17. Scott Young: How To Learn Skills Faster & Retain More of What You've Learned
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Hey everyone, it's Alex from Alex and Books, and you're listening to The Reader's Journey, the podcast that takes you on a journey to meet amazing authors, discover brilliant books, and learn valuable lessons along the way. Now, let's get started. Hello everyone, and welcome back to another episode of The Reader's Journey podcast. Today we have Scott Young, the author of Ultra Learning, master of hard skills, outsmart the competition, and accelerate your career. Scott, thank you so much for coming on the show today. Oh, I'm really happy to be here.

So I think a good place to start would be if you could tell us what ultra learning is and why it's such an important skill to have in today's world.

Right. So ultra learning is a term that I use in the book to describe people who take on really ambitious, aggressive, self-directed learning projects. So I talk about a lot of stories in the book. So it's kind of one of those, you know, when you see it kind of phenomenon. But in the book, I give a more kind of general definition where I describe it as learning that is progressive.

aggressive, meaning that it's you're really focused on getting the most from your time, you're really trying to optimize it as opposed to, you know, learning for fun, or it's just something to while away the time and you're focused on convenience. This is someone who really cares about actually knowing things and building skills.

And then the second factor is that it's self-directed. So in this case, I focused on people who took on projects of their own design. Maybe they use teachers or helpers in various points, but it's different from, let's say, you know, a medical student who has a very aggressive studying approach, definitely cares about results, but is in a very formal program. So they just have to follow the path that's been laid out by their school or by their institution.

And the reason that I think this kind of idea is important, not just because I think a lot of the stories that I document are kind of interesting and fun to read, but also because I think that we live in a world that is constantly changing, demanding more and more of us and often demanding stuff from us that we don't learn in school or we didn't learn in school.

And so I think ultra learning should be something that you keep in the back of your head of, oh, yeah, there's this sort of approach I could take where I go out and I really try to plan to learn some important skill. And maybe I can learn from the people who do this well as a way to.

Not only improve your career, but also to tackle personal projects. I also talk about people who've done lots of interesting and weird things. And sometimes they were professional, but sometimes they were just for something that the person really wanted to get good at. Right. Yeah. And that's one thing that I loved about your book is like, one, you teach people how to learn, which is something that surprisingly education hasn't taught us.

And then, too, it's like you provide like this guidelines of how like if you want to learn new skill or do a new project, if like you follow these nine principles of ultra learning, like you could be successful in this. And especially as you mentioned earlier, like in the world we live now, it's like just having an education isn't enough. You have to kind of be the self learner because like the world is constantly changing. And like those who kind of like learn on their own will be like successful.

Yeah, and I think, don't get me wrong, the book isn't saying that, you know, everyone should drop out of college or school is evil. But I do think that there's a certain rigidity to what we learn in school and how we approach it. You know, these are big institutions. They often don't change that dynamically. And quite frankly, a lot of us can't afford to go back to school or we can't take years of our life off to do things. So I think having this as an additional tool or additional option is really what I want to try to present in the book.

Totally. And I think you did a phenomenal job with that. And like you just mentioned, so you took four years of MIT classes in just like 12 months. I'm sure like a lot of people could relate. Like I took a couple online classes, but I couldn't even like get through one or two of them. So how how are you like so motivated to do like four years of classes in 12 months? Right.

So the project you're talking about is a project I took on about almost nine years ago now. I called it the MIT Challenge, and it was shortly after I graduated from my undergrad at an actual university. I went to school and I did a business degree, but I kind of felt like I wanted to study computer science. And I'd actually been like doing research to like maybe going back to school and re-enrolling and doing all that kind of stuff. And it was around this time that MIT uploads videos.

uploaded a lot of their materials from their courses online. So this is called MIT OpenCourseWare, and it's one of the largest platforms. Other universities also have their own courseware projects, but MIT's is one of the biggest.

And I found some computer science classes and I was like, oh, wow, this is really great. Like they have the actual classes. And I should also know, you know, for the people who maybe have dabbled in this before, there's a new thing now. I'm not that new. It's also several years old, but it was new when I was doing this project called MOOCs.

And these are courses that big universities or even smaller universities put out that are specifically made for an online audience. And they tend to be, you know, not that they're bad, but they tend to be a little bit easier, watered down, shorter videos. They're certainly not like the MIT course that they put online is not as hard as the actual MIT students. This is different from OpenCourseWare because OpenCourseWare was not really intended for like mass online audiences. It was just

We're going to just set up a camera in the classroom and then just upload the PDFs of the exams and the like, just go wild, do whatever you want. And it was often even intended for other educators. So like if you were a professor of physics, you could see how MIT is teaching physics or something like that.

And so the disadvantage of that is that it's not quite as user friendly. Like I had to kind of piece together, OK, how would I actually get something that resembles an MIT education? And then also it's it's difficult. Like it's the course material is at that MIT level because it's the actual stuff they used in the actual classes. And so I kind of dabbling around with this thought, you know, has anyone ever tried to

tried to like build their own degree program using these online resources. And I couldn't find anyone. And this just seemed crazy to me because it's like, you mean this university that costs hundreds of thousand dollars and you have to be in the top 0.1% of people to get into the school. Um,

you could just go and do it. Like you don't even have to, to do it. They just seem crazy to me. And so I kind of started getting this idea for this project and it wouldn't leave me. I was kind of obsessing me for about a year or so. And then when I finally graduated and I had several months out of university, I decided to pull the trigger and start working on it. So I think for me, the motivation was there to learn. And it's certainly difficult to, to go through a class and to sustain that motivation. But I think, um,

One of the things that often get missed is that when you design and take on your own project, it's often very different from if you are, you know, pushed and forced to do something in a school setting. So I felt like, yes, it had some difficulties for motivating myself, but I often found I was more motivated to do something that like this is my project. This is my kind of cool little experiment that I'm doing as opposed to, oh, yeah, I guess I got to enroll in these classes and show up every day. All right.

