Ep258: From Information Overload to Getting Better at Anything by Finding the Right Mentors | with Scott Young

Zack Arnold

I'm here today with Scott Young. And Scott, you sir are a Wall Street Journal bestselling author of ultra learning, you're a podcast host your computer program, you're an avid reader and avid learner. Since 2006, you have published weekly essays to help people learn and to think better, myself included. I have been a longtime follower listener reader. Your work has been featured in The New York Times and Pocket Business Insider on the BBC, TEDx among many other outlets. However, I noticed that you didn't have guests on the Optimize Yourself podcast on your list of accolades because you're a returning guest to the show. And I'm like, I'm gonna have to earn that spot on today's interview. Needless to say, tremendously excited to have you back.

Scott Young

Oh, thank you so much major oversight off to add that to my as seen it. You pulled me right,

Zack Arnold

TEDx, that's the goal for me right? To you make sure it's worth

Scott Young

New York Times, BBC, I'll put it right there as too great to be here. I've all jokes aside,

Zack Arnold

And I'm definitely going to earn that opportunity. Because I want to not today have an interview that summarizes your latest book, that is all about how to learn pretty much anything, but I just I want to have a conversation about this world that we live in of massive, massive information overload where it's just like we're getting sprayed in the face with a firehose, 24 hours a day, things are changing so rapidly. And I like to focus on the things that stay the same, not the things that are constantly changing. And I know that you have not only gone deep into the process of learning things, but learning how to learn things. And really understanding that learning is not just a skill, but it's a meta skill. And I've yet to find any text or any resources, frankly, that were better than Ultra learning, to help me understand the meta skill of learning how to learn. And as I had mentioned, you offline, I refer my students literally to this day, all the time to our podcast, and then to your book, this is going to be another one of those evergreen conversations that I hope 15 years from now, I can send somebody the link. They're like, Oh, my God, I'm so glad that you said. That's the goal for today.

Scott Young

That's a high bar. Let's see if we reach it. Hey, yeah. So

Zack Arnold

what I'm going to do is have the entire conversation over again, that we had originally, I'm going to make sure that we send people to the show notes for our original conversation about your book Ultra learning. But if we're going to do like the three minute summary, so people really understand the level and depth to which you have learned how to learn complicated things, what was kind of the original pitch back in the day that people were kind of using to understand you wonder why you wrote Ultra learning just to get him up to speed. I

Scott Young

mean, ultra learning, I was very much it was a much more personal book talking about some of my personal projects. So I did this MIT challenge project learning MIT's computer science curriculum, over 12 months, I did a project with a friend, we went to four different countries learning four different languages, over a year learning portrait, drawing, quantum mechanics, all sorts of skills. And then that kind of form the backdrop that plus some of these other, you know, really, sort of unusual individuals who are learning things intensively, those things formed the backdrop of a book where I wanted to talk about learning and in particular, a kind of approach to learning of this sort of like intense self directed learning that form the core of ultra learning. And but I mean, my entire life, like my entire career for basically two decades, has been trying to research and understand how learning works, how studying works, how we can improve IT skills that matter. This has been sort of my lifelong obsession. So I have 1000s of essays that are all kind of directly or indirectly touching on this topic. And you can sort of see that that's sort of my background for, for writing about this.

Zack Arnold

Yeah, and the way that I want to help summarize this, so I can use a similar framework that I talked about with my students in my program, and with his audience, I talk all the time about being a jack of all trades, but a master of one. And I feel like you are the absolute perfect example of that. Everybody says, Oh, Jack of all trades, master of none, you're kind of a generalist. But I believe that, especially with the direction that our economy and our world is going, that the value of generalization is skyrocketing right now. And I think you're the perfect example of somebody that's a generalist where there's so many different skills, whether it's language learning, it's illustration, it's, you know, computer programming, I think you can give some of the details, but you would like learn the entire curriculum at MIT, MIT, like nine months or something, if I remember correctly.

Scott Young

12 But I mean, yeah, okay, difference, right?

Zack Arnold

12 months, but the entire curriculum at MIT and 12 months, but what I love about the way that you break it down, it's not that you're some inherently gifted genius, you've just learned how to break down the process, and you have a lot of generalized skills, but it seems to me your specialization is your ability to break down the complex into very simple steps.

Scott Young

Yeah, I mean, for me, I think my specialization if there is one is has been in understanding the learning process, the process of like, breaking down subject skills and trying to learn them. So I yeah, I would say that much more than being a master of any of the particular things that I've learned. That's the thing that I've really come back to and circle back to So even you know, in writing this new book, like it was just an excuse for me to like spend full For years, just reading all the research and getting really deep into a lot of these ideas that I think, you know, that's I think that's my comparative advantage maybe is that I read a lot of real dusty textbooks about how learning works. And I try to, you know, bring it in a way that maybe people can make sense of if they're not going to read all the things that I've read. Yeah.

Zack Arnold

So I would argue that while you're not necessarily a master of anything, you're a master of mastering things.

Scott Young

All right, like it's fine. Yeah, hopefully. Yeah. So.

Zack Arnold

So the the reason that I bring that up, and I want, I want to get your take on this, because I think you you have a lot more background and research and information and experience that I do. But I've been saying for, I don't know, least 10 years now. And I think people are starting to listen, I've been trying to, to make it very clear to people, that information no longer has any value whatsoever. We're for most of recorded history, those that had access to information had the advantage. And it's always been about the internet, Internet has become a firehose of information, blogs, content creators, people that are writing people that are, you know, now it's Tik Tok, and Instagram, and just the amount of influencers and people that are putting information out into the world. I think a lot of people still have this belief that information has value. And my belief is that information has absolutely no value anymore whatsoever. And the value is in both the ability to curate it, but also to be able to use it. And I'm curious what your thoughts are on that, given that you spent way more time in this world than I have? Yeah,

Scott Young

I mean, I mean, it's, it's interesting, I tend to think that we, we live in a world where there's a lot of content, but how much of that content is, you know, this is a genuinely useful idea. This is something that's actually going to make an impact is an open question. I mean, you know, we talk about like I this is my basic feeling is that the internet as an invention had kind of a double edged sword effect on our ability to learn things, because on the one hand, all of a sudden, you know, there's Wikipedia exists. So I don't need to lug around Encyclopedia Britannica, I don't have to go to the library and like find reference material, you know, Wikipedia has going to have to a first approximation, a pretty good article on any single, like, now you can think of, there's going to be something on Wikipedia. Similarly, for like university course material, you know, I don't need to enroll in MIT, MIT actually uploads a lot of their course material online for free. That was the basis of my previous challenge. You know, if I want to download academic papers, I mean, now they have things like sigh have been these other kinds of, you know, quasi illegal activities, that you can download academic papers. So, you know, I don't need to have these really expensive, you know, university publishing access, I can just access all of these information. So the access allows someone who is curious, someone who has the right foundation, people to go and quickly upgrade their skills in almost any direction. But the converse of this is that like, that's not how most people use the internet, most people use the internet, you know, you're using it as a kind of passive way to, you know, just sort of like, this is kind of fun, this is kind of interesting, to entertain yourself. And so I do really think we have this kind of bifurcation, where the Internet enables you to become much more skilled, much more deeply knowledgeable than you could have been in the past. But it also allows you to just like waste a tremendous amount of time and not do things that are important. So I think you kind of hit the nail on the head there that, you know, just having the information does not necessarily mean you're going to be learning valuable skills, just as the kind of myth was like, Oh, if we give every kid a laptop, in the classroom, they're going to be so smart, because gonna have access to information. Yeah, like maybe one out of like, 100 kids is going to do that, that other 99 are going to use it to play video games. And so I think that's sort of where we're at with learning is that there's the opportunity, but not always the action taken. Yeah. So

Zack Arnold

if we were to look at the the world right before the internet, and I would venture, we're roughly in the same generation, you have a little bit better hairline than I do. A few years younger, but I think we're seeing general generation, you probably have a memory of the world before the internet. Yes, yeah. Yeah, maybe maybe it's, you know, fuzzy. For me, it's very, very clear that I remember the world before the internet. And the idea that all of a sudden, you literally didn't have an entire bookshelf of Encyclopedia Britannica. And at the time, you didn't have like the world at your fingertips in your back pocket. But just the fact that you had access to all this information was revolutionary, and we just assumed we're all going to be geniuses. We're all going to have all these new skills and all this new information. I think it's pretty clear that access to the Internet has not made all of us smarter and made us geniuses and helped us acquire immensely valuable new skills. People have most people haven't, that's the difference.

