Greg Voisen
Okay. Hey, well, welcome back to Inside Personal Growth. This is Greg Voisen, host of Inside Personal Growth. And, you know, Scott, this is Scott Young joining us from Vancouver. Scott, say hi.

Scott Young
Hi. Thank you for having me.

Greg Voisen
I always enjoy having returning author guests. Now Scott reached out to about his new book, which we're going to be talking about here in a second. But I want to mention to my audience, and we'll put in the show notes. Scott was on this podcast for podcast 742, which is about 400 podcasts ago, for a book called Ultralearning: Master Hard Skills, Outsmart the Competition, and Accelerate Your Career with Scott Young, he got lots of good play on that particular one. And I know he helped will on this one as well. So I want my listeners to know about that, Scott. So, we'll put a link to that as well. Do you have a copy of the book there with you today that you can hold up the new book? The new

Scott Young
The new book? No, unfortunately, we're real close. So we're recording this about two weeks or three weeks before the books do and my copies are set to arrive Friday, I would love nothing more than to hold a physical one in my hand and show it okay, I was well, I was chastising the publishers about not having one ready for me, but they will be ready by the time this airs. So okay, just you'll have to you have to use AI to do certain one in my hand.

Greg Voisen
All right, we'll do. Well, that will be there, that's for certain we will have it on the screen for everybody. But I'm gonna let him know a little bit very little bit about you. But most importantly about this book. You are a Wall Street Journal, bestselling author, author, as I said, of a book called Ultralearning. He's got a podcast host, he's a computer programmer, an avid reader. And in 2006, he's published weekly essays to help people learn and think better. His work has been featured in The New York Times, pocket, and also pocket and Business Insider, on the BBC. And at TEDx, among other outlets. He says that he doesn't promise to have all the answers just a place to start. And as I said, he lives in Vancouver. And for all of you're trying to guess at this point, the new book is called Get Better at Anything. That's the book that we're speaking about. And if you go to his website, and that's scotthyoung, there's got to put the H in there y-o-u-n-g.com. There, you can learn more about the book, you can learn more about Scott. And you can learn more about getting better at anything. Also, Scott has teamed up with Cal Newport, who's been on the show, and they did a program, it's a learning course. And we'll put a link to that as well. called Life of focus. It's really fascinating. And I think this whole thing revolves around people, really learning how to focus and how to move distraction out of their life. And that brings me to kind of your introduction concepts and getting better at anything. Scott, in the book, you talk about three factors for getting better at anything, see, do and feedback, can you briefly explain how these factors interact, and why they're critical to mastery? Yeah,

Scott Young
Yeah, so these three factors, I mean, it sounds very simple. But there's sort of a shorthand for this, like immense body of research that I was trying to cover in, in the book, and see is coming from the idea that most of what we know comes from other people, most of the knowledge that we have the skills we have, we acquire from learning and studying from other people. And so really, the amount of creativity and problem solving we have is really the tip of a much larger iceberg of knowledge that we acquire from people that we know. And so the thing that I talked about in the book is that the ease in which we can learn from other people, if the environment that you're in enables you to learn from other people more easily, that can make a huge difference, not just in your ability, but the ability of an entire field to progress. So I start off with this example, a little bit of a fun example of Tetris players were in the beginning of the game, when people were fairly disconnected from each other. The actual proficiency people reached was not that high. Whereas now you have like 12-year-old kids, 13-year-old kids just doing things that are incredible. And it's because the internet has enabled them to learn from each other. Do is the idea that of course, to get better at things we need practice, but not just any kind of practice. You need the right kind of practice. So I cover in the book, a lot of research about what is Practice help with, and what are the ways that sometimes our own brains get in the way that we try to do things for practice that make it easier on ourselves, that actually hinders our own growth. And then finally, feedback, the ability to learn from our mistakes, to learn from corrections to learn from interacting with the environment. And so I cover some of the research and they're showing about how necessary feedback is for getting real mastery or real proficiency in many fields.

Greg Voisen
What's interesting, your personal background is you were going to college I think we're I read somewhere, and then you gave it up because you wanted to pursue this whole area around learning. I think it might be interesting for our listeners to know a little bit about your journey, because you really have an interesting one. It wasn't like this typical guy that graduates from Harvard and says, Hey, you, I'm this, I'm this, this, you know, knowledgeable guy, or from Stanford or something like that. You took an unfamiliar path to getting here. Sure. Can you tell the listeners a bit about that? Yeah,