Right. Yeah. It sounds like when you have that freedom to choose like a project you want to pursue, your motivation is going to be a lot higher than like someone forcing a project onto you. And I think I recommend that people follow their own motivation when picking projects. I think, you know, a lot of the people I document where it started was this kind of.

Like, wouldn't that be cool? Or like, oh, that would be really cool to do something like this and then really diving in and going forward. So I don't think the book is necessarily going to say, OK, this how do you learn something that you really, really hate? But it is more about.

You probably recognizing that there's a lot of really big opportunities that would excite you, but maybe you've kind of held back or maybe you haven't really kind of thrown yourself into them. And if you document people who really have thrown themselves into it, you can kind of see, you know, you can see some of these big results. Right.

Yeah. And what I really enjoyed about your book is you share a ton of advice on how if there is some project you want to pursue, you share like how to accomplish that. And like, for example, for instance, I really enjoy the chapter about focus and like dealing with procrastination and distractions, because I feel like something we all, you know, have to deal with. Yes. So can you share some advice on for listeners on how to deal with distraction and procrastination?

Yeah. So, I mean, there's a lot of obvious advice that I think probably people have heard before that, you know, you should go into a quiet space where you're not going to have this. You should turn off your phone or put it in a drawer or something. So you're not looking at it, you know, turn off notifications in your computer, shut off your email. These are all kind of obvious things. But I think at the kind of core of it, I think there's a few other things that maybe often get missed. So one of them that I really stress is,

actually dedicating time to doing the project you have. And I think this is particularly important if it's a personal project. So if you're working all day and then you want to spend an hour a day on some learning project,

You actually have to carve out that time. And so what often happens is you do it in a kind of, well, I'll do this when I have time. And then the problem is that maybe in the abstract, you are really keen on the project. But in the moment when you're weighing, should I do this hard thing or sit and watch Netflix? Netflix tends to win. Right. So I think you actually have to schedule. You have to actually make it in your plan. And then I think the other thing that you need to look at is scheduling.

Getting a self-awareness of where your friction is with the project. So if it's all friction all the time, maybe you've just designed the wrong project and you need to like reconsider that. But often it's the case that, you know, on average, you want to do this thing, but maybe you have a lot of difficulty starting.

Or maybe you have a lot of difficulty when you hit certain parts of the project. So I can talk about, you know, my MIT challenge experience. I had no problem watching the lectures, but it was like the first time you have to do those problem sets. It was always like, ah, because you know you were going to do them badly. I knew I was, you know, the first times I'm doing the questions, they're not going to be very good. I'm going to realize how much I don't know. And so.

It's often about recognizing that. So when you notice, OK, this is my stumbling block, you can put a lot of your attention on to overcoming that. So Pomodoros tend to be a technique. I think it can be sometimes a little overrated. People like will break up their whole eight hour day into 20 minute Pomodoros, which doesn't always make sense to me.

But the idea of I have a lot of difficulty starting. So how do I reduce the pressure of starting or make it more automatic or make it something that's easier to do? And you can even just establish little rules for yourself so you can have things like, OK, well, you know, I have from 8 till 9 p.m. is when I work on this project. So I have to go like 8 to at least 8.05.

I have to work on it. And that seems like a weird thing to say, but it's a lot easier to say, well, I'll work on it for five minutes. And then if I'm really too exhausted and I have to watch that Netflix show, I'll take a break. Means that you're probably going to get started a lot more than if you say, no, no, I have to commit for the full hour every time.

But it's about recognizing where you're getting these friction within yourself. So if you're the kind of person that you were actually going every single day for the full hour, then saying you're only going to do it for five minutes maybe is a step back. So it really does depend on figuring out where that friction is for you and where you're stalling and where you're not getting the motivation to do it.

yeah i really enjoy that the vice on one like recognizing why you're procrastinating and like what's really stopping there and also like i'm big fan of the pomodoro technique and i've done it all the time like usually i'm like okay i'll read for like 25 minutes so i'll work on this for 25 minutes and then take a five minute break with the exception that maybe sometimes you get into that flow state and like once you're going it doesn't make sense to like take that break so yeah huge fan of the but i think as a tool to get started i think it works quite well and so i i do think that um

That self-awareness is very important. I think that's a theme throughout the book that a lot of the reasons we struggle with learning is that we don't step back and look at like, what am I actually doing right now? And I think the more that you can cue into that and kind of develop an awareness for, OK, yeah.

you know, oh, I seem to not actually be getting around to putting in the time in my project or I'm stalling on this part that I know is important. That can make a big difference. Yeah, totally. I think just having that something that like gets you started, it's like such an important part of the project. And then you could, you know,

optimize it or like work longer later on but yeah just starting the project is like key and then another point i really enjoyed on your book is about uh learning from the source and like how you want to be direct in your ultra learning project and you talk about for instance like you're better off practicing speaking to someone if you're practicing like a new language than like using something like duolingo just like you know learn new vocab words so could you share a

So this actually, this principle of directness is drawn from a big literature in psychology on transfer. And this is one of those things that like, if you read the research, there is just enormous how much research there is on this. And yet it is really underappreciated by everyday people.

And I think it's because we have one of these common intuitions that turns out to not quite be right. And so the common intuition we have is that the brain is like a muscle.