Scott Young

Well, I just again, I think it's just one of these things that just exacerbates the extremes. Right? So you want to choose which extreme you're going to be on you know, one statistic that I found very interesting when I was researching this book was that the amount of books that Americans have been reading has been like kind of steadily dropping since smartphones became popular. There's a really depressing kind of statistic because yes, okay, there's newsletters and blogs and podcasts and stuff. So I don't want to say that like, you know, all the things that replaceable To devote devoid of intellectual content, hopefully you're reading some of the good stuff. But I do think I'm a, you know, this is why I write books is why I read so many books, reading a 300 page book where an author has spent an incredible amount of time, perhaps years of their life trying to compile an argument, an idea, a set of research a set of knowledge to you, is just not going to compete with like, oh, I, you know, wrote this tweet. In like, about 30 seconds of like, you know, oh, I'm gonna say some things. This is like a witty insult, I gotta throw this out there. They're not the same. And so I think this shift in our media diet, for you know, it's a little bit like, it's a little bit like the invention of fast food, I mean, all of these timesaving conveniences that make cooking easier. Yeah, I guess it could make eating healthier, better. If you're one of these people who's like very serious about health and diet, I'm going to eat better, because I have the, you know, the calorie information on the box. And I can mean, but for most people, the easy availability of like reducing cooking time, just meant that they're eating less healthy food, they're eating more stuff, the stuff that's yummy, and not that good for you. And so I think a lot of our learning environment parallels this sort of food environment idea that we are trying to push ourselves in the direction where we are getting smarter, we're learning more useful things, and not just, you know, wasting more time not just kind of indulging excessively. Well,

Zack Arnold

one of the areas that I want to dive into much, much deeper that I know that you're very good at. And when I when I posed this question to my community, and I said, I'm going to be talking to, you know, one of the the experts on how to learn, and how to really alter, learn and how to get better at anything. And it was just an endless stream of questions of information overload, how do I know what to learn? How do I know what not to learn? How do I stay consistent? We're gonna get to all of that. But here's the argument that I think we need to overcome first, and I know this is something you touch upon on the book that I want to go into deeper. What's the point of even learning anything anymore? AI is going to take over all of it, why should I even bother learning and I know that you have very, very strong, distinct feelings about this. So we can give all the resources about how to learn things and how to get better at it. What's the point, Scott?

Scott Young

Well, I'll start off by kind of staking my position here, because I think the people who are like extreme AI, optimists are immediate. And some of the like doomsday people aI have this feeling that like the AI taking over most human tasks is imminent, I don't think that's going to happen. I think that's a mix of tech hype, and a little bit of like, you know, I think overly optimistic projections, I don't think we're about to enter a world where AI is taking over most human cognitive labor. I think that the last 70 years of AI as a field has been shown repeatedly that you get a computer to do some things, people think it's imminent, that they're going to take over the rest of the tasks. And it turns out that that there's a wall you hit, and then you have to wait another 20 years for a breakthrough. So if we're talking about the far future, which like maybe a century from now, you know, it's plausible that we'll make artificial intelligence that can compete with humans on every task, and then it's anyone's game. So if I am out of date, and what I'm saying doesn't make sense. 50 to 100 years from now, I'll take that hit. But for the near future, I think we're going to see the same trend that we've seen with Mo technologies, that artificial intelligence, large language models are going to replace some aspects of cognitive labor, they're gonna make some things that were really hard, a lot easier. But human beings are going to adapt, and we're going to adapt to using those tools just in the same way that, you know, once accountants had spreadsheets available, and like accounting software, a lot of the stuff that was traditionally done by bookkeepers, keeping paper, Ledger's, don't need to do that anymore. You can do that with technology, but it didn't eliminate the need for accounting. Similarly, there's going to be a lot of professions that I think you're going to be using these tools in some way. And it's going to augment what you're doing, and it's going to maybe render some skills redundant. But it's also going to open up new skills, it's going to open up the ability to learn to use these things in new ways that complement with it. So exact predictions about where that skill transfer is going to head. I think it's going to be difficult at this point. But my personal opinion is that I would be very surprised if even 20 years from now we're in a situation where like, people don't work anymore that we have got like 80% unemployment because the the machines do all the jobs, I just don't see it happening. I

Zack Arnold

want a link to your internet. Because your internet sounds like a much better place to live and read and work than the internet that that I live in, which is that all creatives everybody that does creative works. We're all doomed. It's going to be 100% unemployment, and it's all going to happen in the next 24 months. Yeah. And a year ago when the we were I had been sharing the Gartner Hype Cycle. I'm sure that you're familiar with the Gartner Hype Cycle of technology, most of my audience wasn't and I showed them the Gartner Hype Cycle and I'll make sure for those that don't know what we're talking about. I will link to it in the show notes. But I would point at the very very peak of the first curve and say we are here where AI is going to change everything and revolutionize everything is going to take over all creative tasks. As I said, just everybody take a breath. And let's give it a minute. And now that I look back on the things I talked about a little bit less than a year ago, a lot of the information now is Oh, wow, the AI hype is over. And now all of a sudden, we kind of see the crash and the realization coming back to reality, hey, it has some really good uses, and it's going to improve in some, but it's not going to be this be all the end all the changes the world, we thought it would, which, as I'm sure you know, very well has happened with just about every advent of every technology.

Scott Young

Yeah, well, I think, you know, I pay attention to this AI debate also to a little, little bit of a technical level too, because my interest in cognitive science and like how people think has that field has a large, intertwining relationship with artificial intelligence, like a lot of the cognitive psychology, you know, was done by people who are also interested in artificial intelligence, because if you can understand how human intelligence works, then you can program it into a machine and vice versa. So there's been a synergy over the last, you know, since basically the 1950s, in psychology. And so I think we see this pendulum swinging back and forth, where, in the early days, this kind of neural net deep learning architecture was very dismissed, there was a lot of like, well, there's all these problems with it. Marvin Minsky published this account that like basically scuttled the field for a while. And now we're seeing this resurgence that actually, if you throw tons and tons of GPUs at it, and you get all this training power, this is like absolutely gargantuan models, you can do some pretty impressive things. But I still tend to think that Well, I mean, you could do a lot of impressive things, but a lot of the like fundamental critiques about what you're going to have difficulty with what's going to be hard, I think those critiques still hold, and we still don't have a good way of merging it. So right now, the large language models, they're really good models for maybe what human intuition does. So I think like, if you think about what you're typing, LLM, it's a little bit probably similar to what you're kind of like that system. One really fast thinking is like in the human brain, but it doesn't really have a good analog to like human reasoning, the problem solving that we do the kind of step by step thinking that we do. So I tend to be more pessimistic, I tend to think that we're going to need some more technical breakthroughs to get closer to that. And so what we're gonna have is these models that like, they're really good at making things that have like a kind of the feel, and intuitive sort of feel that, but they have like mistakes, they have like, kind of like the sort of mistakes you would make, because you didn't really think through what you were doing. And so it's kind of in some ways, it's the opposite of the old style computer intelligence, which was like very much logical and rule following, but had no intuition or common sense. Now we're going the other direction where we have, you know, something like, Oh, this looks really realistic until you look at it like, Man, that guy has seven fingers, why does he have seven fingers? Because no one was counting it, because that's what you would do if you were, you know, a human being drunk as you'd count the fingers. But they're not doing that. It's not how it works. So I mean, I don't know I'm, I'm a bit of an outsider to the field. So I don't want to, you know, wait my own opinion to highlight here. But I personally think just just extrapolating historical trends, we're gonna see the AI hype kind of it. All right, it's useful for some things, but it's, I'm definitely not an Elon Musk, like AGI is imminent kind of person.

Zack Arnold

Yeah. And if you say you're an outsider to the field, that I'm an outsider to the outside or to the outside field. But you you, you expressed a lot of the things that I've said in different words, they're 100 Different reasons that I'm not concerned about artificial intelligence, replacing every breed of mind. But fundamentally, you can tell me with a lot more expertise than I have. My intuition is that in order to create true artificial general intelligence AGI, we have to understand human intelligence, like you said, we don't even understand human intelligence, and it's impossible to read the label from inside the job. The how do we can create something that we don't even understand yet.

