Action Catalyst Update: Scott H. Young

Author, programmer, and entrepreneur Scott Young rejoins The Action Catalyst to talk about his book, “Get Better at Anything”, including topics of discussion like what things it’s NOT worth getting better at, what exactly IS “talent”, the tension of learning, how these principles were on display during the Renaissance, the role of Tetris in all of this, and why monkey see is NOT monkey do.

About Scott:

Scott is a Wall Street Journal bestselling author of “Ultralearning: Master Hard Skills, Outsmart the Competition, and Accelerate Your Career”, podcast host, computer programmer, and avid reader. Since 2006, he has published weekly essays on this website to help people learn and think better. His work has been featured in The New York Times, BBC, TEDx, Pocket, Business Insider, and more.

Scott rose to autodidact stardom when he learned MIT’s 4-year computer science curriculum in less than 12 months. Next, he taught himself four new languages in a year. Such extreme self-improvement projects may seem outside the realm of most of our capabilities, but Young believes that the principles and methods that he and other ultralearners employ are essential tools for anyone who wants a competitive edge in the fast-changing, aggressive workplace.

Learn more at ScottHYoung.com.

The Action Catalyst is presented by the Southwestern Family of Companies. With each episode, the podcast features some of the nation’s top thought leaders and experts, sharing meaningful tips and advice. Learn more at TheActionCatalyst.com, subscribe below or wherever you listen to podcasts, and be sure to leave a rating and review!

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(Transcribed using A.I. / May include errors):

Host
Scott Young is an author, programmer and entrepreneur whose book Ultralearning was an international success. We hosted Scott on the Action Catalyst back in 2019. But now he’s back with a new book, Get Better at Anything. Who doesn’t want to do that? Scott, welcome back. And before we dive into the new book, catch us up on what’s been going on in your life since your last appearance.

Scott Young
Yeah, I mean, I became a father, I have two kids. Now, I also spent a good chunk of the last five years working on this new book. So reading hundreds of books, hundreds of papers to make something new that I thought would be helpful to people.

Host
So the new book, Get Better at Anything, is a deep dive into the science of mastery. To start us off, let’s set the table and tell us exactly how you define mastery.

Scott Young
Well, so the thing I bring this up is that you know why I was so interested in writing this book, is because we all know the experience of things that you spent a lot of time doing, and you’re just you don’t get that much better at it, or things that you you tried it and you failed at it, you weren’t very good at it. And we also have experiences of like, Oh, we’re just clicked and you just got it, and you got really good at it. And for me, you know, those highs and lows can be so extreme like the oh my god, I found a new hobby, a new sport, I got a new job, I’m being allotted by my peers versus man, I suck at this. It can be such a big extreme emotionally, to try to understand what are the ingredients? What are the reasons why sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t. So the book is not specifically about like how to become Tiger Woods at your golf game, or how to become a world concert violinist. It’s to be better, how do we figure out wherever you are, whether you are just at the beginning? Or whether you are, you know, you’ve spent decades doing something? How do we get better? And what are those ingredients? And I think diving into the stories, the research the size, the kind of like systems of learning, that was really fun for me to try to bring that out so that these principles can be available to people who want to use.

Host
Is there anything that it’s better to just be okay at rather than great?

Scott Young
I mean, the truth is, is that most of the things that we do, we don’t really care to get better at it. Like I know, if I went on YouTube right now and I looked at like videos on how to tie your shoes, I could find like someone doing some like crazy, not that I’ve never heard of before that like doesn’t come on time. But like for me, I don’t need to do that, like I’m fine tying my shoes 99.9999% of the things that you do in your life, it’s okay to do whatever you’re doing, how you do your laundry, how you walk to work, how you do everything. But the thing is, is is just because that point 00 1% of the things that we’re doing looms so large in our life, you know, the skill that we do at our job that determines whether or not we get a promotion, like the hobby, whether or not we enjoy it really depends on you know, do we feel like we’re good at it? Do we feel like we could get better at it? And so I wrote this book for that point. 00 1%. So you’re absolutely right. There’s tons of things where, you know, I’m not gonna worry about getting better at this. But what are the things where I want to get better at this? And you don’t know how that’s that’s what I wrote the book for.