And so, you know, like if you were going to the gym and you're lifting weight with your arms, then if you go and you go to the grocery store and you're picking up grocery bags, you're also going to be stronger. And admittedly, there's a difference between bicep curls and carrying groceries, but we expect there to be quite a bit of transfer because if you've got big muscles, you're going to be strong. However, the brain is not a muscle. It's a different kind of organ. And it turns out that it's a lot more specific. So when we learn and acquire skills,

they tend to be a lot more precise. They're a lot narrower than we often assume. And this means that when we do learn things, not only do we think we're kind of learning in a fairly broad way, but often we're actually learning something quite specific, but also we tend to kind of assume that, well, it doesn't really matter what you're doing as long as it's sort of related to that. So the language learning example is the one that I bring up because

Duolingo is like by far one of the most popular language learning tools out there. And I don't want to say that, you know, it's 100 percent useless, but I tend to be pretty pessimistic about how good you'll be able to speak a language, which is why most people are doing it. Let's be clear. Most people are doing Duolingo because they want to go to Paris and, you know, order a baguette. They're not, you know, that's the goal for most people.

But if you use the app, the way it normally works is it gives you little sentences. One of the exercises, and I've used it before, it will give you multiple choice entries. So you get a sentence and you're filling in the blanks, basically assembling a sentence by tapping on buttons. And the problem is that what you're actually doing with your mind when you're doing that activity is quite different from what you actually have to do in a speaking situation.

What I'm doing is I'm looking at the words and I have to say, oh, this is the first word. This is the second word. This is the third word. And I have to tap on them. I don't have to pronounce the words. I don't have to recall how they're said. I can just look at them. I don't have to really even know exactly the grammar of the sentence because there's only a limited number of options there. So and often like if it's a sentence, they'll capitalize the one that goes first. It's obvious what the first one is.

Now, there are ways of making that kind of exercise more effective. So I'm not necessarily against doing flashcards for vocabulary, but flashcards for vocabulary are a lot harder where it's just like, what's the word for this? And there's nothing and you have to just remember it. But even then, if you only did flashcards, you wouldn't be able to speak. And the reason you wouldn't be able to speak is because there's all these other skills that you need to have in order to actually perform.

And so the sort of long story short of this is because of all this research we have on transfer, because we know that skills are often acquired narrowly and they kind of stay stuck in the context and situations we learn them in, that if you have any kind of practical project, you are learning a skill for something, then it really pays to think about how am I actually going to use this skill? And when you are designing your learning project to make sure that

the activities you're doing for practice are at least similar to how you're going to use the skill. So my example is that if you want to learn a language, a much better thing to do is to go to italki.com and set up a tutoring session where you actually are going to have, you know, a Skype or Zoom conversation like we're having with an actual person. Now, that maybe is not exactly the same as, you know,

walking around Paris and, you know, going to the boulangerie and ordering a baguette. Maybe they're not exactly the same, but they're going to be much, much more similar than just playing on your phone.

And so language learning is a good example of that. And I think it also illustrates this sort of ultra learning principle, because obviously talking with a tutor is more difficult and harder and a bit scarier than playing on your phone. And so you have to be really deliberate minded. You have to be like, no, no, I actually care about getting results and making progress, not not about just, you know, passing the time away while I'm, you know, waiting in line at the grocery store or something.

Yeah, I think the biggest takeaway I got from that chapter is you really want to practice as close as you can to the real thing. I think there was an example that James Clear mentioned earlier. It doesn't matter how many books you read about weightlifting. It's not until you get into the gym and actually do the weightlifting that you'll actually grow. And it's the same thing when I was learning basketball. Watching videos helps in a way, but it's not until you actually do the drills and practice it yourself that you'll get the results you want from it.

And I should be clear, I'm not really advocating. Some people have taken this as I'm advocating, like you should never read a book or watch a tutorial. That's obviously not the case. Like that's going too far. It still helps to like have someone explain to you grammar for a language in a book. I'm not against that.

But I think if you only do that and you never do any practice particularly because the practice is the thing you're scared of and is hard You may be sabotaging yourself, but there's also subtle ways that this transfer principle applies So I don't want to just make it into something that's just obvious that like well, you just got to do the real thing

thing. That is true, but there's often subtleties to it. So for instance, if you're learning to dance, let's say, partner dancing like salsa or swing dancing or something, you often go in a class where they'll teach you some kind of routine and then you do it with people and you rotate and then you do it over and over again.

But the problem is that if you go to a social dancing environment where you're meeting people who didn't practice those moves with you and maybe they know different ones or something, then you actually have to develop the skill of communicating with your body what's coming next in the sequence.

Whereas in the classroom, you don't need to do that because they also know what's coming next. So they'll help you out. And so this is a situation where you could spend a lot of time in a classroom, do your first time social dancing, fail utterly and think to yourself, oh, I'm just really bad at this. Like, I'm just not good at this.

And it may just be, no, no, no, you're missing one of these skill components. And so I think the problem of a lot of the learning advice I talk about here is that I think a lot of people maybe have kind of inadvertently used a bad method for learning something, not gotten great results. They spent six months on Duolingo, tried to speak, didn't really do that well. And maybe they internalize it as a personal failure, that the problem is that I can't learn languages or I can't dance or I can't play basketball or I can't do this. And so that's why I think

Not just with directness, but in general, really uncovering the principles for learning and investigating that is important because if you're going to give up on something that you're interested in, you care about, then you probably want to be sure that you are doing it the best way possible. You don't want to just have that kind of mistake. Right. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

And so one of the most eye-opening chapters in your book was the one about retrieval, especially like the paradox of study, where you talk about like, we believe if something feels easy, we feel like we're learning it. But that's not really the case now, is it?

Right, right. So this is another one that it was like the research was so good that I had to make a whole chapter out of it. And I wasn't initially going to make a chapter for retrieval, but then I'm reading it. I'm like, oh, no, this is too good. I have to make a whole chapter for it. So this is the idea. I'll give an example of an experiment, although there's lots of experiments. But one experiment that was done by I think it was Jeffrey Karpicki and Janelle Blunt. And they they took students into different groups.