Scott Young

I mean, I would, I would respond to that, that we actually understand a lot more about human intelligence than I think the average person is aware, like, I think that was a big, you know, part of my joy in writing this book, and doing the research for it was that, you know, we've actually worked out a lot of these systems now not to this, like, you know, perfect engineering level of discipline when we've, you know, figured out all the kinks, but like, we have a pretty good idea of how, you know, human memory works and like a kind of very abstract level, we know a lot of the properties that it has, we know about, you know, your working memory, we have all these kind of sort of basic constraints that like, sort of the brain sort of has to work like this. And so I think, you know, again, this, this idea here is that, you know, it is complicated is mysterious, like how do you seem to learn things, I mean, we all go through school, and we you know, sort of acquire knowledge or we go through our daily life, we learn to walk, we learn to talk, we do these things, without having really any explanation for how we do those things. And so our self knowledge here is like remarkably deficient. But I do think that the science of learning has actually come up with you know, quite a bit of explanation, quite a bit of understanding, not to the level like we can recreate the human brain but to a level where we have some idea of like, what the components need to be like, what are But what are the ingredients that have to happen in order for us to, to, you know, have something that thinks intelligently? So I tend to be a little bit more optimistic about that. But yeah, I think it's I think it's important to at least understand kind of, you know, if you were building something intelligent, I mean, nature had the same problem when it was building us. And so, you know, how would you have to make it? How would you have to do it? Well, we

Zack Arnold

you go way, way deeper into all of that. But that's both not my area of expertise. The reason that we are going outside of my area, too. Yeah, exactly. And that's why I just I want to set that as the stage because I think a very simple objection that I've heard from so many people right now is just what is the point. And I believe that there's very much a point. But I think the what we learn and the way that we learn, it has to change fundamentally. And I've talked a lot about how our current educational system is still today designed the way that it was designed in the late 1800s, which was preparing people for the assembly line, right? We started with the Industrial Revolution, and it was all about, you're going to specialize and learn this very specific skill, this very specific craft. And I do think the where artificial intelligence creates a challenge is if you do one thing that's very predictable, and very repeatable, you are in trouble. And what knowledge you learn in the order in which you learn it, I think is what's going to make you indispensable whether it's in creative fields or otherwise, which changes the information that we need and the way that we learn it. Yeah,

Scott Young

I mean, definitely new technology is shifting, again, what skills are important, I think, this is why, you know, in Ultra learning, I made such a stress about why do we need a self directed learning, it's not because while going to a classroom is necessarily even bad. It's just because you constantly need to be retooling and constantly need to be learning new things. And so if you're not able to guide that process in some semi intelligent way, you're gonna get really stuck. Because if you're only relying on like what you learned in that course, from 20 years ago, you're going to have a hard time. And so I think everyone who is succeeding who is making progress, they find some way or another to how to learn how to teach themselves things. And so I think that knowledge of how our own learning works, how skill development works, becomes more important in a in a changing environment.

Zack Arnold

So the phrase that you shared here is, I don't know, Are you old enough to remember Pee Wee's Playhouse? Where have you? Do you remember the magic word? Right? magic word. And everybody goes crazy. Yeah, so you said the magic phrase for today, which is self directed learning. I think you can maybe speak to this more than even I could. But from my perspective, I think you're a little bit of a unicorn. Because the vast majority of people that I work with self directed learning is like shoving hot pokers through their eyeballs. That's the problem right? Now, I can't get myself to do it, I can't stay consistent, I'm overwhelmed. And here you are spending years with dusty books, learning all by yourself, writing about but but very much when it comes to the creative mind, it's very challenging for people that are dominantly creative, to also be self directed learners, especially with the way that we've been conditioned our entire lifetime. So that you learn in a structured environment with classes, and hours and tests, and then all of a sudden, you're thrown onto the world as an adult, you have none of the human skills necessary to manage continuous learning once you have that degree, and you're supposed to be useful. Yeah.

Scott Young

Well, I mean, I think that's, that's part of it is that we don't in school, take a course on this is how learning works. Like this is how you should be studying this is how you should be doing things. And because we're typically in an environment where, like the school environment, I mean, it has some things going for it, but it also, it's very alien to how you'd have to learn things outside of the school environment. So I think for a lot of people, they're just, they're not prepared for that. Like, they've never had to be like, Okay, I need to learn this skill. How do I do research to figure out like, what are the resources available? What's the right way to learn it? And so in some ways, I kind of I really like resonate with people who are a little bit more DIY, like they have, they're in positions where they have to teach themselves things. Because I think there's a lot of a lot of skills involved in like, how do you find information? How do you evaluate it? How do you sort of structure the progress? How do you set up right, like the right expectations, you know, how to make make progress with it? Because I think there's one thing to be like, really good in the school environment where someone gives you everything. It's just like, Okay, here's the rules of the game, study this and get an A on the test, versus like, Okay, I need to be better at my job. What should I even be learning? What should I How should I go about it? How should I structure that project? I mean, these are skills that I think that is underdeveloped for most people, I

Zack Arnold

would argue not just under dissolved, but largely not developed at all. And this is a lesson that I learned the hard way. I would guess he's in your circle, but you probably know or know of Eric Barker. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So I did a podcast with Eric Barker years ago, and we'll we'll send a link to that. It's actually one of the very first podcast that I did. And the realization that I got from him was I was the valedictorian of my high school and I graduated top I think three or 4% University. again, and I didn't realize how underprepared I was for the world because what it what it's what the being a valedictorian and being high percentage University of Michigan showed, I'm really good at ingesting information in a structured way that you've put forth in front of me complying with your rules and meeting your demands. Once all of a sudden, I had to apply that to the real world, I was a shitshow even talks about the science of success, and how most people that are very academically successful, say flounder in the real world. And I was one of those people that was vastly underprepared for the world, having all the accolades, Phi Beta Kappa XYZ, magna cum laude, like I have no idea how to function on the world, because I've never learned the skill of learning.

Scott Young

Yeah, I mean, I think some of what we're doing when we're sort of successfully doing self directed learning to is trying to create the structure out of a messy situation, is I think that's what's hard is that if you've, if you've never had to kind of create the structure, try to decide, okay, what's the right way to approach this? Take that initiative, I think it is hard. And so I do think that's something that we probably need to be preparing people a bit more for is, how do you, like, you know, if you're going to be doing research in a creative domain, like, how do you figure out okay, what are the books? What are the skills I need to practice? You know, okay, do I need a coach do I need, these are sort of decision points that in a structured environment they've been done for you? And so you don't really reflect on like, how are they going to impact the learning process? How are they going to impact the speed at which you acquire a new skill?

Zack Arnold

And that's why we're here. So this is where we're going to transition to welcome Scott, You're my guest speaker today at how 101, right? I want people to walk away from this not just with an understanding of wow, I understand why this is such a challenge for me, I want them to have actual action steps and frameworks, your so they feel more empowered to become self directed learners. So let's get we're gonna start from the beginning. It's how to learn one on one and this 21st century of information overload. Where the hell do I start? Yeah.

Scott Young

So my starting point with with this is to first focus on understanding that most of what we know comes from other people. So this is particularly true in creative professions that I think there's often kind of a tension that we sort of like put originality, you know, imitation, we put them in opposite corners, so that, you know, either you're an original or you're an imitator. And those two things are diametrically opposed. But most creativity is like a sophisticated form of imitation. It's built off of what other people learn. And so a big part of learning. And I think, particularly in these kind of like murky, ill defined fields where, you know, I can't just take, you know, the course for it at the university. A lot of what you're trying to do is first figuring out what is it that people who are good at this skill know, how do they perform the skill? What is the knowledge that they have? So my first starting point, whenever I'm learning anything new, is to try to compile what's already known about it, not only the skill itself, so if I'm learning the piano, I want to figure out like, what is the curriculum for, you know, people used to teach piano and sort of like, look at like five or six different ways people are teaching piano, so I can understand, okay, these are the building blocks, this is what basically everyone kind of agrees is the way that you'd have to learn it. But then also the sort of the meta skill of like, what's important, what's not important, these kinds of conversations? So that's the first step for learning anything is this, grounding it in what other people have done before so that you are not reinventing the wheel, you're not butting your head against often, what can be a very difficult problem? Yeah,

Zack Arnold

there was a phrase that you had relatively early in your book that I looked at it and like, this could literally be the title of an entire book, which is the essentially the foundation of everything that I teach, which is that you can't get better at anything alone. Like that could literally be an entire book. And one of the things that was incredibly advantageous about the internet was our access to more information and watching or learning from other people. And this is something that I found fascinating both because of my boyhood obsession with gambling and Tetris. But also the intersection was learning. So talk to me about what you call the Tetris effect, because I think this is so vital to understanding how we learn in the 21st century, when we have access to every human being on the planet was