Host
You mentioned the balance of joy and proficiency, kind of a chicken and the egg thing. Which do you think leads into the other?

Scott Young
I mean, you hit the nail on the head, like, I have a whole chapter where I write about Albert benders theory of self efficacy. And this was his idea that our motivation to do things comes not just from like, would this be good for us, but also, like, am I capable of taking the actions that are necessary. And if you’re not capable, the motivation might be low, even if the outcome is very valuable. And this plays into learning in a lot of ways. Because if we don’t know that we can do something, if we don’t think that we can achieve something, then our motivation to pursue it goes down dramatically. And in some ways this is adaptive, I don’t want to say this is like a bug in our software, there’s a million things you could be doing, it often makes sense to do, the things that come easier to you, this is just sort of natural hardwiring, but where it can be dis advantageous, if there’s something you need to do, you can avoid doing it. And you struggle in the beginning, then getting that motivation off the ground can be really hard. And similarly, you can have fall starts where you like, you start out motivated, you’re doing something but then you get stuck in the you get frustrated, and you give it up halfway. And so I think it’s about recognizing this feedback loop of like being good at something and enjoying it and understanding that that makes understanding learning so important to understand that process. Because otherwise you just get into these situations where like, Well, yeah, I used to have these hobbies, but then I gave them up because unconsciously at some point you felt stuck, or at some point, you felt like you know what, I can’t, I can’t get better at this or I can’t improve at it. So in some ways, learning how to learn is also about learning how to, you know, enjoy life about learning how to enjoy your job, enjoy, your hobbies, things like that.

Host
You mentioned earlier that while some people have to really learn a skill for others, it just clicks. How do you account for that?

Scott Young
So there’s a couple factors. I mean, obviously I don’t want to deny it. There are people who have maybe some intrinsic intelligence talent for particular domain. I don’t want to make the claim that like well Tiger Woods just because of like something his dad did was the reason why he’s like on The Mike Douglas Show at two years old lobbing golf balls. I mean, that’s just that’s just incredible, right? And people tend to fixate on talent, but I kind of don’t like talent, not because, you know, it’s inconvenient for my book, but just because it’s sort of a residual concept. It’s sort of just like, well, this is the stuff we can’t explain. So therefore, it’s talent, right. And one of the things that we’ve learned from psychology is, is the importance of background knowledge and background experience. So I know there’s this study that I really liked, that was talking about reading ability, and they were looking at people reading sort of a description of a baseball game. And what they found is that the amount that people learn from this context dependent way more on whether they knew about baseball and whether they were good readers. So I think what happens is that sometimes you maybe have a little bit of ability, you have some extra ability, and you gain some proficiency in a skill. And maybe the environment also works out so that like, you know, maybe you’re not doing that great at it in the beginning, but because let’s say you’re a kid, or because of the environment you’re in, you’re not getting punished, you develop some of this proficiency, then you move to a different environment. And you’re stacked up against people who either have tons of proficiency, or who’ve never taken it before. And depending on where you’re putting that group, you can feel like Oh, I’m actually I have a lot of aptitude for this. And so you keep going on and you get better at it. And other people don’t, you know, my, my favorite, my favorite story about this is that a friend is a woman who got a master’s in civil engineering. So this is like, you know, she’s doing like, advanced calculus and this kind of stuff. And she told me with a straight face, you know what I did this intro programming class, and I was just, I wasn’t smart enough to do it. And it was like, How could you say that? Well, the reason she said that is because the other kids in the class were populated with people who like picked up programming in high school. So she’s going in there with zero, they’re going there with 10. And she just feels like, oh, I can’t do this. And so again, to me, I think like going back to principles, going back to what are the factors that motivate learning, they don’t transform you as a golfer into Tiger Woods, but they give you a map, they give you a way to make progress and making progress, I think, ultimately, is what it’s about.

