Jonas Christensen 2:50
SCOTT YOUNG, welcome to Leaders of Analytics. It is fantastic to have you on the show.
Scott Young 2:58
Yeah, it's great to be here.
Jonas Christensen 2:59
And Scott, I'm so excited about this episode, because it is about a topic that is something that is very dear to my heart, which is learning. And we're talking about everything learning, how do humans learn? How can we structure our learning how they can retain information over time, and you're an expert on this topic, because you are what is called an ultra learner. And you have actually written the book called Ultralearning. And we'll hear all about that in the show. But before we get to that, I think actually listeners should hear about this from yourself and your journey. So could you tell us a bit about yourself, your career background and what you do?
Scott Young 3:40
Yeah, so I've been a writer for over 15 years. And I think the thing that made me most known for is taking on kind of unusual self education challenges. So one of those was the MIT challenge, which this was shortly after I graduated from business school. I decided I wanted to try to learn computer science. Didn't want to go back to university. And as some of you may know, MIT actually puts a lot of their class materials online for free. So I thought, has anyone ever tried to like simulate getting an MIT education without going to MIT? So that was the crux of that challenge. And so I tried to make a reasonable benchmark of MIT's computer science curriculum. Tried to focus on passing the final exams and doing the programming projects. And kind of as a little twist, I tried to do it in 12 months. And so that was sort of my first big project, and it got me a little bit of attention. And since then, I've done projects, learning languages. I did one where I went with a friend, we went to four different countries in one year, and we made these little kind of semi documentary videos of us learning four different languages. The crux of that project was that we weren't going to speak in English to each other or to people we met along the trips. We called the "The year without English" and we learned Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Chinese and Korean. And I've also done other shorter one ones that weren't quite as intensive. I did one where I was learning portrait drawing over 30 days. I did another one doing MIT's intro quantum mechanics class. I did a one in during the pandemic, where we were kind of locked down where I was learning my wife's native language, Macedonian. And so these have been kind of the things I guess, you can say I'm certainly known for - is doing these sorts of challenges. And I wrote the book Ultra learning, which came out in 2019, which was covering not just my own personal challenges, but many other people who have done really cool projects like Eric Barone who built his own video game, and Roger Craig, who built software to become really, really good at Jeopardy trivia and won hundreds of 1000s of dollars. And Tristan de Montebello, who became, you know, mere champion public speaker in like several months of intense preparation. And so really to try to dissect this process of getting good at things quickly, and the kind of unusual steps some people take to get good at things, to hopefully inspire and give some guidelines for people who want to do something similar.
Jonas Christensen 6:00
Yeah, so we're going to hear all about these tips and tricks today as to how can you short circuit your learning or sort of cut corners, if I may call it that. That's probably not a fair reflection of what you're doing. Because what you're seeing is also something that takes a massive amount of self discipline, I imagine. I reflect on my Coursera account and my Udemy account, and it's full of unfinished courses. You somehow managed to cram - I think the computer science degree at MIT is a four year degree that you crammed into 12 months. Is that right?
Scott Young 6:34
Yeah.
Jonas Christensen 6:35
How did you develop this self discipline to just keep going without the external motivators of "You have to hand in this assignment by this date, οtherwise, you're out and all that stuff?"
Scott Young 6:47
Well, I mean, I think there's a few factors. So for one, I want to stress that like, the sort of extremes that I sometimes go through these projects doesn't mean that like, that's how you have to do it. I think the idea I wanted to show in doing the MIT challenge is something like this was possible. I think, for the average person, they're probably better suited to be like "Okay, maybe I'll take like two or three classes, and learn some specific skills that maybe I was missing in my undergraduate education, or that I need on the job or this kind of thing". You know, I'm not necessarily advocating, "Οkay, like everyone just like dropped out of school and do it what I'm doing". I know, it's weird, right? Like, you hear people talking about, like, I know, it's unusual. But I think the other thing I wanted to stress is that a lot of what goes into making this work, I think, is just having a really good design and picking a goal and a target that, like is really clearly motivating to you. Now, I mean, in my case, I was a little bit unusual, because I had two motivations. So one of them was just a genuine, like, I just love doing this, like I sort of set my career up for it. So I do have a genuine, intrinsic interest in all the projects I undertake. But I mean, I also get the benefit of like, I have a career where I write about this. And so it's sort of my job to do these things. And so sometimes I'll get comments from people like, "how do you sustain your motivation doing this?". Like, well, you know, having like a huge email newsletter that was expecting me to like post updates on this helped considerably. And so I think for people who are not in such a situation, yeah, you are often relying on trying to design projects that will be either personally fulfilling or something that will deliver some kind of career or, you know, personal benefit. And so you do need to design those carefully. Like, I think, if you were to try to do something in like your working environment, picking up projects, where it's like "Okay, this skill is clearly something that you know, is going to move me up in my organisation, or allow me to transition to a different kind of role". Like getting really clear on what those motivations are. And setting really clear guidelines and structures for the project is super important. I think the reason why so many people have these sort of like, as you said, Coursera accounts where you have a bunch of unfinished courses, because you don't really have a clear goal of like what you're trying to accomplish in a confined period of time. It's just "well, you know, I'm sort of interested in these things". Then you start watching them, and they get a little bit boring or a little bit hard. And so just naturally, you just "Ah, maybe "I'll watch a YouTube instead or go on Twitter". And so I think this is a very natural state of affairs. And I mean, I don't think I'm different in that regard. Like when I don't have a decided motivation to stick to some class. Yeah, very often, I will also wander around, I mean, there's definitely Coursera classes that I've started, haven't finished as well. So I think that the idea is not to present myself as being just like, I am personally some unique individual, but rather I think, if you understand what factors go into motivating yourself and allowing yourself to stick to this kind of project, you can engineer those. You can set yourself up in such a way that "oh, yeah, I will do this over the next two months, because it's important to me, because I have a structure, because I have something that I can actually make progress in".