Scott Young
I'd happy to I mean, anyone who can go back and wants to listen to the show we did about Ultra learning, I certainly talked about it more than So, for me, I went to school, I graduated, I did go through college and graduate with a business degree. And I graduated and like a lot of people, I felt like I studied the wrong subject. I thought that I wanted to study business. But I really felt like technology, the world of programming, this kind of thing was the future. I was doing stuff online already. I wanted to know more about it. But I didn't want to go back to school. So I did a project. This was sort of the first thing that brought me some internet attention. internet fame, was a project I called the MIT challenge, which was learning MIT's four year computer science curriculum, over 12 months. So this was a project that I did now over 10 years ago. So I'm really dating myself. This is something I did in my early 20s. And it was the start of really an obsession about learning. So I did a project after that learning multiple languages. It was a project we called the year without English, a friend and I, we traveled around the world for a year, only speaking the language of the country, we were in and, and learn a bit of Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin Chinese, and some Korean. And I've since done projects for quantum mechanics and portrait drawing and all sorts of other stuff. And, and really over the last, I would say, maybe five to six years, sort of starting with Ultra learning. And really, since Ultra learning, I've been doing like this intensive, deep dive into the science of learning itself. And so I think that really culminates in this book where, you know, it's not just my personal experiences, but really trying to give the reader a bird's eye view of everything that scientists have discovered, over the last, you know, up to a century really of research on how we learn how we acquire skills, what enables that and what's holding us back. And, you know, it's a complicated area, there's lots of contention and debate still. But I think if you can appreciate the broad strokes of that, it's very helpful for you in trying to get better at what you want to get better at.

Greg Voisen
Most certainly. Now, you know, you're talking about how we learn and how you immersed yourself in learning, based on what you just said, going to a country and only being able to speak in that language. You talked about the MIT project that you did you that you did. You talked about Tetris already, and how kids are, like mastering Tetris. And I think from the outside looking in, sometimes to people, when you talk about it, it's simple. It looks a lot simpler than it really is. Let's put it that way. And you mentioned that most of what we know comes from other people. How can someone effectively discern which influences or mentors to follow when trying to kind of improve in a specific area because there's so many people out there when you look at the millions of YouTube videos where we can learn From right, there's all these various programs now like this reflect note taking one, the second brain guy who's telling you know how to do you know those kinds of things? And it's Yeah, go for two. Yeah, yeah, go right. And you probably know Thiago. Yeah. All right. And all of it's designed to get us to a point where we can be more effective bull at the same time, more creative, more innovative, more ways to think, in unique, and I'm going to say remarkable ways. How do we discerned from these people that we really should be following and mentors? Thiago would be one of them. Right? It's like, okay, I'm gonna get my second brain. I'm going to follow Diego. Right. And the reality is, is how much of that para pa ra Are we really using? Yeah,

Scott Young
I mean, I think so the c component that I talked about that book, I think it's I think it's more fundamental than that. So obviously, there's people like me, and yourself and Thiago, that kind of sit in this ecosystem. And we are kind of advice givers. So we sort of sit above the specific details of your job, your life, your skill, and try to give broad advice, like I'm writing a book that's about learning kind of, in general, it's not about you know, how to become a really good JavaScript programmer, or how to, you know, become a really good portrait painter. But in reality, like what we need when we're actually improving is a lot of fairly specific information. And so I think the advice givers and people like Thiago myself, we have an important role in nudging people in the right direction of offering tools and strategies. But I think what I'm really trying to express in this book of this see idea is the very detailed, specific kind of nitty gritty information for particular skills. That's so important. And so, you know, using this Tetris example, it wasn't just that, you know, people had some broad general ideas about, okay, how to practice it weren't available. It was like super specific techniques, like, how do you hold your finger on the button so that you can make it, you know, move fast enough. So you can move these pieces at these high levels like this is, this is super specific stuff to Tetris. And similarly, you know, even as an author right now, like I'm part of a network of other authors, and people are talking about, like, hyper specific things like about publishing contracts, and like, who to publish with and how you can set up certain deals and stuff. These are not relevant to other fields. But if you don't have that knowledge, if you're sort of, in the outs on the book publishing show, you don't know that you're gonna have a harder time breaking in. And so they see ideas about how you can get immersed in networks of people who have quite detailed knowledge about the thing that you're trying to get good at, whether that's your career, or your hobby, or just a subject you want to do, so that you can acquire that from other people and how, you know, really, if you are in the right environments, the right workplaces, the right places, that's going to be facilitated a lot more, and it's going to affect how you are able to get better at things. Well,

Greg Voisen
let's face it, you and I are living in a world now that's been heavily influenced by artificial intelligence. Matter of fact, my son's master's degree from UC Irvine was in AI, and he now is an executive at Adobe. And as we see companies like Adobe, being able to create images, right online that you know, you just tell it what you want, it pops up some kind of image, or people writing books fully using AI, or doing research. Where do you believe as somebody who's in getting better at anything? I brought this up to my wife, because you know, we were discussing this morning about our human knowledge versus our machine learning. Yeah. And where do you actually see this intersection? Because it's an interesting topic to talk about, are we really headed to the point in business and in our personal lives, where we're gonna go to chat GBT or some other, you know, generative AI situation and start pulling all of our facts and relying on them?