Host
In the book, you list out three main steps in the roadmap to learning. Could you share those with us?

Scott Young
Yeah, so the book is organized around these three sections, these three big ideas that influence learning. The first is See. This is the idea that actually most of what we know how to do comes from other people. So things that make it easier to learn from other people will accelerate our progress. Things that make it harder to learn from other people will slow our progress. And you can see this across many domains. Like, you know, the example I used to open the book is as Tetris proficiency, whereas like, the game was super popular, and people are obsessed with it. But actually, if you look at their scores and their rankings, they’re not actually that good. The kids that like 13 year old kids who play Tetris today, who are like obsessed with the game are much better. And the reason why, because the internet created the ability to like, every single technique and strategy is now learnable, and accessible and instant, you can watch replays of the best players playing the game. Whereas before, it was just like, you know, your big brother’s friend who could live you like, oh, yeah, you got to do this or something to get you to the game. And I mean, Tetris is a bit of a trivial example. But the principle is universal, this ability to learn from others. And whether or not it’s easy or not, makes a huge difference. The second is do obviously, to get good at something requires a lot of practice. But there’s a lot of nuance to this, the kind of practice matters to our brains, our effort saving machines, we are hardwired to try to avoid expending effort. And expending effort is often what’s required for learning. And so often, what we get involved with practice is trying to overcome this natural tendency to not use effort. So an example I talked about is like Retrieval Practices, a big idea. This is the idea that we remember things better when we try to remember them than when we see them right in front of us. So if you already have encountered some information, and you try to recall it, that act of effort is going to make you remember it more, because it’s as if the brain saying oh, well, the paper with the answers in front of me, so I don’t actually need to store this in my head. And so this do component I also have break this down into four like Maxim’s that are covering some of these ideas. But fine tuning the practice is super important. And then the last one, of course, is getting feedback corrections for our actions, not just a teacher saying do this, write this do this this way. But also just even just interacting with the situation we’re having, like realistic practice is so important for gaining proficiency and something that’s often missing when we’re starting out learning skills.

Host
Are those three weighted at all? Or is there a resistance to one over the others? I can see potential resistance to feedback, for example.

Scott Young
So it gets it depends on the feedback we’re talking about too. Because in some ways, like if you are skiing down a mountain, the most important feedback is the one coming from the hill through your feet. Like if you didn’t have that you couldn’t learn to ski. So I take feedback in this kind of broader sense than just like, you know, the teacher’s red pen. But but the thing I would say the thing I would say about that is that these three ingredients it’s like if you’re making a cake you need like flour, sugar and like an egg or something. If you’re missing one is not going to taste good. And so I think part of the problem is recognizing when one of these elements is deficient, and it’s going to really depend on your situation, you know, we were talking about Tetris, this sort of being able to see other players was the major breakthrough, players playing the game, they got tons of practice, when you play the game, you know, whether you win or lose, you get quick, immediate feedback, that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that techniques which were rather subtle, which were not obvious and took a while to develop, someone could develop it, but then it would stay with that person, it wouldn’t get transmitted. And this is true in many domains that we struggled to learn because the best practices, the way to do it are stuck inside the heads of experts, and we have difficulty getting it out. But for other skills is not like that. Like if you want to learn, I don’t know, if you want to learn basic math or something like that. There are like 1000s of books. And like every single thing, giving you how to do it, the difficulty is often getting practice getting feedback, figuring out well, what are the concepts that I have that are mistaken, getting the right level of practice, that’s the difficulty. So in my mind, you know, I kind of present the book, not so much of a, it’s more like, you know, if you had a recipe, you’re like, Oh, this is what’s missing, or this is what is happening, and it’s going to vary from person to person. But laying out all the ingredients is very important. I was really grateful to be able to tie in Joseph Henrich. He’s a Harvard anthropologist and economist, his work on cultural evolution. And he makes the argument kind of somewhat provocatively that like, there is some experimental evidence that shows that some of the great apes, you know, like chimps and orangutans, when you compare them to small children, and admittedly, we’re not talking about adults, partly because just all adults are in cultured and socialized, it’s impossible to remove that. But when you’re dealing with very young children, they actually do better than those children at some kinds of raw problem solving tasks. I mean, one of my favorite demonstrations, as he showed this video, it’s a chimp doing some kind of memory task, there’s the numbers, one to 10 on a grid, and they like blink on and then they disappear immediately. And it’s like, incredible, the chimp knows to like, go like one in order of all these 10. And it just goes like, click, click, click, click, click, click, and it gets it right, like it’s practiced. But at the same time, I mean, this is a chimp, this is not even a person, and he’s doing it so well. And he uses these examples to sort of challenge the idea that like, what it is that makes humans so great is that we’re just so much smarter than every other animal. And he argues, that’s not what it is. It’s that we are really good social learners. Chimps, despite their problems on the ability are really bad at learning from other people. And so I just I love this because it’s, it’s so ironic, we all we like to say monkey see monkey do. But it’s not, it’s because the monkeys can’t see and do is because they can’t do that, that that really, it makes a massive Gulf in our proficiency. If we didn’t have all our accumulated culture, if we didn’t have this imitative ability to like, learn from the examples of other people. I mean, people are really inept, like he gives us stories and just like, you know, explorers getting lost in unfamiliar lands, and just doing things that to the native inhabitants, it just seems so stupid because of this. And so I think, you know, this is a real human strength, and how we’re able to tweak that makes a big difference.