Jonas Christensen 9:58
Yeah and reading your book, you put a lot of emphasis on spending a lot of time on actually picking what you're going to learn before you start learning. And I think there's something in this number of Coursera courses that I have, for instance, in my account, they're sort of fun distractions. Oh that sounds interesting, I would love to learn that, or I would love to have learned that. Νot necessarily, would I like to actually go through the process of learning it, right? I would love to learn Spanish. No, no, I'd love to be able to speak Spanish. I don't want to learn to speak Spanish. That's a different thing altogether. Could you talk to us a bit about this upfront exercise of actually figuring out what you want to learn and why you should do that?
Scott Young 10:40
So, first of all, let me just say like, there's nothing wrong with what you're doing there. There's nothing wrong with like "Oh, this is interesting. Let me check this out. Let me dabble a little bit." I think that exploratory activity is often really valuable. You know, it's even valuable in the sense of like "well, I'm not going to learn this right now. But maybe if I knew I needed this skill, it's nice to know, that course is there." And similarly, I think, you know, there's lots of things like books, for instance, I'll read that I just read just this seems interesting, and maybe that'll come up later, maybe it won't. And so I think just that kind of pure curiosity driven, interest driven learning is fine. But it has an obvious weakness. And the obvious weakness is: This is kind of hard. And then you don't learn it. And surprise, surprise, a lot of the things that are really useful are hard to learn. And so I think sometimes I get into this debate with people where they they sort of see me as being like an opponent of, you know, the kind of "I want learning to be fun and curiosity driven". I'm like, Yeah, that's great. Except when it's not. And how do you deal with it when "Oh, this is actually kind of difficult". Which I mean, we're talking about data analytics. This is clearly a very difficult field. You know, it's, it's one of those, it's kind of like the new rocket science, like, it's one of those things where like, "Oh, these people who, you know, went and got PhDs and learned all this esoteric math are now building, you know, robots that can create images, just from text prompts and stuff". It's a little bit like sorcery. And so I think it's important to admit to ourselves, when we're facing a challenge, you know, even if it's not at that level of like, you know, machine learning, even if it's just, you know, understanding basic statistics and stuff. These are hard subjects. That's right, and they do require effort to learn. And so, the idea here is not to take the approach that we need to, like banish curiosity from learning, but just to be able to admit to ourselves, "okay, well, if I want to get good at this programming language, or I want to get good at this tool, I'm probably going to have to invest some upfront time where it's not going to be automatic, and I'm going to have to invest some effort". It doesn't have to be a real grind, or gruelling, but it's going to be more work than would just maybe happen if I didn't have any goal for it. And so I think that's the right way to think about it. And I think the ultra learning tools that I talked about are very much of this deliberate learning type of like - picking out something that's like, I'd like to be good at that. And let's set up some time and let's figure out what would be an effective strategy for learning and how would I particularly like, how would I organise my materials? How would I organise the time? What is the basic unit of learning that I'm repeating over and over and over again, to get good at this? I think if you can identify that you can make a lot of progress. And you may not use that for every single thing that you want to learn. But I think that that's a tool you definitely should have in your toolkit. Because if you only do things that that interests you, you'd spend all your day on Tiktok videos, you don't actually dig deep and learn something that's hard but important.
Jonas Christensen 13:28
For me, there's sort of two takeaways. One is you talk about taking, I think it's 10% of the time you're going to spend on the full learning journey. Have something to actually plan how you're going to learn it, which is an upfront setting you up for success. It's the adage of "if you fail to plan you plan to fail, right?". Yeah, that's the way without a plan, you're gonna go off in all sorts of directions and the Tiktok videos and all that will come in. And the other thing is, just that we talk about learning being fun, but it actually has to be uncomfortable at times for your brain to really, or your your neural pathways - whether it's a sport or whatever you're learning to actually grasp what you're trying to learn. There has to be that moment, those moments of a really, really strenuous exercise to get there. Is that fair to say?
Scott Young 14:21
Well, I think the way I like to describe it is that the methods that tend to be effective for learning are usually a bit more effortful. That doesn't mean that every single thing that makes learning effortful is more effective. So I don't want to like draw the opposite conclusion, right. Like that would be a fallacy. There's definitely lots of things you can do that make learning both unpleasant and also less effective. Not having really clear instructions on how to do things involves a lot of guesswork. That's bad for both learning effectiveness and for your, you know, general enjoyment of it. But there are things like one of the things I talk about in the book is retrieval practice, which is this idea that, you know, once you've covered something once you get more benefit from trying to retrieve it mentally than just reading it again. So this is particularly for a subject where you just have like texts that you have to read and you're just sort of learning it from that. You get more benefit from, "okay, what was in that book?" and try to write it down, than just "I'm gonna look over my notes another time". So this is relevant, I think in problem solving context is if you know, if you're writing code and doing this kind of thing that you need to see the pattern first, and like, how do you do this? So that's why books and instructions and classes are helpful. But then you actually have to use it. You have to actually try to apply it. And that's difficult, right? You're like, "wait a minute, okay, how did I do this again?". And so I think this is something that getting ourselves out of that kind of passive, just sort of "okay, I'm just watching videos, where someone's talking about this" to actually try to do it ourselves is very important. And so, I stress that in the book. Now, I mean, that can also be fun. Again I don't want to just strictly point out that like, "okay, everything negative". That's not the way I think about learning - is that, you know, it just has to be painful. But rather, you have to recognise, you know, like, if you were thinking about in terms of exercise, it's going to be maybe a little stimulating when it's actually beneficial. And so I think there's probably an analogy to be made there. I think one thing I want to point out, and this is where I think is really important, when we're talking about this 10% rule, a really important component of that research is not even so much having a plan like "I will do this Monday, I'll do this Tuesday" that kind of plan, but reducing the scope of what you're learning. Because I think the problem most of us have is we have really broad vague goals. Like I want to be good at Spanish or I want to be a good programmer. I've heard people say things. So one individual even emailed me saying that they wanted to be competent as a goal. And I mean, this is not a goal. This is something that is way too vague, to be actionable. And to actually be successful at it, you'd have to master lots and lots and lots of different things. And so one of the things that I really tried to advocate in his book is getting really clear on what it is exactly that you're trying to get good at. And the more specific you can be about answering that question, the more likely you are to be successful. So, a lot of what I've tried to do in my own projects is doing that research to figure out what kind of scope I want to work on. So for instance, when I was spending a month working on you know, drawing skills, I focused on not just drawing portraits, but drawing pencil portraits from a photograph, and I was focusing on doing portraits that maybe took a couple hours, so I wasn't doing like quick sketches or caricatures. You could see how like that narrows down what it is you're trying to get good at considerably. And that makes the practice much more effective. Whereas if your goal was just "K, I'm gonna spend a month trying to get better at drawing". That's super unfocused, I mean, unless if you're a super beginner, maybe there's just some like really general stuff that's going to be helpful for all drawing classes. But if that's not the case, then you're going to be wasting a lot of energy learning tonnes of different skills. And so I think one of the things that you can really benefit from, is if you do your research to figure out "Ah, this is exactly what I need to work on right now". Υou make a lot more progress. So whether that's, you know, learning a particular tool, whether that's understanding a particular theory, anything you can do to constrain that scope will make you more effective, because you just eliminate a lot of the things that you don't need to learn right now, that they're not part of the performance goal that you're trying to reach.