And one of the groups, they got to do repeated reviews. So you're given a certain amount of time to study. And repeated review means you're given a text, you know, it's an essay or a chapter or something. You just read it over and over again, right? And another group, they got to do concept mapping. So I'm not sure if you're familiar with this, but it's kind of a popular learning technique where you, you know, you write the main idea and then you draw arrows. And so it's a little bit more fancy than just looking something over and over again. But

They also did it with the book open. So you got the book open, you're writing the main concept, this kind of third group did what they call free recall, which is a super dead simple technique. You read it once, you close the book and then just try, what was in that? What was it that I just read? And I try to remember everything I can. There's no questions. There's no like, it's not fancy. This is just very simple. And they asked, they had, there was two parts to it. So the first part was after they did this, they asked the students, how well do you think you learned the information?

So if I were to give you a test right now, how well would you do? And the interesting thing is that the repeat repeated review people scored themselves very highly. So they were like, I know this, I've seen it again and again and again. Whereas the free recall people were like, oh, wow, this is really hard. I didn't remember anything I'm going to do really badly on a test. And and, you know, the content mapping people were somewhat intermediate. And the interesting thing of this is that it's the free recall people that did way better on the actual test.

And so this is a real kind of quandary we're in, because if we're basing how we should study, how we should learn based on our subjective assessment of our knowledge, then the techniques that we use that make us feel worse, that make us feel like we don't know anything, are often the things that we avoid. And yet they're the very things that we need to do to learn. So in another study that was done, which I thought was also representative, because in this particular study, they weren't given a choice. So it wasn't like the students thought that repeated review would work better. They were just told to do it.

But in this other study, they were given the choice of which ones to select with. And what they found was that the students that felt like they weren't ready yet,

So they felt like they were, no, I don't know this enough yet. I can't do free recall. Stuck to a repeated review sort of idea for studying. But if you, through the experiment, forced those same people to actually do free recall, then they performed better. So this is a, you know, this is an experiment, but this is a very common situation. Okay, you're doing a chemistry class.

class in school and you're reading the material and then you're like okay i've got this practice exam it's like oh i'm like i'm there i'm nowhere near ready to do this practice exam i better go over my notes a few more times first and basically what this is saying is that it doesn't matter whether you're ready or not doing the test is going to help you learn better than reviewing your notes again and so this is i think like along with the directness and transfer research something that is counterintuitive and a lot of people make the mistake of i'll

is that they choose these kinds of like, well, I'm going to like rewrite my notes and draw circles around things and use colored pens and whatever. And this just doesn't matter. The thing that matters for learning, especially for, you know, the kind of learning that we care about, which is actually being able to recall stuff, it actually you have to practice recalling it. And I think it also fits into the overall ultra learning kind of ethos I describe in the book where that we have this experimental result.

that there is a method that works a lot better than what students typically use but the disadvantage of it is that it's harder it's more uncomfortable so you're unlikely to just use it if your goal was just to like fritter away time but if you were serious about studying you're like i only have 10 hours a week to devote to this project and it really matters to me how much progress i make then yeah spending more time doing retrieval practice is going to make a big difference

Yeah. And when I was reading the chapter, I actually felt like internal pain because I could tell you like how many times like before an exam, I would just look over my notes and just highlight it and feel like, okay, I got this stuff down. And then when the test comes, it's like, I haven't, I have no idea what the answer was. And it's like, I wish something, I wish, you know, people taught this in like college, like how to learn, learn how to learn or something like that, because I'm sure countless students make the mistake of just reviewing their notes over and over again without testing themselves, even though testing themselves is like the best way to like practice that retrieval and like do the

better on exams. Yeah. And I think there's also some factors here as well when it comes to like, what is the form of the retrieval? So in these studies they're dealing with, you know, it's just review or free recall. But obviously, if we're learning a lot of subjects, you know, there's the direct practice component as well. So it's not even just about doing some kind of practice. It's also about doing what is the best kind of practice. So I think there's a lot of these little

like little knobs on the learning dials that you can kind of tweak and get more results out of your learning. And there's probably cases where maybe you've learned something in the past particularly well, and those knobs all happen to be turned to the maximal point. And you're, oh, I was really good at learning this, and I did X, Y, or Zed.

But I think the idea is that if you can make these principles explicit, then when you're approaching something where maybe some of the dials are not turned the right way, you can spot that in advance and be like, OK, I'm not doing retrieval here. I'm doing this other thing. And that's why I'm not going to get good results on this test or good results on this thing that I care about.

Yeah, that's great advice. And for any college students out there, even high school students, you know, start practicing that, you know, free recall, start testing yourself and you'll probably do better on the exams. And I think so related to retrieval, you also have this great chapter about retention. And you tell this incredible story about Nigel Richards, who won the French World Scrabble Championship, even though he didn't know French. And that just like blew my mind. Can you share like some of the strategies that he used to like remember more and prevent forgetting?

So Nigel Richards is a very, very interesting case. And he's just like an example of like one of the stories that I encountered the book that just I first time I heard it, I was like, oh, I have to include this. Now, he's a very interesting guy. He is considered by many to be the best Scrabble players ever lived. So he doesn't just play French Scrabble. He also dominates English Scrabble. So he's like one of these, you know, you

Usain Bolt type people for Scrabble. He is the, he is the, yeah, the Wayne Gretzky for Scrabble. He is the real top of his class there. And he doesn't seem to have any like really fancy techniques. So it's not like I can pin it down that he's got some kind of crazy fancy technique. That's not true of all the people I document. One of the people I documented who was really good at Jeopardy, for instance, was

His whole approach, Roger Craig, his whole approach was very much based on all this data analysis and flashcards and stuff. So there are people who really go kind of hog wild in that direction. Whereas Nigel Richards approach to me, it was more emblematic of the kind of overall spirit of ultra learning than some kind of fancy shortcut or technique.

So one of the things he does is he reviews lists of words in his head. So he will practice this kind of retrieval where he is just thinking about the words over and over again and kind of going through them and trying to recall them so that he can recall all the words that are there. So he reads the lists of words and then he tries to recall them. And that's the kind of corresponding habit that went with this is that he's a really avid cyclist and he's

like crazy, like he would do, you know, a 14 hour bicycle ride to get to some tournament, do the tournament and then do a 14 hour bicycle ride back. And the actual French Scrabble championship that he won was kind of like also an excuse for him to do a like a month long cycling trip in France.