Host
And these principles don’t just apply to hard skills, you say they work in the artistic realm as well. And were even on display in the Renaissance.

Scott Young
Part of the problem with with talking about the scientific research is that a lot of the cognitive psychology is really grounded in like math and this kind of stuff. So like a lot of the original research is done with this. And it’s just like, I can’t do another chapter. This has math. And so this was a little bit my own kind of dovetailing because you see a lot of the same themes in different subjects. And so one of the themes in mathematics research was this kind of tension between showing people how to do it and letting them solve the problems themselves. And I found John swelters work to be really instructive here is that he’s kind of created this edifice of research called Cognitive Load Theory, which tries to explain when it’s more beneficial to solve a problem yourself. And when it’s more beneficial to see a demonstration. And he kind of proposes somewhat counter intuitively, that it is possible to solve problems without learning how to solve them, it’s probably possible to do something to solve the problem and not infer like, well, this is the procedure for solving problems of this type. And in his theory, there is that part of the issue is that when you’re solving a problem, it’s very mentally demanding. And that mental bandwidth is devoted to solving the problem and not recognizing what the pattern is for solving it. And there is something analogous here in artistic training because during the Renaissance, you know, Leonardo da Vinci bought a jellybean guys, yo, Titian, all these, like great painters worked under an apprenticeship system. And this wasn’t like some kind of design that like, Oh, this is the right way to teach. It was just because this was an artisanal class of people who were like they weren’t seen as artists, they’re seen as like, laborers, right? And Leonardo was actually one of the first people to sort of change this perception. But the idea was that you’d go to this studio, and they’d get you like, Okay, we’re going to show you how to paint leaves and then you’re going to paint leaves and you’re going to work on that work on it. Now you’re gonna paint this face, you’re gonna work on this and the This idea of this like progression from simple elements, copying someone and then working on it. And then as you get better and better, you’re like developing your own ability, and you’re developing these sort of more sophisticated creative talents. This very much mirrors a lot of John’s father’s work with mathematics and learning. And I also think is very interesting that in a similar way, in artistic movements have kind of, you know, the pendulum swings back and forth. But for a long time, there was a swing away from this, there was this idea of like, you know, teaching kids how to draw perspective, teaching them these basic principles, getting them to go through drills, getting them to work with like black and white before color, all these ideas that were really foundational, not only to their Renaissance, but the whole Academy system that produced just like fantastic artists, was kind of seen as like this is dated, we want people to be creative, and use their creativity, and just get them to use ideas. And in some ways that really kind of stunted a lot of artists development, you have experts, you have people who had a lot of proficiency that managed to persevere nonetheless, but I thought that was very fascinating that these, these principles that you know, are in such wildly different domains still apply. And the other thing too, which creates a tension, and I just had a conversation with someone else about this. But as you get better in a skill, the problem solved becomes more important, because you are able to kind of decompose the skill into different chunks in your mind, so that he can do it with less bandwidth. So just to use an example, like think about the first time you drove a car, like how much you had to think about all the little things you had to do. And now I mean, you can listen to a podcast, maybe you’re listening to this one right now about driving a car, and you’ve just missed your turn off or whatever, because it’s so obvious to you. And this tendency for skills to be extremely effortful to go to almost automatic is universal across skills. But what it means is that what works best for learning is also going to change depending on where you’re at, in the beginning, seeing examples are important because solving the problem is so taxing that you might not realize, oh, all the problems are solved this way. You know, because you’re just kind of like, you know, fidgeting with things to try to figure them out. And so that’s why the examples and instructions are so beneficial at that stage. But as you get later on, and you know those things, and you have them kind of in the back of your head, then the practice the problem solving works on the other end, like we were talking about, about this retrieval, like if you have the pattern in memory, and you can recall it, it strengthens that memory more and adapts into more of that situation. And so this tension often comes up because when you have someone teaching a class, when you have someone telling you well, what’s the right way to learn something, they’re usually an expert, they’re usually on that end where like they benefit more from experimentation, from practice, from problem solving from like, increasing the difficulty. And that’s not necessarily what’s beneficial at the early stage. So I find this sort of framework, his way of thinking about it very valuable, because it’s not just about what’s the right learning technique, but it’s like, when does that technique matter? When is it helpful for you.