Jonas Christensen 18:18
Yeah and this is something that actually doesn't just apply to your individual learning, but you see it all over the place. So, a lot of the listeners on this show would be used to trying to define scopes for things in their workplace, right? So in an organisation, you might want to instal new IT systems. What's the scope of what those systems need to? Do you plan all that before you actually go implement the system. In data science we define with a razor sharp, or we should at least not always do we do it. But we should define very sharply, what is the problem we're trying to solve. Before we start scientifically, solving that problem with data and building models and all this stuff. It's very similar, really, you planning up front and defining what you need to do?
Scott Young 19:01
Well, I mean, given that we're talking about data science this is the perfect example. Like, if you were to build a model that has like some visual recognition capabilities, and you want it to be able to recognise any image, you're gonna leave no data to train that algorithm, right? Whereas if you are trying to be able to recognise digits, that's like one of those things that they code up as like, kind of a "Hello World" type exercise for machine learning. It's much easier, right? And so you know, I'm not going to draw a direct one to one analogy between human and machine learning. But there is a parallel there. That the broader the competency you want, the more vaguely that's defined. And the more situations where it could possibly come into. Just the amount of practice you need and the amount of things you have to learn, they multiply almost combinatorially. And so it is fine totally to have these sort of long term ambitions to master things but we're always working on something specific and so I think the more you can kind of scope down "okay, this is my next step. Ιs that I want to work on this particular skill and get good on that because I think it's going to be pivotal for you know me to make this move in my career or to be able to improve this project that I'm working on or something like that." I mean it, it makes it much more likely that you're going to be successful and much more likely you're going to see some short term results too.
Jonas Christensen 20:16
Yep, absolutely agree. And I thought that was a great example. Now, Scott, let's get into a little bit about how we learn what are some different ways that we learn and retain information? And how can these be used to structure our learning?
Scott Young 20:31
Yeah, so I mean, the getting into the question of how we learn is like such a rabbit hole. And I've read like, I don't know how many books since you can get into these, like, really, really deep theories of people speculating about what it is that we learn. But I would say that there's a few different kinds of key ideas that I use a little bit informally. One is the idea of thinking of knowledge in terms of facts, concepts, and skills, or procedures. And so this sort of rough distinction is you can think of facts as being things that you can memorise. They're just true or false. They're things that a vocabulary word in another language. Something that's relatively simple. And you can understand sort of independently. You can think about concepts which are similar to facts, and that they are knowledge that you can state explicitly, but usually they involve more interrelation. So if you want to understand you know, how a compiler works, or something like this, it's more than just having a few facts about the compiler. You have some sort of mental model of what the compiler is doing. And then finally, there's procedures and procedures are, you know, the actual skills of transforming things, solving problems, making particular outputs. And so this is sort of my kind of rough breakdown of things that we might want to learn, is to break it into "well, what things would I need to have memorised? What things would I need to deeply understand? And what things would I need to have sort of fluent like, I'd be able to match them and do them well?". And most complicated skills have a bit of all three. If you're learning a language, you're going to have tons and tons of facts, there's all the vocabulary you have to learn. There's going to be some concepts, especially surrounding grammar often involves learning rules, and they're little bit more complicated. And then finally, there's tons of procedures, there's pronunciation, there's things that you have to just do over and over again, to get fluent. And these sort of suggest their own kind of learning mechanisms. So facts, you can get better through using flashcards, mnemonics, you can use repetition and spacing and retrieval to improve your retrieval of facts. Concepts, I tend to advocate for things like the Feynman Technique, which we can talk about. Which is just a method for trying to debug your understanding, that's where you have a sheet of paper, you write the concept you're trying to learn, and you try to explain it to yourself as if you were explaining it to someone else. And the idea here is that you get to debug your own understanding and figure out what you understand what you don't understand, you get to drill in on specific ideas. And then procedures usually want to practice it, that's the idea of practice makes perfect - is that if there's some sort of skilled component of what you're doing where, you know, you just need to apply that problem over and over again, you recognise "Ah, in this situation, I need to do this". And that's the benefit of just sort of repeated use. So doing the thing over and over again. And so I think all those three components are very important for skills. And if you can sort of see how what you're trying to learn breaks into those components, then you can start focusing on "Okay, which method might I want to use to deal with this particular bottleneck and learning?"
Jonas Christensen 23:20
So do tell us a bit about the Feynman technique, because you do talk about RICHARD FEYNMAN and all his work throughout your book as well. It's quite an interesting story. And it's sort of personifies the whole exercise a bit as well.