Scott Young

Tetris is a really interesting example because it illustrates a principle that applies in learning, generally. So this isn't about Tetris. This is about everything. And I can bring up examples that have nothing to do with Tetris for the same effect applies. But But I first heard this story from the YouTuber John Green, and he was talking about how Tetris performance if you look at like the best people in the world of Tetris when the game came out in the 90s people were like obsessed with this you know, you're talking about a you or maybe a fan yourself, like we're talking about like millions of people playing this game and playing it so obsessively that people are writing magazine op eds about how people are like hallucinating falling blocks, because they're playing it so much. But the actual performance was not very good. People are not very good at this game, compared to like 12 and 13 year old kids today. Like an example of this is you know, in the classic game they The game only had six digits for the score. So getting 999999 would have been a maximum possible score. It took 20 years before the first person to like document that they were able to do this. And like at a recent tournament, I think something like they hit that number like 40 times, and some people hit it like 14 times in the span of like, you know, a weekend. This is how much people are doing it. And so what is the difference? Why are people so much better now? You know, three decades after the game came out? And the answer seems to be that? Well, the problem was that Tetris in the early days, it is not a field where people write textbooks on how to, you know, be good at Tetris, maybe there's like a magazine article or something like this. The way you get better at Tetris is that you practice you figure out things on your own. And occasionally, if someone else figures out something, they tell you about it, but maybe it's like your brother's older friend or this kind of thing. And they Okay, alright, dude, you can do this. And you can do that in Tetris. The knowledge is diffuse, it's not something that's easily communicable. 20 years from now, we have internet forums, we have live streaming, we have all these technologies, that mean, now if I want to learn, like what's the best way to play Tetris, I can learn all the best strategies, I learned, this is how you have to press the button. This is like a kind of difficult technique that you're not going to figure out just by trial and error. That is the right way to do it so that you can play this game. And that turns out to mean that, you know, young kids will get obsessed with playing this game and a couple of years can be playing better than any human being could have played 20 years ago. Now, this is true of Tetris. But I mean, this is true. In many, many, many situations, I'm one of the things that I was I was a little bit disappointed, I had to compress it to like a paragraph in the book by did all this research on alchemy in the, you know, the medieval chemistry. And people had this impression that like alchemy was just pseudoscience. But it wasn't it was like people genuinely trying to understand complicated chemical reactions, and they were trying to come up with theories. But the difference between alchemy and what we call chemistry today was largely that alchemists had this belief, born also out of this idea that if they can figure out how to transmute things into gold, they get really rich. And so you don't want everyone knowing that, of like, not really communicating what they were doing. So they would write these books where they're like, talking about how they're doing chemical experiments. And they're drawing pictures with like dragons, and like two headed serpents and this kind of, and that was supposed to be a recipe that was supposed to be like, This is how you're supposed to do this. And so it would take all this knowledge and lore and careful, deep reading to figure out even what the experiment was that they did. And then when you do it wrong, and it wouldn't get the result. Maybe you'd have to go back and be like nah, Did I did I misinterpret this like Griffin eagle is actually a different element or something like this. Whereas the early scientists, they, you know, wrote out these really detailed, like, this is the exact experiment I ran. And these are the exact measurements I got. And this is the apparatus I used. And so the ability to learn from other people the ability to see what other people are doing, understand what they're doing, learn those best practices, and not do it through trial and error, not do it through just attempting things again, and again. And again, this is what allowed alchemy to become chemistry. This is what allowed the Tetris players to get really good. This is a fundamental principle, I think, for learning. And I think it's particularly important in the internet age, because yes, lots of knowledge is available. But you have to be able to learn from other people, and often what people know is locked in their heads. And so this is a big part, I think of getting good at anything.

Zack Arnold

Yeah. And I think the one of the the interesting things that the internet has, not again, like you said, it's amplified, it didn't create. But it's so funny, you brought up the alchemy thing, because I thought the same thing like that's it like this could be a whole book, this idea that they were intentionally misguiding people because they wanted to hoard their secrets. I feel like that's the way that it works. In most professions, especially the creative professions, were somebody that super highly successful, they don't want to give away their secrets, because then their competition is going to come after them. And I think that in a lot of ways, the Internet has changed that. And one of my digital mentors who I've also had on the podcast in the past is Chase Jarvis and chase. Jarvis started Creative Live. And he was kind of one of the first people that thought, what if I democratized all of the knowledge that I have about photography, all of my peers and all the people that I work with, they're hoarding all their secrets about lenses and depth of field and this camera versus that camera, I'm gonna give all of it away. And that kind of started this revolution in the creative world of, I'm going to share all of the information. And I know that you're, you're kind of in an adjacent field where you also have online courses, and you're a writer and a blogger, and you're building an audience and whatnot. And I'm sure that you've had some form of a conversation where at some point, somebody has said, you're giving too much of this away, right? There has to be a certain amount that's under lock, engaging key, because that's where you can generate a business out of it. And my argument has been the information. Again, it doesn't have any value. It's the execution of the information. It's knowing what to curate what to focus on what order to put it in. And that's why I think it's so vital that you can't learn these things alone. One of the I can't remember the name of it offhand. And I'm embarrassed that I can't but you and cow Cal Newport had a course that you put together that was very much about how you reach out to people to learn Yeah, that's it. Thank you. That's what I went through the whole thing. And it was, it was the inspiration for the work that I do now with networking and career building. But I will say there what, why waste years of your life, when you can just reach out to somebody that's doing now what you want to be doing next? That's the world's expert. Right? Yeah. And it's not about this is the world's best at something and you talk about this a lot, they probably don't have the expertise to share their expertise, because they're so far removed from the process, they can't see the forest for the trees. So when it comes to learning, I really want to dig deeper into the value of connecting with others, but you have to be very careful and intentional about who you connect with to learn the right things.

Scott Young

Well, I think another thing I would want to underscore is that, like, when when you and I are having this conversation, we're kind of keeping in mind that there's a lot of people listening, and a lot of people in lots of different situations. And so, you know, consciously or unconsciously, we're trying to generalize our advice, so that it's, you know, going to be broadly applicable. And the advice business, the kind of books like these, that's what they have to do that's a constraint is that I can't be like, Okay, here's how to, like, you know, like, learn Chinese characters, because like already now, I'm like, down to like point 00 1% of this audience who cares about that particular thing? So after trying to be like, Okay, what's the general principle? It's a general idea. But the sort of thing that I think I've really come to appreciate is how much knowledge is quite specific, how much problem solving knowledge you need to solve things is not in the form of like a really generalizable Maxim, that doesn't mean that you don't want to learn the generalizable maximum, it just means that, you know, that is not all there is to learning that is not all there is to do. And that's particularly true if you're used to like school based knowledge, because schools essentially kind of have to teach you either facts that we think are important, because of some reason, or a very generalizable skill have some very general kind of idea. And so a lot of what we're doing in like, top performer, for instance, is like, you need to have quite local knowledge, you need to know a lot of the specifics. If you're trying to, like, you know, to use an example, you're trying to, like, get a job at a certain place, you need to talk to someone to be like, Okay, who are the sort of people they hire, what is what it means to be in the portfolio, what needs to be on your resume for you to get hired here? So you're not going to find that in an advice book somewhere? No, like, because it's that's going to be very specific to that company, to that place to that hiring manager to, you know, I think about this in my line of work, because writing books is an area where the process of getting a book published by a traditional publisher, is just completely opaque to most people. And most people have no idea how that works. And so it can result in these situations where it you know, you have people being like, well, I've spent, you know, I spent 15 years working on this book, and like, you know, Oh, can you help me get it published? And it's like, no, no, no, this is like, not how you approach success in this field, like, first of all, you want to get an agent, and you got to write a proposal first, and you got to get a book deal. And even before you get an agent, you have to have certain like criteria on your profile to like, give an indication that you're going to sell books. And I mean, it is a difficult process, I don't want to say that like being a successful author, or publishing a book is necessarily easy. But it's so much harder, if you don't have someone to be like, This is how it works. And I mean, for me, I was lucky, I had friends who have been very successful authors. I mean, James clear, wrote the foreword to my first book, Cal Newport was the one who like was, like, do this, this, this, and this to write Ultra learning. I mean, I have benefited from that wisdom. And so I think for the average person, this is often something they're missing, they're often missing that kind of local on the ground specific to a particular situation, to a particular problem kind of knowledge. And, and so that is, often the thing that we need to get good at when we're learning things is get access to those quite specific people and not just generalized, you know, you should work harder kind of advice. Yeah,

Zack Arnold

and I, you and I are on exactly the same page, again, because a lot of the work I do now was inspired by both you and Cal and I think I mentioned offline, we literally have an entire unit of our program that's taught by my Podcast Producer, that's, you know, behind the scenes with us right now, literally teaching the deep work process and how to build a habit of going going into the practical application of these larger concepts. And we're also doing the same thing with how to learn how to learn, and then how to learn specific things. And you and I are on exactly the same page, don't focus on what you should be learning, eliminate all the things you don't have to be learning and don't learn in the wrong order. And the fastest path to that is find the person that just accomplish what you want to accomplish next. Right. So let me give you the perfect example. I know for a fact that I'm the kind of that the next big goal for me, I want to be a published author, I want to essentially be doing exactly what you're doing. And if my choices are that I can reach out to, I can reach out to James clear, or I can reach out to who or I can reach out to Tony Robbins or I can reach out to you know, somebody that's just about to finish their first book. I should not be reaching out to James clear to say, hey, I want to sell 10 million copies of my first book. How do I do it? Right. He obviously can break that down with a lot more experts. He said most, but it makes a lot more sense for me to find somebody that's closer to where I am in my journey. So I don't come to you and say, I've already written my first draft, can you send it to your agent? You're like, oh, dear Lord, none. And I know this is not how it works. So my first question, if I were going to reach out to you would be just kind of break down, simplify, it's not going to be easier, but simplify the steps. So I know my order of operations. So I don't waste five years of my life writing the next the next great American novel, and you're like, No, no, just do this thing first.