Host
So what’s something that you personally have learned lately that you’ve applied these steps to yourself?

Scott Young
Part of the reason my interest in this subject is because I just have such a like a laundry list of things that I want to learn. So very selfishly, I’m like, trying to learn it so that I can understand how those work. So I mean, something that I’ve been doing recently is painting, I really like painting, particularly I’ve been doing like watercolor painting, which if you’re not involved in this kind of sphere, you don’t know anything about it. One of the real challenges of it is that unlike oil painting, where you can kind of paint over, so if you make a mistake, you can paint over it. watercolors, like is transparent. So once you put something down, and it dries, you’re kind of stuck with it. And so it does create challenges, because you’re a little more technically constrained, like with oil paint, you can kind of almost do anything you want, if you just like are painstaking, whereas watercolor, you know, it’s drying time and this kind of thing. And so these principles that I’ve been sort of looking at have definitely played a factor because it’s been looking at like, Well, why am I getting stuck here? Like when I’m having difficulties and it’s like, well, is the issue that I need more instruction? Or is the issue that you know, I’m trying to do practice but the practice is too complicated and I need to make it simpler and I don’t know I just, to me a lot of these research and all these things have been feeding back into my own practice. Maybe even when I get a chance to finish the promotion for this book, I might even do a project specifically about that about applying these techniques to this this hobby of mine I mean the thing that you realize when you’re doing research on this topic is like oh my god, this is such a big topic. There’s so many things you could talk about like to call it down to a book, like I had, I have I think the bibliography has like 500 references like to like get it down to like okay, this is manageable. This is understandable for person like that was the real challenge of this book was not like how do I fill another chapter but like, what do I cut and so so this book, I hope people will find it valuable I hope they’ll enjoy the journey through stories that I just to me I had to write them because I done so fascinating when I first encountered them and really just you know, even if they just enjoy the ride, maybe it’ll give them some tips for how they can improve the skill they care about. So I mean, the book is available Amazon audible wherever you get your books and they can also come check out my website. It’s got hm.com If they want to read some more essays are find out more about the understanding the art and science of learning.

Host
Scott thanks for joining us today.

Scott Young
Thank you so much, it’s been great being here, thanks.