Ultralearning: Master Hard Skills, Outsmart the Competition, and Accelerate Your Career.

[00:01] SPEAKER_00:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, bringing you the best in professional practice.

[00:06] Announcer:

Here's your host, director of the Principal Center and champion of high performance instructional leadership, Justin Bader. Welcome everyone to Principal Center Radio.

[00:15] SPEAKER_01:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to be joined today by Scott H. Young. Scott is a writer who takes on interesting self-education projects, such as learning quantum physics in a month or learning four languages in a year. And he's the author of the new book, Ultra Learning. Master hard skills, outsmart the competition, and accelerate your career.

[00:37] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:39] SPEAKER_01:

Scott, welcome to Principal Center Radio.

[00:41] SPEAKER_02:

Oh, thank you so much for having me.

[00:42] SPEAKER_01:

Well, I'm very interested in speaking with you about the work that you've done in this book, because as school leaders, obviously, we think about learning all the time. But we typically think about teaching large numbers of students kind of fixed amounts of information, you know, things that are in our standards, things that are in our normal curriculum. And you've taken what I think can only be described as an extreme approach to learning when it comes to to your personal development and mastering topics that are of interest to you. How did you get into this form of ultra learning?

[01:13] SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, so it's funny we talk about this because, you know, there's so many books that have been written and so many people that go around to speak about how we ought to be teaching people that I think it's kind of surprising that definitely me doing research in this book, I found that it was a little lopsided. There's a lot less research on like, how do you become an effective learner? So if you're approaching something that you want to get good at, how do you get good at it rather than just, you know, the opposite perspective? And so For me, I started getting interested in learning and sort of studying advice when I was a student and in school. That was something that kind of interested me in the beginning. And the topic of ultra learning.

[01:46]

So ultra learning is just this sort of term that I use to describe aggressive self-education or aggressive self-directed learning projects. And this actually started when I was on a trip to France. So I was a student on exchange and I was trying to learn French. And It wasn't going as well as I had hoped. I was working really hard and studying really hard, but I didn't feel like I was making the kind of progress I was wanting to make. And a big part of that was just that everyone around me was speaking to me in English all the time, despite the fact that I was living in another country.

[02:17]

And around this time, I was introduced to this guy, Benny Lewis, and he had this sort of weird kind of approach to things where he would just go to a new country and try to learn as little in a short period of time. And so he had this website where he still has this website, which was based on his challenge to try to become fluent in a language in three months. So his website was called Fluent in Three Months. And it just sort of, to me, kind of was this interesting idea that I had never heard of anyone taking on like kind of aggressive learning challenges before. It was just a new idea. I'd never considered it before.

[02:47]

And not only encountering him, but encountering other people that sort of looked at this sort of learning process from the perspective of a student and just how can you, you know, get through material either more quickly or how can you learn something more deeply or how can you learn something under perhaps, you you know, unusual constraints, whether that's time constraints or whether you're, you know, you're not going to school or whether you're doing that kind of thing. And so I've done some of my own projects that you mentioned in the introduction. And then also this sort of culminated in writing this book where I wanted to try to take some of these people and their fascinating stories and pair it with some of the scientific research so that you could have kind of a practical guide to learning hard skills and teaching them yourself if you wanted to learn them, whether you're an adult or someone in class and you just want to learn things that are not being taught in the school.

[03:32] SPEAKER_01:

Well, one of the first implications for us that comes to mind as school leaders is thinking about our students. We have a certain set of things that we want all students to take away from their education. Certainly the ability to read, the ability to reason quantitatively, and of course, then we have a lot of other content standards as well. But I feel like there comes an age, maybe around sixth grade or seventh grade or eighth grade, where some students really start to go deep on what we as adults might describe as kind of a weird interest, like learning how to do a Rubik's cube really, really, really fast. And if you look on YouTube at just about any video made by an adolescent who has developed some exceptional skill, whether it's Rubik's Cube or singing, a lot of top 40 artists now started as YouTubers who just sat at their computer and taught themselves.