Scott Young
Yeah, I mean, it's, it's wild times I like I've been working on this book for a number of years and chat. GPT and, well, really the GPT that came before it, but also chat GPT I think it just blew people away. I mean, I think if you go back a decade, no one's really predicting this. No one's thinking, Oh, well, you just, you know, give a specific type of machine learning model the entire text of the internet and they can have like, human sounding conversations that you had, do all these sorts of things. So I think this failure of prediction should be humbling for people pundits, like me or but even experts who are you know, you know, eminent in their field about making predictions about like, what's gonna happen 1020 years from now, so I won't say what I think is going to be the case with with chat GPT or large language models or whatever comes next, but what I will says it, if you look at kind of the history of technology, you see this pattern of new technologies coming up that replace some human cognitive labor. And when the technology is first developed, people are very much fixated on the substitution effect, the idea that this new technology can replace things that previously were only done by human minds. But what's often ignored or is really unknown is the complementary effect that by creating that new technology, it opens up new vistas of cognitive potential that wasn't there before. So a really simple example. So when we go back to ancient Greece, Socrates is decrying the invention of a very pernicious technology that was going to rob human ingenuity and effort, which was paper. Because we're before if you know, you weren't writing things down, you had to memorize speeches, you had to memorize this oral transmission, this human knowledge, and now you have paper, you can just write it down, you don't actually have to exercise that faculty of memory. And Socrates is saying, this is a bad thing, we're going to lose our ability to memorize things, which was so important for knowledge transmission back then. And the funny thing is, you can look at that as being kind of quaint, but he was actually right. If you go back to the ancient Greeks, they had these like elaborate mnemonic systems for memorizing huge amounts of information because of this need for an oral transmission. And we don't do that anymore. We, you know, we write things down, and we remember it poorly. And we look it up, and we have to, but what he was focusing on was the substitution that there was this human cognitive ability of memory palaces and pneumonic techniques for memorizing, you know, long speeches, things like the Iliad and the Odyssey, that we're going to be replaced by paper. But what he was ignorant of him wasn't aware of was how well once you're able to write things down, the amount of knowledge that you can have, the amount of knowledge that can be built up in a culture in a society just grows exponentially. So now, you know, the idea that you would memorize all human knowledge is just ridiculous. That's a fantasy, you can't even read all of it, right. And so we are much better off as a society. And the cognitive demands on people are actually much higher because of this new opportunity. And so when I think about things like chat, GPT, I think about, you know, there's been some recent studies that show that, for instance, with programmers who have large language models, it's the weaker programmers that do better because they're able to perform at a higher level, whereas the expert programmers don't really use the LMS that much. But again, this is focusing on the substitute effect, this is focusing on will in the short term, where no one's really familiar with these tools and knows how to use them. And as you know, they haven't really integrated themselves into our lives. It's the people who don't really know that much to get most of the advantage of these large language models. But in the long term, it's hard to say it's hard to say, because who knows what kinds of, you know, feats of intellectual prowess, things with knowledge, creativity, are going to be generated in the wake of, you know, these tools being widely available. And so I'm actually kind of excited because I think far from robbing, you know, human ingenuity and creativity, it's going to be totally new terrain, where there's going to be new skills and professions that didn't exist 10 years ago, as a result, well, you know,

Greg Voisen
I personally believe it can take many mundane tasks that we performed, and open our minds up for much more creative things that we do, like, you know, writing a contract or something like that, or getting an outline for a PowerPoint or something where the true creativity goes into what is now in that PowerPoint, right, and, and how I evolve it and how I make it better. I think it's just going to allow us to keep making things better and better. That's my personal, humble opinion. Now in that, and that brings me to you, you talk about self education, because it's like, okay, we've got this brain that weighs three or four pounds and our skull and, you know, neurotransmitters are firing and wiring and hard wiring and doing, but one of the things is that essence that I see kind of is just problem solving. Okay, so as a human species, we've always been somebody in search of problems, can explore how individuals tackle tackle difficult problems. And what are some of the common pitfalls that people face when trying to solve complex problems on their own? Well, in