Scott Young 23:33
Richard Feynman, as most people I hopefully know, was a Nobel Prize winning physicist. He's a real interesting character. I like his autobiographies. Perhaps one of my favourite books "Surely, you're joking, Mr. Feynman". And it just recounts all these like kind of colourful stories of him like learning the bongos and, you know, learning Portuguese and working on the Manhattan Project and picking locks and things like this. And what you see is not only a brilliant person, but someone had who had a unique attitude towards learning things. And it was one that was very much driven by trying to get a deep understanding of things. Like he very much wanted to have a mental picture of whatever he was trying to learn, and not just try to memorise things, or regurgitate a kind of, sort of, this is what other people have told me about this. And so I tried to embody that spirit a little bit in kind of coming up with the Fineman technique as a method. And the idea is that, well, "What are you trying to do when you understand something?" and I think one of the major things you want to be able to do when you understand something is be able to explain it, to be able to - if you had to teach a concept to someone else, that would be a good check on your understanding. And so you can do this yourself. So when you are faced with something you don't quite understand. You just set yourself the task of "Okay, I'm going to write about it as if I was teaching someone" and so you just start with things you know. Start with "Okay, well, this is you know, sort of the introduction. This is the concept. I'm going to talk about this" and make notes of where you get stuck. And I think the idea here is that very often we fail to understand something because we're missing specific inferences. We're missing specific, like, "well, I don't really know how this relates to this, or I don't really know what this thing relates to this other thing". And so the more you can drill down and find those little points that you're missing, then it's a lot easier to look them up. You can ask them on StackOverflow, you can talk to a colleague and be like, "hey, you know, why do you do this this way? Or what does this thing do?" And that allows you to ask very pointed questions to get at the answers.
Jonas Christensen 25:33
So Scott, you also talk about the concepts of intensive learning and extensive learning? Could you tell us about what they are and why we need them?
Scott Young 25:44
Yeah, so this sort of relates to what I was talking about earlier. The idea of intensive learning is this kind of deliberate focused effort on learning something that you've decided, "Οkay, I want to be good at this skill, or I want to be knowledgeable about this subject". And it's going to involve doing some hard practice or reading some hard books, and things that are not going to just like happen automatically on your Sunday free time without you putting any intention into it. And then extensive learning is just kind of all the little habits that you have in your life that bring you across information. Allow you to become more knowledgeable things that don't require a lot of deliberate effort or energy, but are kind of, you know, just the fact that like, Okay, I have an audible subscription. And when I walk to work, maybe I listen to an audio book. And then over the course of a year, maybe I've listened to like a dozen books. And that's expanded my frontiers in some ways, but I wasn't very deliberate about it, it was just sort of going with whatever interested me and whatever I was, you know, kind of drawn to in the moment. Αnd I think both have a place. I think you need to have both, especially because not every single thing you're going to be able to do is going to be something you can just do automatically. Υou're going to have to put some effort into it. But at the same time, if you're only ever learning things, through intensive projects, you're missing out on some other opportunities, because maybe you're only going to do intensive projects every once in a while. Υou're not necessarily continuously doing this at all times. And so I think understanding these two different modes, these two different ways of thinking about learning, I think it's important, especially because the intensive learning stuff is tends to be the stuff that we kind of neglect, you know, maybe we're a little bit "I'm not quite sure how I want to approach this, I don't even sure how I want to do it". And so I think if you can be strategic and thinking about that, and you can go pretty far.
Jonas Christensen 27:29
Yeah, so you're really talking a lot about how you apply a strategy to your learning. So it doesn't just sort of haphazardly appear. You don't just rely on the passing of time and you passively listening to something for it to stick in your mind. You have to really mix both avenues. And yeah, I can see that in my personal life, too. I can get a lot out of YouTube videos and other things that sort of that's probably the extensive learning where it's a mix of learning and enjoyment. And then this is some topics that you cannot learn from watching someone else explain the broad concept in a YouTube video or or or whatever it might be?
Scott Young 28:07
Yeah, well, I think I think the latter, like the intensive learning is goal directed, I think that's sort of a hallmark of it. It is that you are trying to learn something and you're kind of putting in effort energy to acquire a skill or a certain set of knowledge. And so I think that kind of like - there's obviously a little bit of a continuum, maybe you you decide, "okay, I'm going to read this hard book. And I'm going to sort of work on it 15 minutes a day, over a long period of time". But it's something that, you know, I'm reading it for the goal of understanding this difficult book, as opposed to just for fun. And so that would sort of be more in the middle. But I think the idea here is just to sort of recognise that there's this continuum and recognise that there are some goals where, you know, there's going to be a little bit of a barrier that you have to kind of climb over to get to using. You know, I like to use the example language learning, because that's one of the things that that I'm very interested in. And I really do see a sharp difference between these different methods is that one of the difficulties is that when you are not conversational in a language, you don't actually have easy conversations in it, it's very difficult to start having conversations. And yet at the same time, it's almost impossible to become fluent in a language without having those conversations. That sort of phase you have to pass through. And so that represents I think, a kind of a unique barrier, a unique bottleneck that it's very difficult to get around it. I'm somewhat critical of like people who just spend eight months on Duolingo. Because, you know, yeah, you can learn some words and do some things like this. I don't say it's totally, totally useless. But clearly, it's not the same skill as actually speaking, conversation. And so if you don't actually practice that, it's unlikely that you're going to get really good at it. And so I think in the beginning, when you know conversations are not automatic, they're not effortless, having that kind of deliberate goal directed focus to "Okay, I'm going to sit down with a tutor and actually try to speak for a while". It's pretty essential if you're going to make progress. I think that's true. You know, anyone who's taught themselvves anything in data analytics, computer science programming knows this. You know, the things where you've had to put some work to progress on it. And so I think understanding that distinction, and some of the strategies that you can use to learn more effectively are so essential.
Jonas Christensen 30:14
So perhaps, could you talk us through an example of how you do use these concepts in your language learning journey, because that's quite an interesting one. I'm interested in how you structure your plan for learning and how you then go about the actual exercises to learn the many languages that you now speak.