[04:25]

And it's just amazing what young people can do in a short amount of time. And yet that's not at all part of our k-12 education system you know that that's something they do outside of school hours sometimes they even get in trouble for it but it's remarkable like i i don't know if you've dealt with rubik's cube but uh i got my kids rubik's cube for christmas and tried to learn it myself and it took me like the entire break to learn how to do it in a 10 minute period you know i can do a rubik's cube in about 10 12 minutes but a kid can do a rubik's cube in like 60 seconds and it's So help me understand that a little bit. What's going on when someone learns something incredibly fast, incredibly well, and why does it seem so impossible to the rest of us when we witness that?

[05:11] SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, so I think you touched on something really important that there's often this kind of, you know, kids who are really interested in mastering something or learning something that maybe is outside of the traditional scope of the curriculum. I don't know what exactly drives people to do that. I know when I was a kid, I had a lot of interests that often were different from the curriculum. Part of that might just be that the world that the, you know, child and habits is going to be somewhat different than the world that, you know, what adults think is important, what they ought to be learning. And so I think sometimes, you know, if you see a lot of kids these days are getting really good at certain video games. And I mean, that's something that often comes to the chagrin of parents who would rather be doing their math homework.

[05:52]

But to them, you know, getting good at this video game is something that matters to them. It matters for their social esteem and to their peers and for being popular and cool. And, you know, we're talking about YouTube and stuff. A lot of people, they see YouTubers and then they're being successful and they'd like to emulate that. So I think there's a lot of natural urges towards learning and to doing things well. And so for me, I think you kind of hit the nail on the head.

[06:13]

The first part is having that sort of passion to do things and cultivating that and going in the right direction. And then a lot of it is, I think, the same things that you try to do as an educator is try to make sure that, you know, that the skills that they're learning are the skills that match what you're going to actually be using to evaluate on them. So one of the principles that I talk about in the book is directness which I think is something that as educators you know that transfer is sort of a challenging problem when we're teaching students something in one context you want them to apply to other contexts and that can often be difficult to do. And the issue is that a lot of people who are learning new skills aren't aware that this is difficult to do and so You know, if you're learning something purely from a book, you know, you maybe won't have the same ability to transfer it to doing it if it requires motor skills or that kind of coordination. And so I think there's a lot of different little principles that go into self-education and doing that well.

[07:08]

But yeah, of course, it obviously starts with being super passionate about it.

[07:11] SPEAKER_01:

Absolutely. And having a motivation to do that specific thing because, you know, if it was, you know, let's take a class on Rubik's Cube, whether you want to or not, we'd end up with a very different result. But let's dive into that idea of transfer because it's something that we have been interested in as a profession for a long time. But I'm not aware of a lot of empirical research on transfer between different domains. In fact, I've read a lot of research that says often humans are terrible at applying knowledge or applying skills from different contexts. And you've learned how to do lots of very different things from computer science to languages to drawing portraits.

[07:52]

What does transfer look like between those different domains, if anything?

[07:55] SPEAKER_02:

Well, so I think you brought up a really good point. And that was one of the things that I dedicated a chapter to in the book is just that I think as human beings, we often have these assumptions that we're going to get this broad transfer that you're going to teach someone, you know, this abstract rule, and then they're just going to go out in the world and apply it in all these sorts of ways and be much better. And, and yet that doesn't seem to happen. And I don't need to reiterate the research on that for you here, because you're obviously well versed in it. So my understanding of the research on transfer is that transfer does tend to be easier when you have reached a higher level of sophistication. And this kind of makes sense because if people who are not experts did not think it was obvious that you'd be able to transfer knowledge from situation A to situation B, you know, there wouldn't be a problem of transfer in the first place.

[08:36]

It just seems to be that novices or people who just encountered the information in the first place didn't. They can't do that. And that's sort of that's the paradox is that, you know, the scientists who's administering this, they clearly see that, you know, situation A and situation B are related. So you should apply the knowledge. It's just the people who are just starting learning it don't. And so I think for myself, I think my own journey in this process has been really like trying to invest in the learning process itself of how you learn skills.