Scott Young

Yeah, I mean, in tabular form, we have this lesson title, which was called How to I don't contact Tim Ferriss. Yes, yeah. Tim Ferriss? Well, I mean, it was it was because someone in one of our early cohorts was like, I mean, I want to explain the situation, because I don't think like, if James clear, was like, Yeah, I'll get on the phone with you and tell you how to write a book, I would definitely take that call. But I think part of the problem was that like, Tim Ferriss is like an author, investor, you know, he has certain areas of expertise. But this person was like, you know, like, I'm an engineer at a medium sized software company, I want to contact Tim Ferriss. And like, in my head, I was sort of like, why, like, what is the advice that you want from Tim, like, Tim Ferriss doesn't have your job, he's not in your environment, like, he can't give you any local advice. Like, if your thing was, I want to write, you know, best selling book, I want to know how to do good, like book marketing. Yeah, Tim Ferriss probably does have good advice, if you could get a hold of him. But I think it's, I think the mistake here is just this. I think the real generalized version of this mistake is I want to affiliate with prestigious Person X. And so that's what I'm going to reach out to irrespective of whether they're a genuine expert on the exact problem I'm facing right now. And so I think we need to avoid that tendency. I was reading an article recently that was talking about just this human tendency of like wanting to just learn from prestigious people, and not necessarily people who have like, actual on the ground knowledge of the situation. And it was talking about an issue where people, it was some experiment where they asked people their opinion, I think of like, it was like some student activist issue at the time. And there were three people that can consult, it was like a random person, an expert on the issue that students were activists on or an expert on something that was like totally unrelated to what the students were acting and so on. And the thing that they found interesting from this experiment was that people were equally persuaded by the domain expert and the non domain expert, because essentially, they were just like, well, these are procedures, smart sounding people, I'll listen to them. And so I think that is a bias that we have to counteract when we're looking for the kind of nuts and bolts how it's done. If you're trying to fix your car, look for a car mechanic, don't ask Tim Ferriss just because Tim Ferriss is a smart guy. I'm sure he's a smart guy. But you got to focus on this local knowledge. And so in a lot of fields, I mean, we're talking about this at a little bit of a meta level of like, how do you navigate your career? But I mean, it boils down to even the how do you do things level, like if you're trying to figure out, you know, improve your skill at something that's like quite specific technical, like Python programming, or watercolour painting or storytelling or something, you need to focus on people who are good at that particular skill or who have developed in that direction, and not just you know, generically prestigious people. I think that's a very important lesson, I think from from all of this. Yeah.

Zack Arnold

And I double and triple down on that, where I always I do an exercise in my build your dream network program, where I put up two slides. One is if Steven Spielberg wants a janitor, and I say, you know, who's your expert, and of course, everybody's like, well, it's Steven Spielberg. And I said, but but if this is a janitor at a local high school, and your goal is that you want to literally get your foot in the door. So you can also be a janitor at this local high school. You're the janitor is the world's expert on solving your problem. Not Steven Spielberg, right? Yeah. So it's all about understanding when this person receives a message, you want to connect with them, they understand, oh, this is why you're reaching out to me. I'm the only person that really understands how to solve your problem versus I can give you some basic generic advice and say best of luck, but I can't really help you. And that, to me, is the first part of learning and getting better at anything is have somebody helped you simplify it that knows what they're doing? Well,

Scott Young

and another thing I would add to that, because another mistake people make is like looking for that perfect expert. And I've heard that sometimes like people will like so I'm, you know, 35 year old divorcee who is, you know, vegan, and like they create this extremely specific and idiosyncratic profile for themselves. And then of course, they can't find someone who's dealt with their exact problem with all of its individual complexities. And so, I'm a really big fan of learning from groups because No, you're probably not going to find someone who is in your exact same situation and they're going to tell you exactly what you need to do. But if you talk to 10 people who are sort of in your situation, and you look at like the overlapping pieces of their wisdom, you're going to be able to find Mind Map. And that's sort of I think what you're trying to do in this situation is you're not trying to master the skill yourself, but you're trying to figure out how does this skill work? How does this domain work? How is it organized. And if you can sort of stitch that, together with some snapshots from several people, you're going to be probably a lot better off than, you know, trying to think up this hypothetical, you know, Sage guru who's going to tell you everything you need to do.

Zack Arnold

Yeah, so the if we're looking at the extreme ends of the spectrum, the one end that we already said is, well, here's somebody that's famous that probably knows nothing about this, but I can say that I know them and I connect it Yeah. In other words, they have to meet 17 different criteria are not worth reaching out to. But I think there's also another one in the middle, which I think is often the most common trap, which is this person does have the expertise, but they're so far down the path, almost forgotten what it's like to be stuck where I am as a beginner. So if I wanted to reach out to Spielberg, and I said, I'm starting to put together a ragtag crew, and I'm going to do my first $50,000 feature film, it would be amazing to talk to Spielberg. But it's been 50 years since he was in the same position. And this to me, is the hidden trap of finding expertise to learn anything. Well, I

Scott Young

mean, I even get this from people who are like trying to start an audience online, like I'm no, no, Steven Spielberg. But I have been doing this full time for over a decade. And so people will be like, how do I start? Like, you know, do what you do, like have sort of a successful writing career? And I don't want to be like, Oh, well, it's because I'm so far ahead. But you also have to realize, like, I started doing this in 2006, like, the internet is completely different. Like, I have this incumbency advantage that, you know, I if I write a book, I can go on your podcast and talk about it. Whereas if no one has ever heard of me before, like, how do you bootstrap that? Well, bootstrapping in 2024 is different from 2006. And so I think there is, especially in fast changing fields, you do really want to be like the oh, well, this person became successful, like fairly recently, because a lot of the things that they did to become successful are going to change over time. Especially, you know, like, you know, like, if you're going into filmmaking, for instance, you're in an environment where actually you can film a lot of stuff fairly cheap. There's YouTube, there's like a lot of things that maybe could work that were just not an existing, when Spielberg was getting started, and I don't know when he was getting started the 60s or something. So like, the

Zack Arnold

70s things, really seven different world and they're released exactly

Scott Young

right. So I mean, it's going to change. And so there are going to be things that stay the same and stay constant. So I don't wanna say that Stevensville will be devoid of useful advice. But I do think, again, this local specific knowledge is often what you need. And you get that on the ground by talking to people by finding people in that situation by finding communities of people who are dealing with the same problems. That's very important. Yeah.

Zack Arnold

So I'm gonna I want to add one more layer to this, and we're gonna go to the next step. But I want to go back to this Tim Ferriss example. Because I think a lot of times what happens in myself included, I'm also trapped in this is the comparison to others that are on a similar journey, right? Yeah. So I have this, this kind of, I realized that it's bullshit. And I realized it's subconscious. But it's still there. I have this tremendous amount of impostor syndrome comparing myself to a podcaster with Tim Ferriss, because he and I did totally coincidentally launched our podcast the same month of the same year. Wow. Now experiencing his 10th anniversary. Well, I'm gonna experience a 10th anniversary. Yeah, right. Yeah. And he talks about how he's crossed over a billion downloads. And I'm just about to cross over a million downloads over 10 years. I'm about to hit a million downloads, which in the podcast world as an accomplishment, but I'm not doing what he's doing. And if I were to reach out to him and say, I'm bootstrapping my podcast, how can I be a podcaster that get a billion that gets a billion downloads, he'd say, well first launched 10 years ago. Secondly, have multiple best selling books. And before you launch your podcast, have an email list of 1.5 million people. Right? That's not terribly helpful. Yeah,

Scott Young

I mean, I think this is also a broader meta lesson about about maybe avoiding the most extreme examples of like, extreme success in the first place. I mean, I think we're often drawn to like the Warren Buffett investors, the Elon Musk entrepreneurs, like the people whose success is so outsized, that, you know, it's obvious like, hey, they're doing something we want to emulate it. But sometimes, that can again, be misleading, because you're just dealing with someone who may be had either some advantages that you can't replicate, or some just sheer luck that you can't replicate. And so I'm often again when I'm thinking about like, how do I succeed in this domain? I don't want to say the I ignore those examples because somebody is someone doing something extreme does reveal something about the way they did it. But I'm also looking at, you know, what is the thing that sort of generically works? What is the thing that like, you know, people who are in the 80th percentile, not the 99 point 99 percentile, like what are they do to, to make that thing work? Because then you're sort of looking at things that like, Okay, if I really got my act together and tried very hard, I might be able to make that work versus Yeah, I mean, you know, I've faced this myself like, I I'm friends with, like James clear, Cal Newport or people who've had enormous success with books, and then you sort of look at what they're doing. And it's, you know, for for James clear, for instance, it was like, Okay, well, you know, launch your first book, but make sure you sell like, you know, 15,000 pre orders in the first day, and then also go on 200 podcasts. I mean, these are things that like, okay, that's gonna be maybe hard to pull off. But I think there's a lot more that you can understand from that process that like, Okay, well, having an email list is important, right? So I think I think the when we're inferring advice for things, often what we're looking for is sort of directionally what should we be doing? What are the tactics we should be using? And, you know, understanding that, you know, while Tiger Woods, yes, might be doing the same things as Tiger Woods, and he's gonna still be a better golfer. So I think that direction is maybe more important than trying to like, benchmark ourselves on an extreme example, of greed.