And so you can just imagine him like with these lists of French words, we're just reviewing them methodically for hours and hours and hours as he's cycling going through it. So the retrieval seems to be a factor. But I think also his approach to to.

Learning things as well related to spacing was one of the other ideas that I talked about in that chapter and just the idea that if you expose yourself to information multiple times, you're going to have better long term memory of it than if you just expose it to yourself a bunch of times in a short burst.

And so this seems to be also kind of evidenced by his approach of, you know, doing this over periods of time. So certainly there's something special about Nigel Richards. Clearly, you know, I don't think that there is something entirely replicable in his strategy. But I think what you can see there is this sort of intense devotion to learning and doing things well that I think is something that we can all admire.

Yeah, there's a lot we could learn from him. A big takeaway I had from that chapter is the importance of not cramming. So instead of studying for seven hours one day, you want to spread that out one hour every day for a week. And just spacing out your learning helps a lot with the retention and remembering more of what you read.

Well, one of the things that I would say, if you want to remember anything, is just realizing that this power of spacing that and this is one of the things that's challenging, I think, for a lot of students when they're studying, because it requires a lot more organizing. If you know, OK, I've got this exam coming up in four months or something like this and I have to learn all this information again.

then it's very convenient for you to just say, well, I'll do unit one and then I'll do unit two, then I'll do unit three. But what we know is that if you spend a lot of time on unit one all in a row, you're not going to remember unit one as well as if you have to go back and call unit one multiple times.

So kind of like the retrieval, this is a technique that's a little bit more effortful. So there's different workarounds for it. Space repetition software is a very popular one. So if you have a very memory intensive subject, that was one that was used. So language learning is I've used space repetition software and it can be quite valuable because if you've got tens of thousands of vocabulary words, it's very hard to schedule that without some kind of software.

But even if you're learning sort of a simpler subject, creating flashcards for yourself and making sure that you review old flashcards and so that you go, OK, this particular fact, I'm covering it about five times before the exam. That's a good rule of thumb to optimize your attention. And I think that optimize idea is important because I'm talking about a lot of things that seem like a lot of work.

But at the end of the day, it's all about, okay, given a fixed amount of time, what's the best way that I can learn? And if you do it the right way, then you're going to be happier with your results in the long run than if you cram right at the end. Yeah. And so speaking of like retention retrieval and like, you know, I read a lot of books and this is a question I get a lot from my audience. Have you found like any like memory tips or any helpful advice for remembering more of what you read from like books you read?

Yeah. So, I mean, there's different ways you can approach it. And I think the problem with reading books is that there is a quality quantity tradeoff sometimes. So in many ways, the way I approach my book reading is somewhat different from how I've approached ultra learning projects simply because my goal in reading books is read as many books as I can.

right? So if I can increase my overall number of books I'm reading, then you kind of naturally do that as well. Like if you have some topics that you're interested in and you'll occasionally read books on those topics, then you're naturally going to do spacing because, you know, every several months you're going to read a book on that topic and it'll remind you of stuff you read in the previous book and so on. So there is some benefit of that already. However, if you're really trying to study a topic rather than just, I want to increase my casual reading time, then I think there's a few things you can do. One is to do

retrieval practice. And I think retrieval practice is probably the easiest thing you can do. You can formalize that. So, you know, after you read a section of a book, you can just be like, well, what was in that? Right. Or before you pick up the book again, be like, what, what was in the book? Like spend five minutes. What was in the book that I was reading? Try to recall as much as you can.

Um, a strategy that I use personally, which is a little bit more time consuming, but I find very effective is to write essays about what I'm reading. So I write a lot and that's an important medium for me. And so very often I have articles on my website, which are, you know, um,

Quite, quite frankly, they're not even really written for other people. They were written like this interested me. This is a complicated topic. And so in me writing this essay, I have to practice recall. I have to synthesize. I have to make sure I understand the ideas. And so.

Writing is often a very good tool. So even if you were interested in improving how you read things, just having a habit of like going on Amazon and writing a book review where you kind of summarize some of the main points or using Goodreads and summarizing some of the main points is a really good way for you to.

to practice recall, practice your understanding synthesis, and I think get more out of your books. But of course, that also takes up more time. So you have to maybe decide which books you're going to do that for. Um, and so, you know, if there's a book that I really thought, oh, wow, this was mind blowing and deep, and I'm worried I'm going to forget it, then I often do that. So, uh, an example, I, I read a book by, um, neuroscientist Joseph Ledoux on, uh,

anxiety. And I wrote a book about it called I wrote a book review of it called neuroscience of anxiety. And it was largely me being like, this is a really complicated and interesting book. So now I'm going to try to like dump and synthesize because otherwise, I'm going to probably forget a lot of it.

Yeah, and there's just so much wonderful advice you just shared right there. And I've been practicing a lot of that too. It's like after I finished reading like a chapter or two, I'm like, all right, let me try to write down all the things I learned. And like when I pick up a book before I open it, I try to say, okay, what did I learn at my last reading session? And then yeah, when I finish the book and maybe wait a couple of days and then I, you know, try to think what,

what were like the key takeaways from this book and maybe write like a book review or write like a little book essay just to like summarize all the information I learned. And like you mentioned earlier, it might be more work, but if this is a great book, it's worth investing that time because you're going to remember more of it and it's going to like pay off in the long run. Yeah, absolutely. And I think, I think it's important to realize as well, like a lot of the stuff we're talking about is like,

is this kind of, all right, this is the optimal point you could get, right? Like if you were the marathoner preparing for the Olympics, how would you train? But that maybe isn't the same way you'd want to train if you're like, well, I just want to do a 10K and I'm like, you know, I don't want to make it that intense or that effortful. And so the point of this book and the point of kind of my research doing this was, so let's map out what is this sort of optimal approach and

And then you kind of have the choice. You know, you could say to yourself, OK, there's going to be some books that maybe I'm not going to have this active recall, effortful strategy because I'm just reading it for fun or because I just have time. That's totally OK. But I think it's always nice to know, hmm, I'm not remembering much from my books or I'm not remembering or applying these ideas that I wanted to really get take advantage of.