[09:05]

And A lot of that isn't just understanding the research and the science, but also the practical skills of how do you organize a project? How do you make sure you have time to do it? How do you make sure that you cultivate the actual skill you want? And so for me, getting kind of obsessed about that learning process itself is a kind of transfer activity that just sort of built over time so you know starting with studying in university and then kind of doing classroom type learning and then moving off to doing languages and then more practical skills and so i don't think that that's something that i necessarily would have understood you know in the beginning uh rather there's like no simple policy for the transfer just that you know as you get more experience with it you start to notice patterns and so writing this book was me trying to summarize some of those patterns to you know give people a nudge in that direction

[09:50] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, well, let's get into some of the nine principles. So you identify nine principles for mastering hard skills. What are some of those? We can talk about a few or all of them. And how did they manifest themselves in your different challenges that you undertook?

[10:03] SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, so some of these principles are things that I think are going to be familiar to someone who is up to date with the educational register. So as I said, I just talked about directness, which is kind of the inverse of this problem of transfer that basically, if you want to Learn something if you think about how you're going to use it in a concrete situation and make sure you get some practice in that situation. You are at least going to be able to do that thing. That's the way I feel. Whereas a lot of people, for instance, if they're learning a language, they do some practice activity that doesn't really resemble speaking the language. And then, you know, they're on Duolingo for six months and then they're like, oh, actually, I can't really speak Spanish that well or my Italian isn't very good.

[10:40]

And they don't realize that the issue had to do with the fact that there's a lot of skills and a lot of things that they should have been practicing that they weren't practicing. So whereas they thought, you know, I've learned the first 400 words, so I should be pretty good. But they're missing maybe all of this kind of connective tissue as it is of like all the little skills that are involved in doing things. So directness is very much a principle that applies to education as well. Whereas some of the principles I feel apply more specifically to self-directed learning because you have to kind of. bootstrap your own knowledge here that you have to learn something where you also are not a subject expert.

[11:15]

So you don't necessarily know the best way to learn it. So one of the examples of that principle is meta-learning, which I opened the book with. And meta-learning is really this idea that before you start a learning project, you ought to spend some time on Google looking at how other people learn it and what are the strategies they use and what are the books and resources and courses they use. And it's funny because I think a lot of people don't do this. They just sort of go with whatever is first recommended to them. And they just, yeah, I'm just going to go with this and try this out.

[11:43]

And if it doesn't work, then they just, you know, write themselves off and consider it a failure. Whereas, you know, again, if you're going to learn a language, for instance, if you spent a little bit of time, you'd see that people who learn lots of languages have tons of strong opinions about you know, popular tools for learning languages and their strengths and weaknesses. So these are a few of the principles I have. There's, you know, seven more that I discuss in the book. But I think that if you can understand these sort of basic building blocks or basic ingredients, then you can apply it to your own learning, even if, you know, you don't have a PhD in educational science, right?

[12:16] SPEAKER_01:

I wanted to ask your opinion on the question of content knowledge as well, because I think in our profession, especially in the standardized testing era, I think there has been an attempt to teach skills, you know, whether it's skills about understanding a complex text or skills in solving a mathematical problem. And I've seen some pushback against that idea of teaching kind of pure skills apart from the idea of... Like critical thinking and stuff. Yeah.

[12:43]

Yeah, like critical thinking as a discrete skill versus the ability to reason about specific things. And I actually have a book on my desk right now that we'll probably talk about on another podcast, you know, addressing that issue directly. So there's a lot of conversation about the value of knowledge. And you're a person who has consumed enormous quantities of knowledge, sometimes in very short periods of time. In 2012, you took the entire four-year course. MIT computer science curriculum.

[13:10]

Is that right?

[13:11] SPEAKER_02:

Yeah. So I did a project I called the MIT challenge where basically MIT uploads a lot of their materials online for free on MIT open courseware. So I had the idea of what if you tried to do something close to an MIT degree and try to pass their final exams for that project. So that was, yeah, I started in 2011.