Scott Young
writing this book, the first chapter, which I really had to open with, because it's such a fundamental mental model, that I think if you don't see it this way, it's hard to make sense of a lot of the other learning research. But this was a model created by Alan Newell and Herbert Simon in the 1970s, where they published this landmark book called human problem solving. And basically they he redefined what problems only means they sort of took the study of it and said that what it means to solve problems by looking at tons of people solving problems is that we create something they call a problem space. Now a problem space is a bit of an abstract idea. But the idea is that it's essentially all the moves you can do to go from the start to the finish. So I like to analogize it to amaze. When you're in a maze, you know where you are, you know where you'd like to be. But you don't know exactly how to get there. Because there's, you can go left or right, you can't go directly to the endpoint. Now, in a maze, the walls of the maze are kind of physical, it's a very tangible representation of a space. Whereas you can think about problem spaces as being more abstract than that. So if you're trying to solve a Rubik's Cube, for instance, the space is not like the physical space of the cube, but the configurations because every time you rotate it, you switch the problem into a different state. And so his idea or their idea, rather, was that when we're solving problems, we're trying to first construct a space. So we're trying to represent the problem in some way that we can make moves to solve it. And then we're using this sort of library of these are the different moves that I can make to get from A to point B. And what I think is relevant to take away from that is that there's two ways that we solve problems. One is using kind of generic problem solving methods. And these methods appear to be fairly universal, they're not something that we necessarily need to be taught, they're things that we kind of do almost instinctively. And they are things like, hill climbing is one of them, which is where you just basically try to make it better. So if you're writing an essay, you keep making small edits, to make the whole essay better, until you get to a better essay, or you're trying to get from point A to point B, you're just like trying to get closer on the compass direction to that direction. But then, the real way that we solve problems, and I think this is I think the real insight from their approach. And what we've learned from there is that the real advantage we have as a human species is that we have all these things that call strong methods, which are basically tricks that we know for particular situations to move forward in the problem space. So solving a Rubik's Cube just through trial and error is almost impossible. There's so many configurations, there's no way you could do it. But if you've learned the right method, you can solve the Rubik's Cube in under a minute. There's like tons of YouTube tutorials where people can do it. And so the idea here, and this is related to this C factor is that when you are trying to solve a problem, the very first step you should do is how do people solve problems of this type? What are the experts doing that solve problems that are very similar to this, because if you can build your knowledge, your creativity, on top of what is already known about solving problems in this space, you're gonna make much, much faster progress than if you're doing things through trial and error, or through your weak methods that we talked about, you know, these generic processes for solving problems.

Greg Voisen
That's a good explanation. I don't want to thank you for that. Because I think, you know, when we're solving problems, starting the book off that way, was a good way for people to get an idea. I think frequently we get stuck, right? Sometimes in us talk about the how creativity and copying, and you assert that creativity begins with copying. How can learners balance the act of copying as a form of learning without stifling their own creativity?

Scott Young
Right? Well, I mean, this is this is another. So first, we're talking about how when you solve problems, a lot of what you do to solve those problems comes from other people's lives. The first factor, right, you're at it copying. Yeah, in a broad sense. I mean, obviously, it takes understanding it takes thinking so I don't want to just say problem solving is just copying. But the idea of copying this is this is something I think is very powerful is that often we make this tension between true creativity, original originality, and understanding and replicating the works of other people, like, you know, there's someone who's being derivative, and there's someone who's being original. And we put those in opposite poles, when really, I like to think of them as a progressive continuum, that anyone who does anything really original has started off by understanding kind of the work that's already been done. There's very few people that enter a domain having zero experience and create a useful contribution. And part of this is because of what I just talked about. And this is why I had to introduce this problem solving thing is that you know, to solve a Rubik's Cube, for instance, if you know nothing about it, the amount of configurations is huge. Just trying things out by trial and error. You're never gonna get them in the same place. Now, you might with some intelligence, figure out the right way to solve a Rubik's Cube, but it's much easier to learn how someone else doesn't. And in this chapter here, where I talk about creativity comes from sorry, creativity begins with copying thing is yeah, the idea hear is that there's a lot of research showing that learning from worked examples. So this is someone else, demonstrating how to do something is a much faster method of learning than beginning with problem solving. And so in a lot of domains from mathematics tonight, I talk about artistic instruction here as well. This sort of apprenticeship model of seeing someone do it, being able to fully understand being able to do it, the way they do it themselves, is a foundation for doing original work. Like kinda, you have to know the rules before you can break them. But like having that foundation is the recipe for creativity. Because once you're able to do that, creativity is often just making a few small changes to an established body of work. So instead of doing it this way, you do it another way, or you break this convention instead of sticking to it, rather than, you know, a complete reinvention which you throw out all the rules, and you start off with something completely from scratch.

Greg Voisen
Well, getting better at anything, what you're doing is kind of laying the ground rules in this book for getting better at anything. And I think that's what's important. In other words, if we go seek a new hobby of some type, and we want to master it, there are ways we can do that. I've always told my well wife that I'm got a lot of grit and determination. And if I'm going to repair something around the house, first thing I do is go to YouTube to look for a channel where somebody's done it to see what's happening. And I'm I mean, look, there's millions of people that do what I do. But still, they can't repair it. Right. So when they're done, it's like, oh, my gosh, you know, where do I go? Next, what you do is take the knowledge you have from things that you've already experienced, add it to what you saw on the video to actually do that. And that's where kind of the copying like somebody says, well, I'll give you a shortcut to go do something or get better at it. And one of these things was, you talked about in your was feedback utilization. And I think that's where this comes in is because when I go to YouTube, I'm looking for feedback. I'm looking for like, Oh, I was on the right path. You know, I just missed a couple of steps. Maybe I should go do this. So what would you say the some of the strategies you'd recommend for somebody to seek out to utilize feedback effectively, especially in the fields where feedback is not readily available. Now, that's not YouTube. Because you know, YouTube, you can say, I got this plumbing issue, and you're gonna find 800 guys on there that have put something on about how to fix some plumbing issue. Right, you following me? Yeah. So but you're saying this is not where it's readily available? So how do I get feedback loop in those areas? Well, I