What could I do? And then have that sort of in your back pocket, because certainly there's some books, some ideas that they really do matter. You know, if you're studying for a big accounting test, for instance, you really want to know that stuff. You don't want to you don't want it to be like, oh, no, I cut to my exam and I forgot all of it.

Yeah. And I think that's a very big theme throughout your book is like there's a tradeoff between like effective learning strategies and what feels like fun and enjoyable. And we have to like balance it and know like when it's like something super important and we just have to like focus on the effective strategies. So that way we remember it. And when's like, you know, if I'm just reading a fiction book, I don't have to take notes and analyze this whole thing. I'm just reading it for enjoyment. I think just knowing that balance is super important.

Well, and I think it's also important to realize that doing things effectively can also be fun, too. So like a lot of the projects I've undertaken, they were intense, but they were also exciting. They were fun. Like I, you know, we didn't even get into the language learning project I did. But this was a, you know, very, very intense kind of project. But it was also something that I really enjoyed. And I think I would have enjoyed a lot more than just playing on my phone for like a year or two and not getting any results.

So I think it's not to say that something just because it requires more of you mentally is going to be not fun. Certainly we play video games, which are very difficult and we enjoy them. So it isn't to say that, but rather it's to say that I think...

Um, often those more effortful things just are not going to be the default. They're not going to be the thing that you do automatically. And so it does require a little bit of deliberate attention. Um, and, and I think it also requires understanding why you're doing it. Like,

If you don't realize that doing this free recall is much, much more effective than rereading your notes for studying, if you think that, well, they're probably about the same, then you might just drift to doing the reviewing your notes, right? So I think that knowledge is power. If you understand how learning works, you understand spacing is better than cramming, that retrieval is better than review, that direct practice is better than indirect practice, I think you'll be much better equipped to handle a lot of those problems.

Yeah, that's really great. And I appreciate you like going into like the nuances because, yeah, I feel like I might just be like generalizing a lot of the advice. But of course, there's like always more details. And that's why people should definitely read the book if they want to get all those like details and learn a lot more about learning. And so for listeners who feel like inspired by this conversation and they want to take action, is there any advice you would give someone who's starting their first like ultra learning project?

Yeah, so, well, other than buy my book, no, I should say, if I were starting with a project, I think the number one piece of advice I give, which is the thing that you should always start with, is take planning seriously. I think that a lot of learning projects particularly suffer from this because they're kind of hard.

And there's a lot of research on people who do sort of learning as an adult, doing their own self-directed learning projects. And people just gravitate to whatever is immediately available. And so...

The key lesson or key insight of this is spending a little bit of time researching, figuring out what resources are available, picking something that's good, planning your actual approach, figuring out where you're going to put the hours in, what techniques are you going to use. It's like, okay, I'm going to do this to practice. I'm going to do this to retrieve and learn the knowledge. These can have big impacts, and yet we often neglect them. We just kind of, eh, I'll just do it for a little bit, and then, ah, it's hard, and I'm not making much progress, and I'm fizzling out.

And I think if you take the planning process seriously and actually structure your project and allocate time and figure out what methods you're going to use and what materials you're going to use, if you spend a bit of time in advance doing that, you're going to be much more successful with your projects. And so that's what I'd like to hopefully see from people is just

taking the learning process seriously. And, and also the converse of that is if you take it seriously, you can probably learn a lot more than you can if you haven't taken things seriously before. So there's definitely been cases of people I've talked to who, you know, they're

Maybe they abstractly thought, OK, maybe I could do this at some point. But actually going through this process and setting up a project and researching it and planning it out, they're often able to do things that, oh, wow, well, I've never done anything like that before.

Yeah, and I really appreciate it. Towards the end of your book, you provide like the guidelines for anyone starting their own ultra learning project and like providing these practical steps like, you know, do your research, schedule your time, like execute on your plan and like review your results. And I just found that like super helpful for anyone like looking to start their own ultra learning project. Oh, thank you.

And so Scott, you mentioned a little bit earlier about like the language project you did where you went to like four different countries to learn all those like four different languages. And let's say someone else started like their own ultra learning project or they're trying to learn a new language. How do you prevent yourself from forgetting like a skill that you mastered or like a similar ultra learning product that you finish? And like now you're not in, you know, you're not in Spain, you're not speaking Spanish. So how do you like maintain those skills that you spent so much time learning?

Well, so one thing I will say, and I think this is something that I've come to appreciate more and more, is that particularly for memory-intensive subjects, the maintenance for those skills can be considerable. So one of the people I document in the book is Benny Lewis, and he speaks about 10 languages now, and he's learned more than this. And I remember when I, this was before I'd learned any other languages, and I met him, and he had gone and spent three months in

I don't know whether it was Poland or Czech Republic or one of, one of these Eastern European places. And I said to him like, Oh, well, like, and I'd seen videos of him, you know, conversing at kind of a lower intermediate level. And I was like, Oh wow, you're, you know, you can speak this language now. And he's like, well, I'm not going to, I'm probably not going to maintain it. And to me, that seemed crazy at the time because I was thinking,

Like how can you go to all the effort of learning it and not maintain it? But I am now wiser and I now understand that to speak like a language, which is a memory intensive subject, to be able to keep it crisp where you're able to like at a drop of a hat, have a conversation requires some ongoing effort.