Scott Young 30:30
Yeah, so I've gone through different language learning processes. So I've had situations where I'm learning a language in a place where it's being used frequently. And I've also had situations where I don't have access to that environment. And so I think that some of the strategies that I use are adapted to that kind of situation. So the project that I did with my friend Vat, when we were travelling, we use this no English rule where, when we landed in the country, we weren't going to speak in English to each other to people we met. That's obviously a very intensive rule. But I think it's also something that can be misunderstood, I think, the main purpose of this type of activity, doing it really early, which people kind of, well "But I don't speak very well yet, maybe I should wait until I can speak a little bit better". The motivation for doing that is that whenever you're in a change of environment, you're in a bit of a change of the social routines, the sort of your daily life that surrounds you, that's just being established. And so the kind of crux of this method is that well, when you land in like another country, and you're going to learn another language, if you commit to it early on, you establish an immersive environment one way. So when you speak to shopkeepers, you're speaking in Spanish. When you're at home, you're speaking in Spanish. When you're meeting friends, you're speaking in Spanish. And this creates an environment where speaking a lot of Spanish, because you're speaking a lot of Spanish. And it's because it's integrated in with your daily life, it's very easy to spend eight, nine hours a day, using Spanish in some format. Whereas if you were at home, and I just said study for nine hours a day straight Spanish from a book, that would be a lot harder, it would require a lot more willpower. And so this is a sort of a subtle thing. But part of what I stress in this kind of approach of language learning is kind of creating those norms that sort of force you to use the actual skill that you're trying to use. So you can do this in a more minimal sense, if you're learning away from an immersive environment. Even if you just like go to a meet up, for instance, and you just say "Okay, while I'm at this meetup, I'm only going to speak in Spanish or Mandarin Chinese or something like that, even if I'm not very good". Now, admittedly, if it's constrained to a couple hours, it's not going to be the same as if it's 24/7 for weeks and weeks and weeks. But it means that for that three hours, maybe I'm speaking Spanish the whole time, as opposed to if I went there, and I'm mostly speaking to people about how I want to learn Spanish or this kind of thing, then maybe I'm only actually speaking for like 20 minutes, but I felt like I was spending three hours. So this is where I think where the sufficiency criterion comes in. Now, obviously, this can be difficult in the beginning. So you need to supplement this with learning vocabulary, and sort of you can do some flashcards in the beginning. I really recommend Pimsleur in the beginning to get some of that basic phrases, fluency hardwired, so that when you say those basic phrases, they come out automatically. I think doing the kind of stuff you do in a classroom grammar practice, this kind of stuff can also be quite helpful because it can help make sense of things. But just this idea of like making a simple rule switch that switches from "Okay, now I'm sitting in a classroom and spending five minutes of the actual classroom hour actually speaking Spanish" to spending 50 minutes engaged in some sort of communicative activity, it makes a huge difference, right? Because the amount of time being spent is so big. This is a rule that applies to lots of things. If you, for instance, start using a programming language on your job, then maybe you're now spending 30 hours a week applying it, whereas maybe you could only spend three hours per week of your spare time learning it on your own. So even if maybe those 30 hours a week are not quite as efficient as if you were like taking a class and being taught every single pattern explicitly. And this kind of thing, just it can often make the difference because the amount of practice you're getting automatically just goes way up.
Jonas Christensen 34:21
Yeah, it's interesting. I'm reflecting on my own language learning journeys, which have not been nearly as structured and planned and so I learned most of this stuff at school. So that was the plan for me with a certain structure and my native tongue is Danish, which I of course learned before I went to school. Then we learned English at school and I also learned German and English I obviously speak quite well. I've also lived now in Australia for many years, so that's part of it. But many children in Denmark will know some English words before they even start the class because all the TV is this wonderful junk that we get sent from America. And I used to watch all the sitcoms and then as a kid and cartoons and other things, and you get bombarded with this stuff. So there's a huge extensive learning exercise there. I'd say it's not intended, but you get words all the time and little humans have brains for this stuff, right? Whereas German, it has a much stricter grammar structure. And it was just grammar practice for most of the six years that I studied German in school in high school. And do I speak German? Well, I can barely string together a sentence. I don't use it very often. But I really struggled. I never got to the same level, it needed a completely different effort for me.
Scott Young 35:38
I think one thing I want to say about that, because I think what you were talking about, about like the passive exposure to television in this kind of - That can be good, too. I think input practice is also good. I think sometimes there's a debate in language learning communities over like how much you should spend having conversations versus like listening. And to me, I always think that that's kind of- a little bit of a non sequitur. I think, the listening practice you do certainly helps with listening. And listening is a very important part learning a language, especially to higher levels of fluency. I mean, I can get by transactionally, at a fairly low level of ability in a language just because I use basic words. And the speaker, recognising that I'm using basic words, also uses basic words, and we thus transact, and we're able to communicate about simple things. But obviously, native speakers use a huge array of vocabulary. And there's lots of implicit knowledge in this kind of seven, that's probably a best acquired through reading and watching television and kind of engaging in broad cultural activities. But I think the idea here is that, like, again, going to the specificity idea, if your goal was okay "I have, you know, maybe a month or two to devote to something and what I'd like to be able to do is, you know, travel around Spain effortlessly, or I'd like to be able to read white papers that are written in English, and my English isn't that strong, but I'd like to be able to do this other thing". If you can define what that other thing is, quite specifically, then you can narrow down your practice. So I think the sort of mistake in my mind is to view something like language learning as this homogenous activity that like, Okay, well, we're all trying to do the exact same thing. And I think that's probably not true that there's lots and lots and lots of different sort of micro abilities. Within learning a language. Basically, you could think of like your proficiency with every single word and every single grammar pattern and every single pronunciation inflection as its own sort of little separate ability that kind of adds up in various ways. And I think if you have that kind of picture, then you can see that Yeah, well, people, even if you were to say that they were the same proficiency, by some standardised test, they might have very different subsets of the language that they've mastered different vocabulary, different grammar, this kind of thing. Maybe some of the basics is going to be overlapping in almost everyone. But certainly, you know, even in English, my native language, there's tons of words, I know that other people don't know. And there's tons of English words that I don't know, because they're outside of my kind of broad range of like reading or cultural background. And so I think this idea of specificity is very important, because if you see the actual skills as being quite precise, then it very much matters which ones you acquire, because they don't necessarily - spending a lot of time watching television does not necessarily make you a conversational speaker, and vice versa.