Zack Arnold

So what we're talking about is essentially one of the three core themes of your book, which is seeing, doing and feedback, it's this idea of seeing how other people are doing it asking the right questions. So I'm going to ask you kind of one example question. That's me just totally monopolizing the fact that I've got your attention, but it's for the sake of learning. So people understand how to do this right versus how to do it wrong. So let's say that we have a mentor mentee relationship. And at this moment, you're the world's expert for me, which is that I want to learn how I want to I want to sell a Wall Street Journal best selling book, you've done that you've done it recently. Okay, and you're not Tim Ferriss, or Cal Newport yet. Right. So the question I'm not going to ask is, what do I need to do to become a Wall Street Journal bestselling author, right? That's not what I want to ask, well, actually, you can Wall Street Journal

Scott Young

doesn't even have their list anymore. So it's actually impossible to become a seller.

Zack Arnold

If I were to say, how do we become a New York Times bestselling author, really broad, vast general advice? But here's an example of a question that I would ask. And I'm literally asking you right now, I already understand that having a built in audience in today's ecosystem is really important for you to both an agent and get a book proposal, knowing that there's already a built in group of people that are interested in what you have to say. So what I'm interested in is, is there kind of a minimum benchmark, so I can set a goal? Is it a matter of you have to have an email list of 50,000 or a million Instagram followers, or is there kind of a minimum barrier of entry, where I know if I reach this benchmark, I can at least start setting up meetings.

Scott Young

I mean, I don't know what that exact benchmark would be, I think the best person who would be able to give you that advice would be an agent, because an agent is dealing with all sorts of people I know, when I was pitching Ultra learning, I knew I was above that threshold, I knew I was at the threshold where like, I'll get a book deal. If I want one, it was a question of whether I'm going to get a good book deal or a bad book deal. So it's easy to get a bad book deal as an author where they're like, Okay, we're gonna give you an advance, it's gonna be like, you know, $5,000, and like, you know, they're just basically have an option on like, in the off chance that you turn out to be super, super successful, we'll do it. But otherwise, we're not gonna do any work. And so I think that's not usually what you want to get as a as an author doing a book deal. So an agent will be able to help you gauge that is like, is your audience big enough? Now, that kind of thing. But I also think it's not just about the audience. I mean, if you have a modest sized audience, but you have like a killer proposal, like this is a book that will sell this is a book that has like a compelling premise. It is, you know, strong idea. You have strong writing. I mean, the problem with a lot of people who have like, you know, blogging, and they're there, they have this sort of background of like doing online stuff. Is it like their books aren't that good? Their proposals aren't that good. And so unless they're James, clear, level famous, they're like, Okay, well, you know, even if you throw out some garbage, I know, it's gonna sell a million copies, because you have, you know, 20 million followers on Instagram, you're going to be facing that sort of uphill battle. So I think the second thing I will work on is like, Okay, how do I write like an extremely good book proposal, I'm lucky, the agent that I work with, is pretty demanding for book proposals. Like she actually spends a lot of time on it. I know other people, because I've seen their book proposals. And even like, the book proposal that they sold versus the book, like the book proposal would just seem very half baked when it was coming out. And, and so you know, there's a lot more work to get that into the shape of a good book. So I think the right way to think about book publishing is that you're coming at it from a number of factors. It's your built in audience, it's the idea, it's your personal reputation, like can you credibly be the person to write that book? Other things that work too, is like media contacts? And like, you know, are you someone that if you wrote a book, where they talk about it, the New York Times, this kind of thing, all of these things are factors that you know, weigh in your favor or weigh against you. The things you probably have the most control of as an author are, can you write, like a really compelling proposal that like, oh, this would be a really cool I think at least in the nonfiction space, like a really compelling nonfiction book, as opposed to, you know, alright, this is like, this is just a bunch of platitudes that you've wrapped up in a book cover, I think that's, that's sort of probably where I would put the most effort. And then, you know, obviously, if you're way below the threshold on the other things, even a super compelling book, you might have an uphill battle. And so, you know, if I weren't at that threshold, and the agent tells me, you know, you're not really there yet, I would probably just keep working on building the audience. So that's where I would get that feedback signal from. Alright,

Zack Arnold

so what I want to do is, I want to break down this conversation, otherwise, I'm gonna go down the rabbit hole, because I've got five hours worth. Right now. I'm not gonna monopolize this for my own personal gain. But I want to break down what just happened. By asking you a better and more specific question, I get a much more specific answer. And you potentially just saved me three years of my life. And let me give you an example. This is where it comes down to how do I learn the right things, if I decided I want to be an author, so I'm going to become an expert at Scrivener, and I'm going to write my first book. So I can impress people, that's probably two years of my life that you just saved, because now I realize that's a waste of my time right now. And what I need to do is either a combination of learning the skill of writing a book proposal, so something good enough to get somebody's attention, or at the very least build enough of a relationship with somebody where they'd be willing to at least connect me with their agent. So I can do a phone call, or conversely, make it very clear how the network that I built could get this out there and example being if I had the worst book proposal in the world, and it's 200 pages of Instagram platitudes, but I said, Oh, by the way, Tim Ferriss is a close friend of mine, and he's going to do a five newsletters series on my book, they don't give a shit. Yeah, right. They're gonna be like, Yeah, of course, we're gonna give you a book deals, but now I know exactly where to put my attention, my time and my energy. Yeah.

Scott Young

I mean, I do think another thing too, and sort of a meta point, if I can reflect on my own advice giving here, which I think is potentially generalizable is looking for those feedback points. So like I suggested, you know, I'm not even in the best position to know what the threshold is for what is, you know, going to be decent book deal territory, because I knew I was over it when I did alter learning, maybe just a bit over it. But I don't know how much lower you could go. Like, if you were to say, Oh, I have a list that has 5000 people, or I have 50,000 people or i 500. Like I don't know where that cutoff point is. Exactly. And so, you know, who does know is the agent who is going to be like, decide to represent you? And so that's an example that I think is often underrated, is this sort of, you know, you're writing a script, you know, you send it off to people like, Okay, what do you think of this script? If you're not getting any traction with that at all, you know, you're missing some ingredient. But if you are sort of just sitting on it, you don't have that feedback signal, right. And so, I want to start, I was just talking to a guy who wanted to get work, doing some kind of creative job, I don't know whether it was like Digital design or this kind of thing. And he was sort of debating this trade off of himself of like, do I keep working on this? Like, what should I do to go forward? And I was saying, Well, the first thing I would do is start like applying for gigs. Because even if you get like complete 100% rejection rate, you're at least learning something about where your skill fits relative to the spectrum. And a mistake I think a lot of people make is that they overemphasize one aspect of a skill that they think matters. But they're not getting that feedback signal from the environment to be like, Oh, no, the issue is not that I'm not good enough at JavaScript programming to get a job. It's just that I don't have any track record, no background, and people only want to hire someone with five years experience. So my real problem is like, how do I get those first gigs to build up that portfolio and not like become the JavaScript expert, at least like that's not the main priority. And so I think this kind of, again, this map, making this sort of figuring out how a skill actually works is so important. Because yeah, you could spend, if you think the only thing that matters, is building the list size, you could wait 510 years and not realize, well, you probably were ready to write a book, you just had to have a really good proposal. And so, you know, these kinds of details, I think, are really hard to know a priori, they're hard to just from your head, figure out what the answer is, you need to get out there and get that feedback signal from the environment.

Zack Arnold

Yeah, and that's why I want to emphasize one more time how this one phrase could literally be an entire book, you can't get better at anything alone. That alone and we could talk about for four hours. But I want to move on to the next step. Let's assume that I've had a conversation with one or several of the right people. And it's I've narrowed it down from the endless firehose of information on the internet to these are the key areas that you should spend your time. I have all the time in the world right now. I'm staring at the wall, I'm unemployed. But I know that I need to be learning a bunch of skills whether in my audience whether it's, I need to learn these editing programs or learn about the new advents and tools in AI or I want to learn my craft better and learn theory better, even when you narrow it down to the three four or five things. In the world of self directed learning. A lot of people just walk around all day wondering where their pants are because they don't know where to start. So if we're gonna get into the doing phase, how do we start to information even though We've reduced it, there's still information overwhelm and this fear of, well, I'm not learning the right thing in the right order at the right time. How do we just like dig in and actually start learning things? Yeah,