Scott Young
mean, I think when we're talking about what your experiences were, like repairing things, and having a YouTube video, I think an important factor, which is, you know, related to feedback, but is, I think, even more fundamental, is that in order to be able to use that example. So you're talking about repairing something, another example I can think of is that, following an online recipe, how many times if you're not a good cook, and someone shows you a recipe online, you try to make it and it's just a disaster, and like why I follow the same steps, right. And part of it is that in order to be able to copy in order to be able to make use of that, you have to come at it with some background knowledge. So you already have background knowledge for repairing tons of other things. And so what you're doing is you're not only following the steps, but you're filling in the sort of implicit assumptions that they make in that thing. So even if they try to spell things out in the most minut detail possible, well, maybe your pipe isn't the same as the pipe that they had, or you don't have quite the same wrench, or, well, this thing actually got a little bit stuck. And should you try to force it open? Or is that going to break something, these kinds of little difficulties, you're filling in with your background knowledge, repairing things. And so I think this is a big part, again, it goes back to our problem solving ability. Whenever we meet a new situation, we're always having kind of the union of our background knowledge and whatever knowledge is supplied by the situation or in this case, you know, from additional instruction or additional advice from the outside. And so building up that background knowledge is huge. And that background knowledge, again, mostly comes from this earlier process of seeing other people and doing practice and getting feedback. And you know, getting feedback. Yeah, sorry, keep going. Well,

Greg Voisen
well, I was gonna say something, you know, because I've had so many people provide me accolades about, you know, like my interview process for a podcast out, and I and I really appreciate that, even though at this point, I have to just accept it and say, Well, I can always be better. i There's something I could do that was better. And you know, you talk about mastery and teach it. Now, one of the things people have asked me to do is like, Okay, can you teach me how you did those 1100 podcasts, right? And what did you learn? But what I really Get out of these podcasts is I get the knowledge and expertise of somebody like Scott H Jung. And where I really do is I apply what I learned from you. Now, most people say, Well, you're doing that, because, you know, Scott wants to sell another book. And I say, Yeah, I like to help authors sell books, but at the same time, I'm very curious. And that's the other thing, Curiosity is a huge element. And so without, you know, detaining any longer, how do you teach to deepen understanding, that leads to, you know, one's greater learning rate, in other words, just their their blossoming of their learning. And there's got to be an element here, Scott, where Curiosity just has to be a huge element of somebody wanting to dig in here and learn and learn and learn and become better and better and better, so that they hone this skill and master the skill, right? Ultra learning.

Scott Young
Yeah, I mean, I think I think you're right. Like, to me, curiosity isn't is an issue of motivation, like what motivates people to learn things, what motivates people to improve? And I actually wrote sort of a research oriented article on my website, because I was very interested in this question of motivation, like, what motivates people, what motivates people to learn what holds people back? Like, why is there some people in the class that are just like, eager to soak up knowledge? And other people are like, this is so boring, you know, it's not boring to some people? Well, why? Why is it boring to some people, right. And so I wrote this complete guide to motivation, it's free on my website, if you Google Scottie Chun, complete guide, no motivation. You don't have to buy anything. It's a some almost book length essay on on the research and motivation. And there's a couple things that come up, and I think they're relevant. So one of them related to curiosity, and I think this is fascinating is that curiosity tends to be a kind of perverse sort of motivation, because most of our motivations are kind of drive like motivations, that you have a drive for something, and then you get something that satiated. So when you're hungry, you eat some food, and then you're less hungry, and then the motivation goes down, or you're thirsty, and then you drink some water and you're less thirsty. And a lot of motivations work that way, right there homeostatic curiosity seems to be almost the opposite, that you're more curious about things you know more about. And that can seem paradoxical, because obviously, you know, if there's 100 facts about something a, you know, zero, you know, less than someone who knows 99. But that's just really not how knowledge works. That the issue is that when you don't know anything about something, it's also impossible for you to formulate good questions about it. When you know more about it, then you can ask good questions. And so one of my real joys has been like diving into the research where researchers can formulate questions that they're just not even articulable to someone who doesn't have a depth of knowledge in the field, because you don't even understand what the question is asking. But once you have that knowledge, you can be like, Oh, that is a really interesting question. Why does that work that way? Or why is it this way, and not that way, and that can drive people for their entire career. So I think the first ingredient to curiosity is kind of somewhat paradoxically, to start learning more. When you read more books, when you have a greater understanding more questions come up that fuels that curiosity. The second,

Greg Voisen
I'll add in there, read more books and listen to more podcasts.

Scott Young
Even better, you get to have these conversations and listen to as well. The second thing that I think is important, I cover it in this book in the in the third wall, Fourth Chapter. The third maxim is this idea of self efficacy. So the psychologist Albert Bandura, pioneered this concept. And it's basically the idea that to be motivated to do something, it doesn't just have to be the case that the outcome is something you find rewarding or valuable. But also, you have to feel like you can successfully take the actions necessary to achieve that outcome. And that's pretty obvious. But it does mean that there is a certain self reflexive quality to motivation that when you are motivated to do something, and you know how to do it, you do it and you get a bit of practice, and you get better at it. And then you feel more motivated to do it. Because you're more confident that you'll achieve the outcome the next time you do it. Whereas if you try it and you fail, or you try it, and you don't know how to do it, you no one's shown you how to do it, then you get stuck, and you've experienced failure and you're you know what that outcome is out of my grasp, I'm not going to be able to understand this book, even if I do try to read it or I'm not going to be able to learn this skill, even if I do practice it for two months. And when you have those beliefs, they become a self fulfilling prophecy. And so I think self efficacy is another huge part. I mean, part of my journey and learning how to learn was really, you know, taking some of these projects happening to get some success with them and those fueling motivation to try new projects and try new projects. If it had been the case that you know, those first early projects I did, were just total disasters, maybe a million Yeah, you know, this whole learning things is devoting my life to maybe I'm going to work on something else, it's a little bit more tractable for me. So I think building success, building that base of knowledge, that background knowledge, all the things that we talked about, they're really self reinforcing cycles. So you get more curious by learning more, and you build this motivation to learn by learning more. So it's really something if you start making that investment in 1020 years down the road, you're going to be you know, like yourself 1100 podcasts in hungry for more,

Greg Voisen
I think you get an insatiable appetite for even if the peripheral, I'm gonna call it peripheral knowledge, right? People can say, Well, I'm a, I'm not a master at anything, right. But I have this broad, broad background through a lot of things. But you can connect the dots, right, and you learn how to connect dots better, the broader and more expansive your education is. Now I'm not saying that you don't become a specialist at something and maybe become a neurosurgeon. And then everything you want to learn about neurosurgery and how it works and what you want to do. But you did say in the book, improvement is not a straight line. And what advice do you have for the learners and listeners who feel discouraged? You just said it a second ago, you get discouraged, and you go, I'm going to kick the can and forget that one, because I'm not going to be able to do anything about it. By plateaus in skills development. I, I've gotten a hook the lately on Peter A TIA. Okay. So Peter does a podcast around he has a new book out outlived longevity. And he's really, you know, all the way down to muscle testing. And, and I mean, you want to get into the the nitty gritty of glucose and how your glucose is doing and what's happening. And I think that, you know, somebody that's that driven, like Dr. Peter, a TIA to want to understand both the physical, emotional, spiritual, psychological elements of how our body works, is is cool. You know, some people would call him crazy, right? On the other hand, he's gotten to plateaus and even emits it. But he had to force himself to dig deeper or find another person who knew more about it than him. Right? Yeah. So my question is, what would you tell somebody right now is maybe hit that plateau, and maybe he's a little discouraged.

Scott Young
I mean, I think plateaus happen for all sorts of reasons. So I think you know, what you're talking about, you know, there's a lot of areas of life where there are diminishing returns to things, you know, if I am trying to get in shape, for instance, and I have, you know, never exercised ever, and I'm like completely out of shape. Even doing something like you know, just keeping a step count and walking a little bit or, you know, doing a little bit of jogging is probably going to have enormous health benefits. Whereas if I'm already, you know, an ultra marathoner, and then you know, to just get that little tiny bit of extra fitness could be quite a bit of work. And I think that's normal. So in that sense, is kind of a plateau just because once you've already gotten to 99%, getting that last 1%, or another point 1% is, you know, maybe as much work as going from 40 to 50%. That's just how progress works in a lot of domains. But in in this book, and what I talk about in particular, is that there is a common pattern for a lot of skills, that when you keep doing them, when you keep practicing them over and over again, what you're doing is you're making the sort of procedures, the sort of mental tools that you have for performing that skill, more and more automatic, you're making them easier and easier to apply. Like you're kind of more deeply and deeply ingraining, those habits of thinking those ways of doing things. And that has two effects. One effect is it makes it easier and easier for you to perform the skill. So if you think about something like driving a car, for instance, it's something that was maybe excruciating ly difficult the first time you're doing it, you're like, Okay, where do I put my hands? And like, how much do I turn the steering wheel and pump the brakes and this kind of thing, to where you can just do it so automatically, that you end up driving somewhere you didn't want to because you got distracted, and you just went on your normal commute, but you had to turn off in a different place. You weren't even thinking about it that hap