Jonas Christensen 38:17
No, and the subtlety in my comment, there is thing that the TV stuff helps to sort of prep you but also what happened in our German classes, in my opinion, at least, the German grammar structure is so much harder than English one that we had to spend so much more time reciting the grammar rules that we didn't spend so much time actually speaking it, right. Where it's almost like a mathematical equation where you're trying to combine different grammar rules, rather just having a go at it, right. So we didn't get the immersion and never, never got to that sort of inflection point of okay, from now on, we can actually start stringing together sentences, and then you really start picking up the pace. And that kind of is where my head was going with that.
Scott Young 39:01
Yeah, my personal opinion too, is that linguists put too much emphasis on grammar. Grammar is very important in the study of like theoretical linguistics, because it's sort of - it is the thing to be explained that no one spends that much time on, like figuring out how people acquire vocabulary, because it seemed to be relatively simple. But, you know, Chomsky, and all these people who posit universal grammar, that's the thing they're working on is like how do we learn the rules of how the language works, not the specific like lexical units, but my personal opinion is that this is a little bit overrated. I think that we are highly memory dependent and using complicated skills that we you know, memorise little chunks of language and just spit it out, memorised without even analysing it. And it is true that we do acquire rules for using language. I don't want to say that there's no point to grammar, no point to understanding these rules. But there can sometimes be a sense in which that is really really drilled down is like that's what the language is. I can't tell you how many like books I've bought on like learning a language that the exclusive organisation of the book is grammar. I know someone who they took a Spanish course and they just did it week by week going through all the tenses of Spanish verbs. Like as if that was the proper way of organising Spanish is that here's now the simple past and here's like that was the way of organising it as opposed to well, yeah, but I mean, probably you need like three of those for 98% of things, you don't really need like the future imperfect subjunctive for almost anything. And if you were focusing on functional fluency, like to be able to deal with in real contexts, tons of the things you're going to need know are going to be things that you memorise. They're going to be knowing that you use a certain word in this context, for instance, that there's no rule behind it. It's just something that you learn through experience. And so I think that's, to me, one of the deficiencies in some ways of like, modern kind of language education, is that it fetishizes this sort of grammatical proficiency of like, "I can make grammatically correct sentences irrespective of any other goal". That's a little bit of a pet peeve of mine. Not everyone agrees. But that's how I think of it.
Jonas Christensen 41:09
Now, it is fascinating. I think there's something to that I often meet other English or German speakers where I can explain to them some rules in their, in their language and grammar rules that they have no idea exist, but they obviously speak the language.
Scott Young 41:24
Oh, yeah, well, I mean, it's obviously the case that native speakers do not understand their own grammar. And so I do think there is a case to be made that if you are a non native speaker, there is like some deliberate effort required. I mean, all the languages I've learned, I've never acquired grammatical rules spontaneously. Maybe some usage of words, you kind of learn "Okay, I'll do it this way". But usually, it requires explanation where you're sort of like "Okay, this is how you have to do it". But at the same time, I think, again, like you can get this sort of, like, think of a nutritional balance. It's like, if nutritionists were just really obsessed with protein, right? You can be like, well, actually, you know, to function. So I like that I think the kind of appropriate, like language learning diet, if it were would probably be about like 90% practice and about, like 10% study. I think that definitely the study's required. If you look at research on second language acquisition, clearly people who don't have any deliberate practice of like you said, doing the grammar doing certain things, it is harder to acquire those things automatically, for sure. But again, I can learn, you know, basic conjugation patterns in Spanish in about half an hour maybe. And then I actually have to spend probably about like, 100 hours, so that it's just like totally automatic for a large range of like words in different contexts that I would like to use. And so I think that's the idea is that the school knowledge for language learning is important, but it's a dosage thing. Most people who learn language in school, they get a lot of the foreign practice, and they have zero conversation situations where they use it. They have zero television they're watching. Zero books they want to read, and naturally, they have these memorised patterns in their head that they've never applied to any situations. And so it leads to this kind of imbalance. And I think the same thing could be said of programming or, or math concepts or things like this as well, that the ratios may not be exactly the same. But you need to have a dosage of like, kind of understanding the rule and understanding you know, how to correctly use something. And then there's just a lot of doing it, and a lot of making it automatic that way.
Jonas Christensen 43:28
Yeah, very interesting. Hi, there, dear listener, I just want to quickly let you know that I have recently published a book with six other authors, called "Demystifying AI for the enterprise, a playbook for digital transformation". If you'd like to learn more about the book, then head over to www.leadersofanalytics.com/ai. Now back to the show.
So Scott, a few years back, there was this 10,000 hour rule that was made very famous by Malcolm Gladwell. He states that it takes 10,000 hours of intensive practice to master something. Now there's another part of the community that say, "no, no, no, you can actually become top class". So probably top 5% at any discipline within about 100 hours of deliberate practice. So we're at two extremes here, I'd say. In your experience, how long does it actually take to master something? And how might we reduce the time that it takes to get great at something?