Scott Young

I mean, I talked about this sort of see do feedback loop, but it's really like it is very nested. So we can talk about this very broadly of like, you know, we'll use the author example, again, because it's fairly concrete, but like, how do I, you know, write a successful book, a successful nonfiction book, there's at the very broad level of like, okay, well, I need to get an agent, I need to like write a proposal. And you know, I need to have some of these background factors before they'll even consider me this kind of stuff. But then let's say we narrow it down to like, how do I write a proposal? Well, that's the same thing. I will be like, what are successful proposals? You know, you just Google that online successful book proposals, you'll find some things if you get an agent, they will give you like, Okay, this is so and so's proposal that was good that you can use as a template, or this is what you need to do. So I mean, if once I've narrowed it down to like, how do I get good at writing proposals? I would start by like, looking at what are good proposals? What are proposals that like, this was like a million dollar book deal? What did it look like? What were the ingredients, you know, and then you're, then you're practicing writing things yourself. And then you're getting feedback, maybe either from other potential authors, you know, people who are in the industry, who can give you sort of validated feedback. And maybe you're narrowing it down further, like what is a good book title? Or what is a good way of like, pitching, you know, this is the target audience for this book, like the marketing section, like, you can keep breaking these down and narrowing it down to like tighter and tighter little feedback circles. And so I think this, this idea of thinking about in terms of like, what's an example out there in the world? How do I try to do it myself? And how do I get some feedback, so I can bring myself closer in line to what works. This pattern, I think just exists at many, many layers of it. So you just have to keep breaking it down until it's something that's tractable, and you can move forward with it. So

Zack Arnold

this is the point at which your book really kind of saw into the center of my soul, and found like the deepest, darkest insecurities. You talked about one of the, one of the first steps of doing, it is just copying others. I'm like, Whoa, hold on a second. I thought being a creative man, I have to always come up with original ideas and be new and different and unique. I can't start by copying other people. Yeah. Right. So talk to me about how, like you said, finding like whether it's the book proposal or the whatever that creative medium is, it's literally tracing paper to start with whatever form it might be.

Scott Young

I mean, I mean, this was, this was a chapter that I wrote that like it was one of those chapters that like, I could have written a whole book that were that was just the idea. But I think so there's a couple ideas here. So one is a more broad phenomenon about human cognition, that we are great imitators and only mediocre problem solvers. And we tend to think of it as the reverse. And so I tried to present some evidence that like most of what we learn is coming from other people. And this is true, even in the sort of creative problem solving fields that we don't think of as imitation. Often what we are doing is we've seen six examples we generalize from, you need to see those six, but we infer a kind of a more abstract principle from those six. And we can use that to generate things that look new. And so even even at our like, most creative level, it's usually built on this sort of iceberg model where like, you know, yes, there's this creative part. But there's this huge foundation of examples and you know, tricks and things that we've learned that make it look like what we're doing is original. So my favorite example, this comes from the science fiction author, Octavia Butler, and she is someone I think it really embodies this, she really struggled to find her way because of his lack of access, this lack of ability to learn from other people and what actually works. And when she did achieve success, she was very generous with her time and helping budding science fiction writers. And one of the things that she used to give his advice was like, Well, if you're struggling with something in your work, say you don't know how to start a story, find like a dozen stories that you like, and copy out how they started the story word for word. And her point, which I think was very important was that the goal is not to just copy one of those, like, you know, that is not what you're doing and not just be a plagiarist. But it's that by really looking at how these people start these stories and looking at a dozen of them, you suddenly get what was an impasse? Isn't it? Well, I have a menu now I have these like three or four broadly different ways that I could solve this problem. And I can pick one of them. And so even for me when I was writing, ultra learning, because it was my first book, my first one of the traditional other, the way I started was like, how do you structure this book is like, well, what are nonfiction books that I liked. And so for me, the starting point for structuring Ultra learning was looking at deep work because I liked Cal Newports writing, I like deep work. So the original template for ultra learning was very similar to deep work where it was literally like, Okay, I'm going to introduce a concept, I'm going to argue why it's important, and then I'm going to say how to do it. And that was how deep work worked. Now, the books don't actually look that similar either not my book is not actually structured very much like deep work, because as I kept working on it, I realized well, the how to do it is actually almost all of the book Deep Work that how to do it is maybe smaller. So you need to spend more time arguing for it. But this is what I'm talking about is that like, you can end up in a very different place a place where it's not even clear that X was an influence on Y. But, you know, if I were to just like, Okay, I'm going to forget everything I know about nonfiction books and just invent a good book structure. That's very difficult to do. And the only people usually who are able to do that successfully is because they've seen so many 1000s of examples, they don't even think about that they're relying on them. They're just sort of generating things spontaneously, without that internal reference to the original source.

Zack Arnold

Yeah, I, obviously I didn't have your book to to use as 15 years ago. But I was using this exact same strategy without knowing that I was using this strategy. And it got me my career changing opportunity. And I don't think I've ever told the story before. And I think it would be useful for the same position, where the big career changing opportunity that I've shared many times is where I went from working on low budget indie features to editing the number one show on cable television at the time, which was burned. Notice, I had no TV credits, like, if you're talking about the skills experience gap, there is no reason I ever should have been hired. But here's how I was able to get hired, I had worked on a project just before that, stylistically, was almost the same as it. And in order to develop that style and speak what I call a filmic language, you're a master and actual speaking different language. But I've learned how to be a chameleon with different filmic languages and different editorial styles. And I said, here's the style that I'm going for, which was very Guy Ritchie Ocean's 11, kind of fun, carefree, you know, split screens and cool graphics. So I literally and this, it was much different 15 years ago, but I had a stack of DVDs. And I digitized all the little pieces, the little transitions and the graphics. And I would literally it's called over cutting, which is the same as tracing on paper, or like writing somebody's actual words, I would overcut the exact same picture. But it forced me to realize, oh, this is a seven frame transition. And this key frame goes here. And this goes there was literally copying piece by piece. So I had internalized this style. And I can then express it in my own ways when I was cutting the story. And it's a very, very specific and unique skill. So when I showed up for this interview for the show, Burn Notice, I basically said to them, I already know how to do your show, I know like literally down to the keyframe, how long this transition is and how to transition to a quad screen and how to make sure it goes to black and white with film grain. Because I've done it over and over and over. And they realized, well, this guy is the only person we can hire that doesn't have a learning curve. And for me, it literally started with copying, but then starting to express myself with my own originality, but using that as the foundation. And then when I started to become a writer and having online courses and a coaching program, I did the same thing with learning how to write a sales email. So my business mentors for me, it's 80, who have also had the podcast before, I literally would just take his sales emails, and I would rewrite them word for word for word. I've never sent anything. But if people and I've had multiple the students, because I've been a case study on some of his business programs, they say your your voice and the feel of your your newsletters in your community is very similar to our meet. So I'm like, yeah, yeah, cuz I started by copying is word for word. And I've never sent it to anybody. But that's how we internalize the tone and the feel of that language.

Scott Young

So I think I think there's two things I want to say on that experience. And I think that's really good. And it really summarized it well. So one, is that part of the tension, I think, is that in Western culture, we really prize this sort of peak level creativity. And we put it in contrast to someone who is a kind of, you know, operates on cliche or a stylistic crutches or this kind of thing, like, you know, we like the person who invents a new genre, we don't like genre writers we don't like people are like, Ah, you're doing this thing that everyone was doing. And so I think this sort of at this very high level discussion is that we want to praise people who are truly original, and sort of denigrate people who are just kind of making cheap copies of something. Part of that ignores that there is this continuum that to get to the really original level, what we're you're doing is that you're getting so many examples. And you're seeing the kind of they'll relationships, the things the properties that they're doing, the moves that they're making, in making a creative product, are becoming increasingly abstract increasingly away from the superficial stuff, that it is actually just genuinely something new, especially to someone who doesn't have that same level of training. So I think that's the first thing. And so, like, for me, for instance, like when I started writing, if you look at my original essays, they're very similar to the art of like the essays of people who I admired. So I really like I started 2006 I really liked Steve pavlina. My early essays often have a Steve pavlina kind of writing style. Now, I don't think I have a particular kind of styled it's like really reminiscent of a particular author now, but that's just because I've read a lot of people and so I've become this kind of incredible pastiche of like 1520 30 different writers that I like the thing I would say is that you talk about a language like a filmic language. And I think this is a more general point than maybe even you realize, like, I think learning everything is in some sense kind of learning the language of x. Now, it's not always words, but it is the same idea that there is a vocabulary, there's grammar, there's this kind of detailed, specific kind of knowledge to every skill. And so if you take this kind of metaphor of like, the way you become fluent in a language is by learning the words, seeing what other people are speaking, practicing yourself, making it fluent getting correction, like that applies to many, many, many different skills. And so learning the language, I think, is a really potent metaphor for understanding a lot of skills. So

Zack Arnold

I never would have thought I was going to ask the next question, but I just realized you might be the intersection of the world's expert on answering this question. Maybe you Okay. All right. Let's see, I've I've made the assertion for years, not that I believe it to be true to something that intuitively I've always felt is that I believe that language and writing and grammar is just math, but with words instead of a numbers. Hmm, what are your thoughts on that? Because you're somebody that's in the intersection? Very high level?