Greg Voisen
or you're already just turn the autopilot on your Tesla and let you

Scott Young
know, but I mean, I mean, even if you're listening to this podcast right now, maybe at this point, you're like, Oh, I missed my turn off because I was listening to what he was saying and I wasn't paying it. So this is a common tendency skills, but what it means is that like I am the very automatic drunk driver, I drove here this morning. I wasn't really thinking about driving, but am I a really good driver? Now? Probably not. There's probably a lot better I could be as a driver and part of the diff faculty is that because you find some way to do something, even if it's not the best. And it becomes more and more ingrained, more automatic, that learning that getting better at some point requires a kind of an active effort to, in some ways unlearn to like, take an old habit and resurface it and make it better. And this can be difficult, this can be challenging. I talked about the research of Anders Ericsson, which was all about how, you know, elite performers are constantly doing this, they're constantly finding some aspect of their performance, that's good enough, that's been good enough for years. That's something that an outside person who's not an expert probably wouldn't even care about. And trying to rebuild it, tweak it to make it better, so that they can reach a new level of performance. And so

Greg Voisen
it's interesting, it's interesting, you say that, because I was speaking with my wife, and she's been a piano teacher and a flute teacher, saxophone teacher for many years for kids and adults. And she in somebody asked her, they said, Well, do we have to know anything about playing the piano. And she says, I'd rather that you came to me as a clean slate with nothing. Because the reality is, is learning an instrument like that, when you have to have hand eye coordination, you have to be able to read music, you have to have put foot pedal coordination. You know, there's been many papers written about it. It's it's a very challenging instrument to learn, right? So she said, she really likes to find the the people that were their minds haven't been bent in a different direction.

Scott Young
To exactly right, right, so

Greg Voisen
to learn it? Well, we've given a little bit of time to technology and advice in how AI maybe or the internet is going to affect it. What do you see in the near future or far future, that the role of this is going to play in human learning changing our lives over the next decades, because where we are now is people like you like me, 1000s, we can put up a course and you know, 10 lesson course, and we just push buttons, and we listen to videos. And then there's some worksheets, or we have interactive trainings, or whatever it is we're doing, it seems to be it's getting more and more immersive. Now, I would think with AI, that AI is really going to change the game of learning, especially in learning modules, where, hey, it's Scott and Cowell talking about XYZ. Oh, by the way, here's the AI, you can just ask it a question and it's already going to be able to respond back to us in Kalin. And Scott, don't have to sit there and ask it, you know, respond.

Scott Young
It's very interesting. I have a lot of I have a lot of thoughts about technology and learning. And I think one thing you can say, as a sort of an overall trend of learning research and edtech, maybe over the last few decades is that often there's been like some new technology that is heralded as like this is going to transform education, and it often doesn't. And part of that, I think, is the fact that despite these advances in AI, despite these advances in internet and technology stuff, the for the average person, the average student, learning just remains such an important like human social relationship. So we can definitely make apps these days that would teach kids the basics of how to read, but the app itself is not going to force them to sit down and do the kind of cognitive work of learning the skills and to that they need the peers, they need the teacher, they need the social environment to create that. So in some ways, I think, you know, I talked about this in Ultra learning, that, you know, the future really belongs to people who are able to have the self regulation skills to like teach themselves things to be able to like, Okay, I want to learn this subject. And they're able to use these tools, they're able to use AI, they're able to use these things to get themselves to learn. And I think the kind of I don't know whether it's a tragedy, but the difficulty of that is just that for a lot of people, they're still going to be relying on this social environment. So it remains to be seen what AI is going to be able to add in those environments just because I think so much of human learning is so intrinsically social that not that we're not like cognitively able to learn from the AI tutor, but whether we are going to be motivated to like sit in front of a computer and prompt and texted all day to give us their questions. The second thing that I think is important and I think is also relevant to our question of like this substitution and new vistas of cognitive skill, is that because these large language models are so trained on the text corpus like book knowledge, basically, I think that's going to make an increasing premium on the kind of difficult to write down expert knowledge that tends to be encoded in practices in people's, you know, intuition and wisdom of the field, this kind of like hands on knowledge that is often you know, it's just in the mind of some person who is an expert at this. And so I think in some ways, is going to make us even more reliant on social networks on the kind of facilitation of learning from other people. Because you know, the kind of, you can just type it down and write it down, there's going to be a large language model that's going to learn how to do that at some point, because there's detailed instructions for it. Whereas the, you know, difficult to describe how to knowledge that you learn from observation and practice is going to remain kind of opaque to that kind of machine learning model.

Greg Voisen
It's, it's interesting as with this dialogue has progressed with you and I, we come to this point where I want to wrap up and give the listeners because you call them the 12. Maxim's for mastery, right? And it makes me reflect back on George Leonard's interview with George was one of the founders, with another gentleman of epsilon, which is in Northern California here, and it's a, I don't want to call it experiential learning kind of service. And his book about mastery was was really fascinating. And the many things that he did repeat at that time, because this book is quite old. But yet, it it's, it's one of those things that you say 12, Maxim's for mastery. And it's mastery that he really honed in on of the practice of something on a regular basis, whether it was swimming, cycling, big teacher playing the piano, and I think you'll find a lot of this come back to practice. What are the if you were to leave our listeners with some of these Maxim's that you'd really want to drive home and say, Okay, guys, these are the things that I think would really help you. In accelerating your learning for something very hard mastering a very hard skill. What would be those three things that you would promise some from this book?