Scott Young 44:36
Well, first of all, I would say the questions totally nonsense. I've always disliked the 10,000 hour rule. In part because it's like performance is totally relative, right? It's easy to become the world's expert at something that no one else is practising. I'll make a game, it's called schmuck Cole or something like that. And I make the rules. And after five minutes, I'm better at it than anyone else on the planet, right? Whereas chess like you could easily spend 30,000 - 40,000 hours and only be a mediocre player just because of how much effort has been invested in. And so I think these questions of 10,000 hour rule, just, they're not answerable questions just because the definition of what it means to be world class is competitive. And so it's inherently structured on well, how much effort are other people investing, you know. I think any competitive field where people devote their lives to it, and the people who devote their lives to it are not using a terrible strategy and they are - which is usually the case, I should say - they're not using a terrible strategy, and they actually care about results and etc, etc. I think the right way to look at it is that to also be similarly world class, you should also have to invest a similar amount of effort and time investment. Now, that being said, a lot of what I try to do in the projects I'm showing is to show how specific kinds of skills or specific kinds of knowledge can be approached in a bit of a different way. So I'm not trying to make any strong claims about being world class. I don't think I'm world class and anything, even things that I have spent probably 10,000 hours doing, but I do think that I've gotten to a, you know, not bad level, at a lot of skills through a kind of focused practice effort. And I think that I'm not particularly unusual in that regard. There's lots of people that have done it. And so I think what I'm trying to show with my projects is not - I don't think it has anything to say about the question of how much effort it takes to become world class. But just the idea that, well, if you wanted to become good or conversationally fluent in a language, for instance, what will be a good path for doing that? And I think from now, I've studied enough people who have done it to have some good guidelines for it that I think are not commonly known, right. And similarly, if you want to learn the kind of, you know, typical academic content as like a computer science degree, I have some knowledge about that as well. Or if you wanted to get good at drawing, I have some knowledge about that as well. And so I think the idea here is that expertise, and performance is socially defined. In many fields, it doesn't even have an objective basis. I mean, to be an excellent lawyer, there's no objective basis for that. I mean, they're not tracking case performance most of the time. What it means to be an excellent lawyer is that other lawyers think you're excellent, right? Like that's, that's what it means. And I think that's true of a lot of fields. And so even in those cases, I think the kind of deliberate practice Anders Ericsson formulation simply doesn't apply. Because we're not even evaluating those people on an objective benchmark. But that doesn't mean that there's nothing to be said of, well, "if I wanted to understand the law better. And if I wanted to understand how to study law better" that those are meaningless questions. I think they are meaningful questions. It just means that this specific question of what does it take to be the world's best lawyer or something like that, it's just not necessarily answerable in that framework. So I think the right way to think about how you should be getting good at things is "Okay, given my goal, what is the most efficient strategy? What do I know about learning? What do I know about skill acquisition? What do I know about how the task and the domain are structured, in order to become more efficient?" And I'm always trying to seek out answers to those questions. But I think sometimes people like to extend that into Oh, Scott, saying that you can do this in two months or something like that". And like, well, very much depends on what this is, right? You know, language line is another example. Because I get into hot water sometimes where people like myself tend to get into hot water sometimes, because from the outside perspective, you know, someone who's chit chatting in Mandarin for like half an hour. It's like, "Oh, my God, they're fluent, right?" Whereas someone who is a native speaker of Mandarin is probably very sensitive to widely different ranges of ability that fall under "can have a half hour conversation in Mandarin". And people who have spent, you know, years and years studying it are like, well, "They're not very good. Like I've spent years studying it. They're just a beginner". And so I think that's one of the things that you can see is that as you get further into a skill, you notice finer and finer distinctions. You notice gaps that are invisible to novices. And so how long does it take to master a skill? I mean, I think there's lots of skills where the answer is actually forever, like you never really mastered it. You always just have more to go and you always have further to go. I really like a quote from Ernest Hemingway talking about writing where he says that "We are all apprentices to a craft of which no one masters". I think that's the quote, I might be paraphrasing it slightly. But the idea is true. You know, Hemingway is one of the great American authors. And you know, he considered himself to be still learning the craft. And so I think that's the right way to approach it. It's that we're all learning and how far you get and how far you get in particular, in comparison to other people depends on you know, what your goals are, and, and how you're being compared.
Jonas Christensen 49:44
Yeah, nice. So it's somewhere between 10,000 and 100 hours.
SCOTT YOUNG 49:52
Yes, it's actually 800 hours. Yeah.
Jonas Christensen 49:54
Okay, great. There we go. I can do that. I'm not sure about 10,000. But 800 I can do.
SCOTT YOUNG 50:00
800.Yeah, that's the answer,
Jonas Christensen 50:03
Now, Scott that many of the listeners on this show are interested in analytics, data science, which is considered sort of a mess, heavy, probably hard discipline, if you'd call it that. On this show, I also talk about the need for analytics leaders to develop the leadership communication skills, which is probably more of a soft skill. How would you tackle learning these disciplines? And what are some similarities in your approach? And what are some of the things that are different? And why?
SCOTT YOUNG 50:33
Yeah, I mean, I think one of the major differences between soft skills and hard skills is that a lot of the knowledge, I guess you could say, of a soft skill is just purely tacit. It's something that you learn how to interact appropriately in social situations, not usually by someone telling you how to act appropriately, but kind of inferring it by being in those social contexts and getting feedback. Whereas obviously, in mathematics, someone can explicitly teach you how to do it, and you just do it the way that they tell you to do it. And so there does seem to be a difference in these kinds of skills. There's educational theorists David Geary, who argues in favour of the idea that there are like evolutionarily primary and evolutionary secondary, or biologically primary and biologically secondary skills. And some skills like social skills are ones we've evolved to acquire. That we just sort of pick out the rules from the environment from engaging in it. Whereas other things like math, we are not evolved to require and require a lot of deliberate effort and studying kind of a more painstaking approach to learning it. Now, I don't go as far as Gary does, and sort of arguing that the primary skills are sort of essentially unteachable, or unimprovable or something like that. I think that goes a bit too far. But it does seem clear to me that they do involve different processes of learning. So I think one of the most important things in improving a soft skill is first of all, back to our common point, one of the most important points is that with soft skills as with hard skills, defining the scope is super important. So improving leadership - impossible, Like there's no way of doing that. But "I want to effectively manage a team through a three month project" is like that's now a little bit more tractable, right. And "I want to improve my listening skills in like sort of one on one conversations", again, more tractable. "I want to be funnier, or I want to be able to tell sort of better stories", these are all skills that you can work on, you can kind of break them down to focus on sort of like the explicit components of it like "Okay, this is how people tell a good story. I need to work on this". And I think the other thing that's important is because a lot of this knowledge, I think is acquired implicitly of these kinds of skills, I think it requires engagement in sort of real situations. It's very difficult to practice social skills outside of social environments. And I think it requires better feedback. So I think that's one of the major elements that you can try to cultivate if you're working on these types of things is how can you create either objective indicators of feedback? So things like what is the actual performance of the teams that I'm leading, or, you know, measures of group cohesion and these kinds of things that are not someone else's opinions, but even just bystanders can get opinions for specific social interactions. You can even get situations where like, you know, you have documented evidence, and then you review it after. One of the people that I cover in the book "TRUST IN MONTEBELLO" got really good at public speaking. And one of the main strategies used was to record all his speeches that he did and then like watch them after and note what he did write and read he did wrong. That's something that most people don't do. You do a speech and then you forget about it. And you never get a chance to be "Oh, yeah, actually, I thought that was funny. But it's not that funny, or I'm speaking too quickly, or I'm doing this". And so if you want to get good at it, that's a way that you can kind of invest that deliberate effort. And so I think those two ideas of narrowing the scope, getting feedback are very important for soft skills. But it seems clear to me that they are different in some fundamental way from some like explicitly acquired, let's call it hard skills.