[13:27] SPEAKER_01:

Can you actually learn that much stuff in 12 months? Can you learn, uh, you know, a four year degrees worth of computer science in one year? How did that work out?

[13:35] SPEAKER_02:

Yeah. So, I mean, this is sort of the thing. I think when you list it out like that, it sounds crazy or people will say, oh, no, there's no way you could do that. But I don't think that there's anything really magical about it. There's some things that you are going to find that you learn a little bit easier and a little bit harder. So I don't want to make the suggestion that every single person could necessarily replicate that approach.

[13:54]

But there's also a lot of things that I did, like I worked incredibly hard over that year. And I also, you know, did a lot of things that you couldn't do if you were actually in MIT. So one of the things that I did is when I would watch lecture videos, I would watch them at 1.5 times the speed. So Normally, a lecture is spread out over a long time, but you could get it done in, well, in total amount of time, probably about a day or two, even if it was spread out over a couple sessions there.

[14:19] SPEAKER_01:

It's funny that you mentioned that, but this is not something I've talked about on the podcast before, but I was homeschooled up until about eighth grade. And in that era, we didn't have MIT OpenCourseWare, we didn't have online classes, but we did have VHS tapes. So a lot of my, especially seventh grade year was watching recordings of a school that, you know, that had such a service on VHS tapes. And I actually did something pretty similar for a lot of the classes where I would just kind of blast through them, you know, and, and that we would say, you know, as proper educators, we would say, well, that's not what you're supposed to do. You're supposed to take the time and do the reading and then watch the video and then do the exercises and things. So again, how did that work out when you, when you did kind of blast through and go really intense?

[15:02] SPEAKER_02:

Yeah. So I think, again, this is particularly true of the sort of math and science classes at MIT. But my kind of feeling was that the learning isn't in the lecture. The learning is in the homework. And so for me, when I was doing those things, I think that there is a lot of people who would be, let's say, critical of a kind of, you know, a cramming type of approach to going through the classes that quickly. And I did try to take steps to mitigate that later on by doing multiple classes in parallel.

[15:27]

So, you know, you're learning it over a longer period of time rather than just over a week. But the idea that I was sort of working on was that whatever could get me to actually doing problems, getting sort of, OK, let's try to solve this. Let's get some feedback. Let's figure out what I'm not doing right. Let's go back to try to understand it. I mean, that was where I think the bulk of the learning took place.

[15:46]

And so the lectures were just for me kind of like getting to that entry point where I could actually work through and start doing some of the problems and questions. And so that's sort of been the approach that I've taken for those kinds of classes. And I mean, there's different trade offs. I found that, you know, the way that you often do it in class is where you space the lectures out. So they would be over, let's say, a semester. You'd be doing all of the lectures versus cramming them together.

[16:10]

There's going to be a downside to cramming them together. But one of the advantages I found of doing it that way is that you get kind of a complete coverage of the material and you get a better sense of, OK, this is going to be the hard part of this class. Whereas if the hard part is in the last three quarters and you only allocate the last quarter of time in a tight studying schedule, you might end up under practicing that element. So for me, it was sort of doing first pass with the lecture so I could get an overview sense of everything, then work through the assignments, usually again doing one pass. going through all these assignments to figure out, okay, what do I understand? What don't I understand?

[16:44]

And then it was like a process of drilling down on the things that I didn't understand. So that was sort of the broad approach that I took in that year.

[16:50] SPEAKER_01:

So there's some metacognition there, definitely, where you're gaining an awareness of where you stand and what's going to be difficult so that you can budget your time and budget your effort toward the things that you'll need to focus on the most.

[17:03] SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, absolutely. Like if you're trying to do it in that tight a time frame, it's always about sort of satisficing. It's always about, okay, I only have a certain amount of time. So where am I going to get the most bang for my buck, so to speak? And I think, you know, that is a, that is a particular strategy for doing it. I think it was valuable in my case in particular, because I was able to, you know, get this experience of covering a lot of different ideas in a much shorter timeframe.