And so I think that the ongoing effort is not huge, especially if we're dealing with one or two languages. And I think indeed with language learning, I think that's a big problem that polyglots face is that if you speak more languages, there's more interference.

So I definitely find it harder to maintain, you know, now on top of English, six languages than if it, you know, if it was just French or just Mandarin, it would be like not so bad. And so I think that there is definitely something to be said for, you know, it's okay not to maintain all of your skills. I think relearning is something that

is actually a lot easier in a lot of cases and maybe the right choice. So if you are in a situation where you're like, well, you know what, I'm not going to use this in the meantime, you know, making sure that you're maintaining every single piece of knowledge you've learned may be a little bit too hard. But at the same time, I think if you are

Wanting to keep a skill sharp. I think it's mostly about having a regular habit or schedule of interaction. So for years, what I've done in my case, because I've wanted to maintain my ability to speak languages, is set up Skype tutoring. So I have like a half hour, hour Skype tutor once a week or once a month. And that gives me a chance to practice.

And it's not the same as like living in Spain, as you said, but it does kind of keep things at that kind of, um, that level where it's not too hard to reactivate it if you need it. Um, and then I think there's also something to be said for people who want to go deeper because I've talked about, you know, learning a lot of different skills here and there, but there's certainly going to be topics that you're not going to have to worry about maintaining them because they're kind of constant interest for you're constantly digging deeper. So, um,

I think for those subjects, often the case is that you learn even further than you kind of

consolidate the stuff underneath so there's a nice study about people who were learning I think it was algebra and they found that doesn't matter how smart you are you kind of have your knowledge decay at the same rate so the people who got 90% maybe they lost like 10% a year these aren't the actual stats but like you know you're 90% 80% 70% on the test and whereas the people got 40% they were 40% 30% 20% like it was also kind of the same sort of

However, what they found was that there was a subgroup of people that went on to learn calculus and those people didn't have the same decline.

So what this shows is that, like, if you learn any more advanced setting that really over learns the stuff that's underneath, that that stuff tends to be a bit more resistant to forgetting. So that's another strategy you can employ that if you really want to be good at this basic stuff, then mastering this kind of like, well, this is much harder than that. And you have to be really good at those basic stuff, I think, can also be another way of sustaining knowledge long term.

All right. It's funny you mentioned kind of like that over mastering skill, because I used to have this job where I like always worked in Excel. And like yesterday, my roommate asked me like, hey, can you help me with this Excel thing? And I haven't used Excel in like two years. And I was like, oh, yeah, use this shortcut. And she was like, wow, I didn't know that. But it's like I was so into Excel back then. Like, I just still remember like a lot of the shortcuts, even though I haven't used in like years.

Definitely. And that's one of the things that's borne out by the research is that overlearning and proceduralization, so the idea that like it's just kind of what we call muscle memory. It's not really in your muscles, it's in your brain. But what we call muscle memory is this sort of proceduralization. And it seems that those kinds of skills are learned differently than declarative knowledge or things that are like facts and concepts and ideas.

And so, you know, it's why we say it's like learning a bicycle and not like learning trigonometry, right? Because riding a bicycle is something that's very difficult to forget. So there are these little things that you can do to kind of shift things in the direction of maintaining the knowledge long term.

Yeah, I just I just love how much like stories and studies you share about just like just learning how to learn and just like so much fascinating stuff in this book. And like I enjoyed towards the end of the book, you have this great chapter about raising kids to be ultra learners. And although I don't have like kids of my own, you know, I hope like in the future that they do become like ultra learners. And I'm sure many listeners or parents. So could you share some advice on how to raise kids to be ultra learners?

Well, so the idea wasn't necessarily to present it as this is the advice for how to raise children. I certainly I wrote the chapter before I had any kids of my own. And I, I was just fascinated by the idea of this is the example of the Polgars and their father, Laszlo Polgar, decided that he was going to raise chess prodigies, even in advance of having kids that showed any particular talent. And he actually did it like his

three daughters all became world-class chess players, including Judith Polgar, who I believe was until recently the highest-ranking female player of all time. And

She and she completed competed in the world championship and these kinds of things. And so the ideas that were sort of present there were were kind of leaning in favor of that. We do have a lot more capability than we think. And I mean, it's just an example. This isn't some sort of scientific proof. So obviously, you know, if you are like a staunch determinist and you believe that talent is everything, then, you know, a study like this is not going to change your mind at all. But.

But I do think that it's interesting showing this kind of capability. And in my own sense, I'm not sure that I would want to manipulate my children's future so that they're really, really good at chess. I don't really favor that kind of approach. But I do think with my own son and when he's older –

What I would really want to instill in him is not this kind of, I'm going to turn him into a chess prodigy, but the idea that for anything that he wants to learn, that's difficult, that he has the tools and resources to do it. And that he has this sort of experience of pushing himself to do something that's, you know, that he's interested in that and that's hard. And so I think that in education, often what we're trying to do is mold our children into some version that we want, right?

So we want them to be good at math. And so we force them to grind math problems. And there's benefits to that. I'm not really going to argue against the idea that we shouldn't teach our kids to do things they don't naturally want to do. But I think there's also such a benefit in igniting that spark for people to think about, well, what's something I would like to learn?

And we rarely ask kids that. We rarely ask even adults that of what they would like to learn. What would they like to be good at? What would they like to really understand? And so I think, you know, this is the real benefit of self-directed learning and really at the core of what I believe in is that I think the world is a much more interesting place when you believe that

you can go out and get good at things that you want to get good at, see things you want to see and learn things that you want to master. Yeah. And I think you just shared a great points. Like, uh, even I think Judah's father, like he didn't force them to like play chess necessarily. It's like at a certain point they had to be self-motivated because the,

At a certain point, they passed his level of chess learning and they had to go out on their own and have that motivation to become a great chess player. You can only push the kids so far and then you have to let them go to do their own thing.