Scott Young
Yeah, I mean, I think what I would try to promise people and each of the Maxim's, the way I kind of organize them was that this was a sort of central concept, a central idea that if you understood it, it would give you some keys to unlocking, learning or improvement in your own life. So they're all built on kind of an established body of research around a particular idea and learning. So you know, we've talked about a couple of them. So the first one was problem solving as searches about this, like really fundamental idea of like, how do people solve problems? Why are some problems impossible to solve? Or some problems very difficult? How can we get better at solving problems. And then the creativity begins with copying is about cognitive load theory, but also this idea of, you know, learning from examples and learning from this sort of demonstrations of other people. You know, each of them covers in incense, their own little world, their own little, you know, I could have written an entire book about each of them about these ideas related to learning related to mastery, I think, if I were to give people kind of the, what I think they would get from the book, what I think would be most valuable to them, I think, probably the idea of the see do feedback loop. This is the idea of combining seeing from other people getting practicing around and getting feedback. This is a common element in many, many successful learning systems. And getting that feedback loop right. Getting those three elements, right is a huge part about making progress. The second thing is what I was talking about alluding to before is this idea of finding the right level of difficulty, you know, we talked about, you know, you're able to fix something that maybe other people aren't able to fix by watching a YouTube video because of this merger with your background knowledge, and the knowledge that's present in this situation. And so a lot of learning is about finding that sweet spot where you have enough background knowledge, you have enough skill to be able to make gains to make progress. If it's too hard, you're not going to be able to acquire new knowledge. If it's too easy, you're not going to grow. And then the final thing I think, which is related to the emotions, the motivations of it, we talked a little bit about self efficacy, about how building from Success builds that curiosity creates this sort of flywheel that keeps going and going. And I talked about at the end of the chapter about how fears and anxieties are also related on a similar principle that as we get exposure to things, our own negative emotion surrounding something reduces well. So I think diving deeper into that research, understanding those principles, I think could be helpful for someone in unlocking whether it's a barrier to getting better at something or just to give them the confidence to try something new.

Greg Voisen
Well, Scott, it's all was a pleasure having you on inside personal growth. And this book's gonna be a huge success, I can tell you because, you know, when you look at our work world today, and how diverse people have to be, to maintain and sustain what I could say, any vocation, because they're all expanding, particularly people that are in the programming world, like you have familiar already with authors, entrepreneurs, visionaries of any type, they're being thrown so many things on a regular basis every day. And they're trying to get better at fundamentally coming up with a response or a solution or an idea, or being creative or do something. And it's, it's become, I want to say relatively exponential in a lot of people's lives. Not everybody, of course, but probably for many of the people that would read your book. This is an area where they are going to say, hey, yeah, I got some really great ideas from how to get better at anything, right? And fundamentally, it's coming down to, how quickly can we learn? And how quickly can we draw from the resource pool up here, the resource pool on the computer, and the resource pool through other people, that we can rely on mentors, other folks, folks we can talk to to get feedback, you can take all three of those, put them together, and usually come up with a pretty good understanding of the decision you might want to make about something or the way you might want to go. I know when I go out and seek a new project, I'm usually looking at all those sources to fundamentally get an understanding and groundwork for it. But you've given us a tool, a really good to your book, get better. If anything, I'd also tell for all my listeners, we're going to have a link to altra learning, ultra learning was one of the predecessor books, but you have how many books out now?

Scott Young
Well, these are the two I've published with traditional publishers, but I also have four self published books that predated by a number.

Greg Voisen
So just go to Amazon, we'll put a link to it. Also go to Scott H. Jung there, you'll see articles, challenges, products, podcasts, you've got a plethora of things that you can sign up for, you can also get, you can sign up. I will say for those of you looking at this, and I'm sure it'll be taken down by then. But there was going to be some bonuses for pre ordering the book. But this podcast is going to come out after that. So you won't be able to get those bonuses anymore. But I want to thank you for being on the show and sharing your ideas. Scott, it's always a pleasure having you on and it was wonderful. And again, we'll put a link to life and focus. The actual course that Scott does, which you said is it a year long? Three months last

Scott Young
three months. This is of course we do with Cal Newport. So if you like his work to talking about deep work, digital minimalism, he just really slow productivity. It really builds on a lot of those ideas, which are obviously consonant with things that I talked about and get better at anything.

Greg Voisen
Awesome. Well, thank you for being on Inside Personal Growth and sharing it. Have a wonderful rest of your day in Vancouver. And I appreciate you being on the show.

Scott Young
Oh, yeah, great. Thanks for having me. Take care.

Greg Voisen
All right. Take care.