[17:30]

And so even if there's maybe some drawbacks, I think that the advantages of doing that, let's greatly outweighed the disadvantages of any kind of methodological difficulties that I had when I was going through it. So, for instance, I did an undergrad in business school, and I think that I learned far more in that one year period of doing that MIT challenge than I did in my entire undergrad, you know, just because not only was I being taught by lectures and professors at one of the top universities, but also just The approach that I took meant that I wasn't, you know, there was lots of times I remember sitting through university where I was bored or where I was doing some busy work assignment, you know, that I wasn't really learning anything new. I was just, you know, checking off boxes, so to speak. And so, again, this is sort of my idiosyncratic approach. But I think that there are lessons to be learned from that if you're a learner and you're trying to learn something difficult.

[18:21] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, the ownership there really strikes me that you're not just saying, okay, whatever the people who planned this want me to do, I'll do. You're looking at the structure of the thing that you want to learn and saying, what is the best way for me to learn that?

[18:34] SPEAKER_02:

Well, you know, and it's also funny because the MIT Challenge was like sort of my first big project. And in some ways, the things that I think differently now than I did eight years ago when I did that, Is that at the time, my entire experience in education had been in school. So it just sort of made logical sense to me that the best way to learn something is to like benchmark it off of a university curriculum. And now I would say I move further from that so that if I were to approach a similar project, it probably wouldn't resemble that. You know, it wouldn't even be like attempting to resemble a university curriculum. It would be a more kind of direct like, OK, what are the skills I want to be good at?

[19:09]

What are the theoretical subjects I need to master and and do that? But so that in some ways was kind of my bridge between the sort of formal education experience I had and and this sort of ultra learning world of kind of taking on unusual self-education projects.

[19:22] SPEAKER_01:

Well, and that kind of mirrors the nature of the professional work you do as a computer scientist, doesn't it? You know, like an experienced computer scientist or programmer or software developer who needs to learn a new language. You know, maybe that one that's been invented in the last couple of years wouldn't go back to college to learn that, right?

[19:40] SPEAKER_02:

Well, I will say, first of all, that although I do programming, my trade right now is writing in the English language. So I would not call myself a computer scientist by profession, but... I would say that definitely the world of professional skills, and that was a big focus in this book, it's related to what we learn in school. But I think that they often, what we're trying to do in school and what we're trying to do in professional learning are optimized towards somewhat different goals.

[20:04]

And sometimes there can be incompatibility issues there. So one of the things I definitely feel about schools is that they're often optimized for definitely ease of being able to deliver to a standardized audience and but also so that you can easily compare students. That's a big goal of education is to be able to see who has an A and who has a B and who has a C. And although that's sometimes a useful goal, sometimes it results in sort of optimizing the educational experience so that what you end up with is extremely standardized and easy to compare, whereas more idiosyncratic projects where you're doing something that, well, it's kind of really hard to evaluate that against the other students are a little bit harder to implement in the education system, but maybe the very thing you need to do if you want to acquire professional skills.

[20:50] SPEAKER_01:

And that's what I think, you know, working computer scientists largely would do is learn what they need to and then get to work on the actual project rather than say, I'm going to take all these courses and then maybe someday I'll have the skills that I need. But no, get right to

[21:02] SPEAKER_02:

Yeah. And sequencing is so important, too. You know, like if you're a programmer, I mean, learning everything about computer science theory, that's probably something you can get to a little later. It's probably better that you can actually like do something useful, you know, make an app or a website or something. So the order in which you learn things is also sometimes different in formal education compared to, you know, as a as a professional practicing.

[21:24] SPEAKER_01:

Absolutely. And back to the adolescents on YouTube who are teaching themselves these amazing skills, you know, like you kind of discover as you go what you need to learn. I'm just fascinated by some of the young people. Like I remember when the Disney movie Moana came out and there's a song that's in the movie and then they play it again at the end and it's sung by a different singer. And I said, who is this? And it's Alessia Cara.