Jonas Christensen 54:00
I think the common denominator for me is that you can break it down into some building blocks that you can then focus on practising like you said. Υou can go okay, how do I manage a project? Well, that goes for three months. What are the components of that that I need to put together? And how can I get good at that? And all of a sudden, you acquire this
SCOTT YOUNG 54:19
Yeah,
Jonas Christensen 54:19
tested skill or what have you. For me, I spent 10 years in the Toastmasters Club, and the first time I walked in there, I was so scared. The last time I went there, I was one of the top speakers there and had been the president of the club few times. I've won lots of competitions. And I'm the same individual with the same ability, but I had the practice then use my muscles in that sense, right? And the other thing about a Toastmasters environment was you go and speak and then you get immediate feedback from someone - when you did this and target it like that. Or maybe you could do this the next time and you retain that information. The scariest thing still is actually recording yourself doing those features. I still sometimes use it and look back and you sort of just for some reason, even though you're doing a good job, perhaps it's kind of a little bit weird, a cringe worthy watching yourself?
SCOTT YOUNG 55:11
Oh, absolutely. I mean, I think when I was saying about the recording yourself, I think like that's something is very good for performances or, you know, even in like meetings or something like that, you could be like, Well, how did I hold this meeting? Were we like on topics? it's not always the same. It's just like, it's just presentation or some performance ability. I think even just looking at your emails, like he had some email exchange with people, and you can kind of go over it and be like, well, you know, I could have made this clear, because this led to a confusion in some way. This is an idea that I think is very interesting. It comes from the military is called like after action reviews. And like, the way that they get pilots to get really good. This is from this other kind of Top Gun programme, is that they would get them to engage in mock combat, and then they would review the footage of it and be like, well, what can we do better? What did we do wrong? And I think that's a good way of getting good at a lot of these sort of nebulous or hard to define skills, because no one really has the sort of rules for how to do it correctly. But we do have some sort of vague sense of like, well, this could be better, or this could be better. And that's sort of a starting point, I think.
Jonas Christensen 56:10
Yeah, absolutely. So that sort of review and retrieval is super handy. Now, Scott, we're sort of coming towards the end here. I've got three questions left, the first one, what resources would you recommend for listeners wanting to know more about how to increase their learning rate?
SCOTT YOUNG 56:27
Yeah, well, I mean, they can definitely check out my book "Ultra learning". I've got a lot of resources in there. If you go to my website www.scotthyoung.com, I've got a couple of these complete guides that I cover a lot of research. I have one on memory, I want to working memory, one on self control, and one on motivation. And so if you go through that, there's like kind of - you can treat those as sort of like hubs to lots of other research you could explore or ideas on all those aspects, which are very important for learning.
Jonas Christensen 56:52
And listeners, I have read Scott's book and it's had a big impact on my life. And I can't say I've applied everything in there but I've played a lot of it. My learning rate has gone up. And I've also forced myself into some of these uncomfortable learning situations I might not have done otherwise, which has been super helpful. Scott also has a newsletter that's really good that I subscribe to and it just keeps me primed and my learning journey. And I never forget about learning that way. I'm stealing your thunder a bit there, Scott, because you will get to talk about those before we wrap up. But the second last question is, I always ask listeners to pay it forward as our guests pay it forward on the show by recommending other guests. So who would you like to see as the next guest of leaders of analytics and why?
Scott Young 57:37
Well, I think you might like Khalid Azad. He runs the website betterexplained.com. And he's been a longtime friend of mine for a number of years. But he focuses on trying to understand math better. And I think math is one of the harder parts to really master to understand deeply. And so I think he makes a good contribution there.
Jonas Christensen 57:58
I have tried to learning maths and stats with my YouTube video strategy, and it doesn't work for them, I can tell you. So that's great. They'll get an email from me very shortly. Thank you, Scott. And lastly, where can people find out more about you and get a hold of your content?
Scott Young 58:18
Yeah, so come to my website, www.scotthyoung.com. I've got literally 1000s of free articles there. There's lots of guides so you don't have to buy anything from me. There's lots of information on how to learn more effectively, links to research, things like that. And then also check out my book "Ultralearning". It's available on Amazon, Audible, wherever you get your books from and I cover a lot more of the science and stories behind you know, people who have accomplished impressive learning feats.
Jonas Christensen 58:45
Great. So listeners, check out the links in the show notes. And, Scott, thank you so much for being on the show today. It's been wonderful to learn more about learning and to also reflect on my own learning journey with you. Thanks for putting all this content out into the world. It is truly a bit of a treasure for all of us to have these resources available and that you've taken the time to experiment on our behalf to figure out what works and what doesn't and we can follow your footsteps there. Thank you so much and all the best for your future learning journey.
Scott Young 59:17
Thank you