Well, that definitely deserves mentioning because, you know, you can contrast the Polgar's kind of educational style with the kind of like tiger mom parenting style, which is it wasn't based on you have to do this and you're forced to do it. Rather, he was very careful and kind of cultivating this motivating environment so that they would naturally become very curious and interested in chess. And I think...

when you're you know four or five and you're really good at chess and everyone's always applauding you and how good you are at chess too i think it does also spur some of that motivation and so i think the way that they that he set up that kind of um project i don't think it was necessarily the case he was coercing his children but i i do think that it just shows that there is um

you know, we kind of take for granted how, well, this is just how education works. This is how everything has to be. And I feel like there's a lot of inertia and kind of status quo bias in how we approach learning. And so, again, my goal with this book is not to make any definitive claims about everyone can learn X or this is the new standard of what we should be teaching in schools, but rather just to have a more open-minded attitude. And I think

I want to encourage people to have an open-minded attitude about themselves, about what they can accomplish, about what they can do. Because sometimes we have these strong opinions about, oh, I could never do that. I've gotten that a lot from people. Oh, I could never do that. And it's like, well, how do you know? You don't, actually. You just think that. Yeah.

Yeah, I think the one way to describe your book is not like this is the only way to learn and this is what you should follow. But here's a path to learn. And if you want to pursue a project, these guidelines will likely help you and just give it a try and see what happens. And for many people that have read your book and you share a ton of examples of real students that have followed your ultra learning process and have had incredible results from it. So I think like, hey, this is the path, check it out. And you never know, it might be like,

a great, great way, a great path for you to take. So Scott, I want to be respectful of your time here. So I want to ask the closing question. I asked all my guests, which are what are two books that had a major impact on you and how did those books change you?

Oh, wow. Well, I've read a lot of books. I always find these questions kind of hard because I always feel like I'm missing some book out. One book that had a really big impact on me early on was David Allen's Getting Things Done, sort of a perennial classic. I think that book had a big influence on me because it showed me this idea of optimizing systems to get better results.

And I wouldn't say that my approach to learning is like very David Allen-esque in that I'm not as big about having tons of lists and files and folders and documents. There are people who really like doing that. It's just not me. But I do think that it kind of kindled my spirit of thinking about tinkering and about also recognizing that our kind of our mental hardware is often not very well equipped for performance in the modern world. So.

I think that applies not only to productivity but also to learning. The way we approach things by default, I think, worked really well for our hunter-gatherer ancestors, but maybe not so well for someone who has to read a bunch of books and has to think about abstract ideas all day.

So that book I think has had a big influence on me. I think another book is Cal Newport's Deep Work. Cal Newport's a personal friend of mine and Deep Work was actually the, I used that book as the template for like when I was writing my book, I was like, well, what's a structure I can use? And my book ended up being quite a bit different, obviously, as I worked on it. But that was sort of the starting point was I really liked that idea. And I feel like attention and focus and

Committing yourself to doing hard mental activity is sort of central to my philosophy. So Cal and I have collaborated on a number of projects together, and we definitely are kindred spirits in that way.

Yeah, that's awesome to hear. And yeah, I was getting like a little Cal Newport vibe from this book. And yeah, I loved his book. Yeah, Deep Work. Still working on getting him on the podcast. But so you've taken this MIT challenge, you've taken this, you know, four different countries, learned four different languages, you did the portrait challenge. Are there any ultra learning projects you're currently pursuing?

Well, I don't have anything particular right now that I'm doing publicly. So I tend to kind of make a distinction between the projects I do personally and publicly because publicly I'd like to document them and make them really like, you know, and so that's actually quite a bit of work of like...

There was actually, when I did the year without English, that was the travel language learning based project. There was like a non-trivial amount of like filming that we actually did on there. So it was always funny because we were doing a learning project, but it was also like, oh, we're also trying to make a documentary at the same time, which created its own challenges. Right now, one of the things I'm doing is I'm working on a new,

complete guides. So I have these complete guides. I just wrote one, published one recently about motivation. So it was me kind of reading all the research on motivation and trying to assemble it in a package for someone who doesn't want to read all the research but wants a kind of good summary of the

the current understanding of what we know and think about motivation. And right now I'm doing one on productivity. And so I have, here's a book I have right now. This is the evolution of management thought is one of the books in my reading list right now that I'm going through. But I'm not sure whether I would call it an ultra learning project per se. It's not necessarily meeting the same kind of intensity standards I've set before, but it is a sort of self-directed learning project that I'm going to try to write something up about it when I'm done.

Awesome. And Scott, this has been a really wonderful conversation. I enjoyed learning about learning with you and I'm sure listeners did too. Where's the best place for them to kind of connect with you or learn more about your work?

Perfect. Well, you can visit my website at scotthyoung.com. That's S-C-O-T-T-H-Y-O-U-N-G.com. And there I've got over 1400 articles. There's links to all my projects, lots of learning advice. If you are interested in the book, you can get it at Amazon, Barnes & Noble. And you can also listen to it on Audible if you're not tired of listening to my voice.

I think we recently crossed 1,000 reviews on Amazon, so I was very happy about that milestone. But it's very gratifying that a lot of people are enjoying the book and getting some value out of it. 100%. I definitely got a ton of value with it. I'm sure listeners from this episode will too. And Scott, I just want to say thanks again for writing Ultra Learning. And thank you for coming on the Reader's Journey podcast with us today and talking about your book today. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you. Thank you.

Hey, everyone. I hope you enjoyed this episode of The Reader's Journey. You can learn more about what's covered in today's podcast in the show notes below.

If you enjoyed this podcast, the best way you can support it is by subscribing and leaving a positive review. If you're looking for reading tips or book recommendations, head over to alexandbooks.com. If you want to join my reading journey, you can follow me on Instagram and Twitter by searching for Alex and Books. That's all for now. Thank you so much for listening, and I hope to see you soon. Read on, everyone.