Scott Young

Yeah, I mean, there's definitely going to be some relationships, I think a lot of as, like I was saying, using this sort of very generalized example, a lot of languages, there is an overlap with this kind of how I think about languages, this sort of building blocks and stuff and many other skills. I don't know whether I would go so far as to say that language and math are the same, I do think they probably rely on somewhat different parts of the brain to do their work. So I mean, there's people who have deficits in like the visual spatial area of their brain. And so they're going to be like very bad at math, but there may be like, very fluent with languages. So the question of whether they work on the same principle, I think, is a bit of an open one. I know, there's some people that think that there's like a language module. And so we have like, specific linguistic kind of faculties that are just different from our other skills. And there's other people who think like, well, they're actually, you know, based on a lot of the same thing. So I will give a very unsatisfying answer there that I don't know. But I think it's an interesting question. Well,

Zack Arnold

number one, I appreciate the fact that you're saying that you don't know. And you're not pretending to be the expert that has the answer, because I would, I would rather walk away from a conversation with more questions and bullshit answers. So first of all, thank you for that. And secondly, the reason that I bring it up, and I feel it's relevant to today's conversation, other than just stoking my own creativity, and curiosity, is because there are so many transferable skills that people don't see in themselves, where if you start to see the kind of the the matrix of, Wow, I'm really, really good at math. But I've always been bad with writing prose, and you realize, oh, well, there's actually connection between my ability to be able to solve formulas and proofs. And I can actually see words in a similar way, it helps people to connect the dots of where they have valuable expertise where they don't think they have valuable expertise. Yeah.

Scott Young

Well, I definitely think often when people can build a skill in one area, you can get some confidence and helping with the other. So one of my favorite examples is Barbara Oakley, she, she wrote a number of books, but her experience was in languages, she was like working in Russia, learning Russian and this kind of stuff. And then she kind of belatedly learned math to get a PhD in engineering. And she found that the Russian experience really helped her because learning something hard kind of gave her some confidence to like how you could break things down and learn them in general. So I do think that's often what I'm trying to do for people is try to break down like at a very abstract level, how does learning work? I mean, it doesn't fill in the vocabulary, it doesn't fill in the specific grammar. But if you have some confidence that you know how it works, that often is enough to get you started learning something new. Yeah.

Zack Arnold

So I realized that I've gotten through about 4% of my notes. So if you can just clear out the rest of your day that will be 18 hour podcast, exactly. Trust me if I could do an 18 hour podcast and people have listened that I preferred format, got a lunch break. 16 I'm like I can't do 60 minutes. And then I now 90, I'm like I can't do 90 minutes. But I love having great conversations with a no. So very quickly, I want to summarize where we are. And I want to go into one other point very, very quickly. So if we're going to summarize is that number one, my belief and your backing this up is that there's no point in trying to figure this out alone and reinvent the wheel. Just reach out to people and learn from them that have already done this so they can simplify the path. So you can eliminate all the things you shouldn't be learning. And you know what you should be learning ideally in roughly the right order, then you can eliminate or remove the barrier of I must be good immediately. And I must be creative and original. I'm just going to copy what works and I'm going to develop those skills so that then I can find my voice and find what is the language that I want to learn next. But I at least want to talk for a couple of minutes about the importance of feedback. Because from my experience, I've spent most of my career in a small dark room all by myself. I am as introverted as introverted gets but I have seen the tremendous value between spending years cutting my own projects on my own and then sharing a wall with somebody else for a month and I learned more on that one. Other than I did in seven years by myself, so let's at least talk a little bit about the feedback process when we go from copying, to finding our own voice how instrumental feedback is in the learning process?

Scott Young

Yeah. So I mean, I think we had this kind of conversation before we were talking about, like, what's the threshold for publishing a book? I mean, this is a quite specific example. But my answer boiled down to I don't know, ask an agent. But I think what you can generalize from that is that there's a lot of areas of your skill, which require calibration, like you need to get the dial set right, on a lot of things. And when you start in a field, none of the dials are going to be set, right? You're not going to know how much you should be doing this, how much you should be doing that. Is this too much? Is this too little? Is this right? Is this not good? There's millions, there's like a, you know, there's a whole control board with all these little knobs. And, yes, there is going to be some ways that you can like look at someone and you can kind of try to, you know, match their settings and get it close. But it is really this iterative, iterative feedback from the environment is going to help you calibrate on a lot of these things. And so just quickly, two things that I want to clarify. So one, when I talk about feedback, I'm not just talking about the teacher telling you what you did wrong, or like, you know, a boss being critical of you, because I think that's what people think of when they think of feedback. But it's broader than that it is general interaction with the environment. So being out there, and like working in the field actually doing things. This is even if no one ever tells you what you're doing right and doing wrong, you're getting feedback from the environment. And that is very important for sort of steering your ship. So it's about avoiding being disconnected, avoiding being this kind of like, I'm going to work in a hole and not talk to anyone. The second thing is that being criticized getting kind of this sort of negative feedback, which I mean, it can sometimes be necessary can sometimes be useful is not the most important element of feedback. I've had a number of conversation with people where they say things like, you know, I wrote this book, or essay or whatever, and I send it to people and ask for feedback. And people just said, compliments, like, how do I get them to give me constructive feedback? And my response is always like, well, no one's gonna really like, unless they're, you know, just kind of a jerk in general, no one's going to be like, Yeah, you're this is garbage. Like, why are you sending this to me? Because you know, that's gonna damage your relationship. Most likely, people understand what then that when people are asking for feedback, they're usually just asking for encouragement. And we've imbibed this as a social norm. And even if you tell people, I'm actually looking for constructive criticism, people still think that is actually just a really deceptive way to ask for encouragement. And they're, you know, so we have these social norms against being overly critical. So the best way to do is to shift away from that, if you're trying to get feedback from someone that you think could genuinely provide feedback, don't ask them to evaluate you ask them how they can help. So ask them, okay, if you were to improve this, what would you do to improve it, and then all of a sudden, the conversation isn't about being critical. It isn't about like, oh, well, you're not at the threshold, you need to do good work. But here's something you can improve. And so I think often, the more you can change it so that what you're getting from the environment is not an evaluation of your self worth of your ability, this kind of negative critical signal. But something that is constructive, something that's going to help you is going to be valuable in the long run. So

Zack Arnold

we're not going to have another 90 minutes to go into this next concept. But if anybody is really interested in how to get better at asking for or giving feedback or criticism, one of my mentors, that's one of the world's best at this is the author, Adam Grant. And he talks extensively about this idea of having something that's called a challenge network. And if anybody wants to learn how to build your own challenge network, listen to Adam grants interview with Tim Ferriss, because he talks all about how to surround yourself with people that can give you the right feedback. And one of my one of the questions that I use all the time that he shares is based on what I've given you, whether it's a video, whether it's a manuscript, whether it's a workshop, if you had to cut 20% out of this, what would you lose? I have gotten the most amazing feedback from asking that question. Yeah. Because sometimes the answer is, if anything, it needs to be longer and you didn't cover enough versus well, because you asked and then dot dot, dot, you're like, if one person says that you're like, okay, but if 17 people independently say, Well, if you're gonna cut 20%, you kind of lost me here, here, here. You identify the patterns, but people don't feel like they're criticizing you. They feel like again, they're providing you value and helping you make your work better. That's

Scott Young

a good one. I'm gonna steal that one I'm gonna copy.

Zack Arnold

But I use that all the time, which is, even if you love this if you were forced to cut 20% Healthy cut this by 20% in value like that question. So having said that, we've gotten through about 4% of my, my prep sheet for today. So yes, we're probably gonna have to do another interview sometime in the future. But I also want to be tremendously respectful of your time. So for those today that want to learn more about learning, learn more about you your journey. There are a lot of different places that I could send people, what's the one place to simplify to help them to get started with your working getting better at learning? Yeah,

Scott Young

well, anyone can always visit my website, Scott H Jung calm, I've got 1000s of essays there links to all my books, all my courses, everything that we've talked about. So that would be the hub I'd send people to. And I'd also recommend checking out the book get better at anything, you can get an Amazon, you can use your audible credit, I think they have it on Spotify now. So anywhere you're listening or reading or watching books, you can check it out. And we go into way more detail a lot more of the research. So I think if you like some of what we were talking about here, I think you'll get a much more detailed and complete picture from the actual book.

Zack Arnold

Yeah, I see my job. Not a summarization of your work. Yes, Inception. Let's plant the seed of an idea that grows and somebody's like, now I have to dig into the the ideas and the methods in this book. So I'm hoping that we planted the seed of the idea of nothing more. And just, you know, one further accolade to add on that and then make sure people know on the show notes, if they want to go deeper into your original work in your story, shameless self promotion. Listen to my first interview with Scott. Yeah.

Scott Young

Yes, yes. And they can check out the other book Ultra learning, which I think was also something that can be very helpful for people in the same vein.

Zack Arnold

Yeah, couldn't agree more. So Scott, I cannot thank you enough for taking the time today to to share all this with me. I've learned a tremendous amount. And I'm pretty confident you and I are going to have an off the record conversation sometime soon. Breaking down and simplifying the process of becoming a best selling author. Oh, thank

Scott Young

you. Thank you for that. Um,

Zack Arnold

I very much appreciate the time. Thanks so much. All right. Great.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai