right? So, if they want to go deeper, how can they find you? How can they find the book?

Scott Young: So the best way is to go to my website, which is scottyoung.com that’s S C O T T Y O U N G.com There, I’ve got links to the book at all the major retailers. It’s going to be published by Harper Business, so it should be available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, any online place that you get your books, and hopefully also in some bookstores as well. And I highly recommend you can also check out the book on Audible. I know a lot of people who listen to podcasts prefer to listen to the book than to read it, and it is narrated by yours truly. So, if you, if you’ve enjoyed listening to my voice for the last hour, then maybe you’ll enjoy listening to it for a little bit longer as I read you the book,

Zack Arnold: I may end up listening to it twice. Just now that I’ve now that I’ve read the advanced copy, I may just go back and listen to it, just for fun.

Scott Young: Yeah, and so if you, if you check out the book and check out my website, I would definitely appreciate that. And I think anyone who has taken some ideas, some inspiration, maybe from this podcast, or decides to take the next step and read the book, I would be really interested in hearing what kinds of career-enhancing ultra-learning projects you come up with, so please contact me if you apply any of the ideas of the book. It’s definitely something that I’m keeping an eye on to hear how people are approaching learning in their own lives and professions as a result.

Zack Arnold: Well, this has been absolutely fantastic. I mean, I’ve had so much fun doing this. I hope that you’ve had fun doing it as well, and I know that everybody listening will very much appreciate it. So, thank you so much for your time and for being here today.

Scott Young: Oh, thank you so much for having me.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

How to Master the Metaskill of ‘Ultralearning’ | with Scott Young

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