[21:47]

And she taught herself on YouTube, you know, and figured out what she needed. to get better at, what she needed to learn in order to move to that next level. And boom, she's on a Disney soundtrack at the age of, I don't know, 16, 17. And it's pretty incredible. And a lot of us think, well, hey, I've done everything that my university said to. I've kind of followed the program.

[22:09]

But I really appreciate the focus on what you need to accomplish your goal. And I wonder what advice you have for young people, especially at the high school level, who maybe are thinking about their career, thinking about their next steps, you know, maybe college is or is not a part of that. What advice do you have for young people based on the book?

[22:29] SPEAKER_02:

Well, I think the thing that I would give as advice is to find something that you're passionate about learning. And I think that's one of the things that rarely gets asked when we are talking to young people. We're always telling them what they ought to be learning, like what someone else says that they think is important and not really asking them, you What would they like to make? What would they like to be good at? What are they curious about? And I think that's a little unfortunate because very often, although we're talking about, you know, I do think that there is issues of just generally transferring a lot of skills.

[22:57]

If you can get someone in the idea that they always have kind of a learning project and it's something that they choose and that they're taking on and learning, you know, eventually that's going to be the kind of thing that's going to snowball to great results. You know, I can remember this situation when I was in high school and I shared two classes with this guy and And this guy was studying, he was taking a computer programming class and a math class. And I remember in the computer programming class, because we had access to computers, he spent the whole time playing games. So he just failed all his assignments, wasn't doing very well. But in the math class, he had one of those T4 calculators and he was programming games on the T4 calculator in the math class. And I remember laughing at him saying, if you just did your computer programming in the computer science class, you would actually get a good grade.

[23:41]

And I think that's sort of part of the problem is that we often kind of discourage these sort of spontaneous attempts to learn and master things because they don't always fit exactly into the curriculum. And I think we want to empower people not just to learn what someone else thinks that they should learn. but also what they themselves are interested in to build that confidence that they can figure anything out if they're serious about it.

[24:03] SPEAKER_01:

Absolutely. And it always kind of makes me a little bit sad when I hear people say, well, I don't know how to do that. And I think, well, all the people who do know how to do that once didn't know how to do that. They just...

[24:15]

got to work on it. And I think we just live in a remarkable time when we can learn anything that we need to, almost always for free, through YouTube or MIT OpenCourseWare or whatever the source might be. I mean, information wants to be free. Information has largely become free. And I think so much of what you outline in Ultra Learning is the process that we have to go through. We are the variable.

[24:41]

We are the deciding factor in whether we make it happen or not. So such an inspiration.

[24:47] SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, well, my hope with writing the book was to give people some insight. And again, obviously, a lot of the people listening here are probably very familiar with a lot of educational literature, but also just give people some concrete examples, as well as some principles that they could apply. So they could see, okay, Where am I getting off track with this project that I'm doing? And I think a lot of these lessons do need to be learned firsthand through experience. But I'm hoping that a book like this, just the same way that my friend Benny Lewis who did the Fluent in Three Months project was kind of the encouragement for me to you know start doing my own trial and error and experiments to figure things out and so I definitely agree that we need to be a society that not only goes through school and formal education but knows how to teach ourselves things and knows how to figure things out and has these skills cultivated.

[25:37] SPEAKER_01:

So the book is Ultra Learning, Master Hard Skills, Outsmart the Competition, and Accelerate Your Career. Scott, if people want to learn more about your work or get in touch with you online, where's the best place for them to find you?

[25:48] SPEAKER_02:

So they can go to my website, which is scotthyoung.com. That's S-C-O-T-T-H-Y-O-U-N-G.com. And of course, there's links to the book there. And you can find the book in Amazon, Barnes & Nobles, wherever you get your books from.

[26:01] SPEAKER_01:

Scott Young, thanks so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio.

[26:04] SPEAKER_02:

Oh, thank you so much for having me.

[26:06] Announcer:

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