SPEAKERS

Scott Young, Clint Murphy

Clint Murphy  00:10

Good morning, Scott. Welcome back to the show. Where I want to start with you, Scott, is last time you were here, we talked Ultra Learning. And at the time, the show was The Pursuit of Learning. It’s since been rebranded The Growth Guide to focus on more than just learning but to help people get better at different areas of life, which is interesting, because now we’re on the show to talk about your book: Get Better at Anything. So what I’d love is if you could let the audience know why the follow up Ultra Learning Get Better at Anything. What was the drive to jump from the one to the other?

Scott Young  00:45

Yeah, well, thank you for having me back. I mean, learning has been a central sort of topic that I’ve been obsessed with for pretty much my whole career. So even before Ultra Learning, I had written like eBooks about you know, studying had a book called Learn More, Study Less, I had produced courses. So that in some sense, this is just like a continuation of my career talking about learning, trying to unravel the puzzles of how we get better at things. And some of the motivation to write this book as a kind of complement to Ultra Learning was to cover a lot of stories and ideas that were hard to fit into the framework that I had in Ultra Learning. So to remind people who maybe never even heard of my first book Ultra Learning, the kind of central conceit of the book was that there were these people who are doing these ultra learning projects, intense self directed learning projects, I use some of my own projects, as an example learning MIT’s computer science curriculum in a year and learning multiple languages in a year, but just people who are doing really intense projects that were sort of unusual, weird of their own design. And that framing allowed me to explore a lot of the science behind what makes learning work well, and how do you learn well, but there were also things that were missing from them. And so one of the stories that got me on the path of researching this book was a story about Tetris players. Actually, the YouTuber John Green posted this video, why have Tetris players suddenly gotten better at Tetris? And I thought this was fascinating, because his explanation was that basically, people were obsessed with the game since it came out. But they’ve only very recently gotten very good at it, like the the amount that people are better now at the game than they were in the early 90s is astronomical. And the reason his explanation, which I agree with is that it’s so much easier to learn from other players today. So back in the day, if you were learning, you know, maybe your brother’s friend or something like that could, you know, give you a tip, but that was about it. And now you can go on websites, where people like, show you exactly how to hold the controller, which it turns out, you have to hold it in like a weird way. Like, you’ll see people now play with like gloves, because you need to do this sort of special finger tapping, actually, this super weird stuff that like you would not figure out just on your own. But that ability to learn from other people means that good techniques, good strategies undersized, the game, disseminate wildly, you get more innovation. And this turns out to be a general property not just of Tetris, but learning in general, that the ease of learning from other people determines how quickly we can learn ourselves. And so this was an idea that wasn’t about an individual. It wasn’t about you know, there’s certainly some crazy Tetris players, but wasn’t about a Tetris player, it was about here’s a system for learning, an environment of learning. And what it illustrates is a basic principle that needs to go into learning. And so this book was sort of an exploration of that. So I talk about not just, you know, incredible individuals, but about how different systems for learning work on these kinds of fundamental ideas. So I talk about like science fiction writers, and how they use these workshop methods to get good at crafting prose, I talk about like the training of fighter jet pilots, all of these things, have these dynamics where if you look at environment, look what works well, what doesn’t work well, you can see these principles at work. And so this was a chance to explore some different things that I wasn’t able to tackle in the first book.

Clint Murphy  03:43

Love it. And when I think of getting good at something or accomplishing a goal you have, I always break it down into a simple framework know what you want, understand what it takes, do the work and on the understand what it takes. You know, what are the barriers in your way? How are you going to overcome them? Which is the way Ray Dalio looks at it. Stephen Covey has a very similar framework, you have a very similar framework, yours is see, do, feedback.

Scott Young  04:12

Yeah.

Clint Murphy  04:13

Can you take us through that at a at a higher level, and then we’ll dive into little bits and pieces of each one of those?

Scott Young  04:19

Well, so one of the challenges of writing about learning is that this is not a field like physics where we have like Newton’s laws. And everything derives from like a few simple equations. Really, there’s just like, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of books and, you know, probably now millions of papers that have been published on various facets of things. And there’s so many different perspectives and ways of looking at it, that it can be difficult to sort of take a bird’s eye view and be like what are the broad trends as opposed to like some specific finding that an academic has spent their career on like one little, you know, tidbit of the problem. And so after reading, not nearly as many as exists but quite a few of these papers in books, one of the things that struck me is that these three themes have learned learning, these three basic ideas that kind of control our ability to get good at things are essentially the ability to learn from other people, the ability to learn through practice, and from getting feedback. And so we need to have all three of those. And those ingredients need to be in place in order to get good at things, particularly to get quite good at things. But then as well, there’s all these details in getting it right. So you know, see, do, feedback, is in some ways also like an umbrella term for like, okay, when I’m talking about seeing, there’s a whole category of how do we learn from observation? What ways can we make that more efficient? So I talk about a lot of the research that’s been done on some of the constraints in that process or for practice, similarly, you know, yes, you need to do a lot of practice to get good at things. But the right kind of practice matters. And we have lots of research on that, like, which kind of practice is more efficient, what works for certain scenarios, what things you need to keep in mind when you’re practicing if you want to get really good. And the same thing is true for feedback. So in some ways, this was a sort of an organizing technique, because I wanted to try to bring a lot of different practical ideas, a lot of sort of basic principles, under the hood under the same umbrella. So if you were reading through the book, you would have more than just well, there’s just one suggestion, there’s many, many things that you could apply to the things that you’re trying to get good at.

Clint Murphy  06:08

Let’s start with problem as search problem solving as search. And I’ll throw a quote at you and you can allude to what it means. You’ve been on this similar journey yourself as it comes to learning. When you said it was Wiles who said “I knew from that moment, I would never let it go.” What was he talking about? And what lessons can the rest of us learn from the journey that he took.

Scott Young  06:36

So the story is the famous story of Andrew Wiles solving Fermat’s Last Theorem. So this is a mathematical theorem, that was sort of alluded to in the margin notes of Pierre de Fermat’s textbook. He said, you know, I have this elegant proof, but I don’t have space to write it here. And it was a very simple thing. It was just the idea that, you know, most of us have learned Pythagoras Theorem, (a^{2}+b^{2}=c^{2}). Now, if you restrict yourself to just whole numbers, if you so like, you know, three, and four, and five, those weren’t three squares, equals nine, four square equals sixteen, add those together, you get twenty-five. Turns out, it’s also a square five times five, right? And so he said that if you do that with squares, there’s lots of those actually. This was well known since the ancient Greeks. But he made the claim that if you took an exponent, so instead of squares, you did cubes, you could never find any numbers that worked. And it was true, if you did four, or five, or six or anything other than two, you could never make it work. And, you know, this is something that I mean, I don’t want to say it’s trivial, but it’s something that like someone with a reasonable understanding of mathematics could understand, as opposed to most mathematical theorems that you require a PhD to even understand what the question is. But it took over three centuries for people to figure out the answer for someone to actually prove this. Which it was very bedeviling, because he had wrote, oh, I have a proof of this, but we don’t know what it was. So so maybe he had one maybe had a proof that didn’t actually work. And he just thought it was correct. That’s probably that’s my guess, is that he didn’t actually. But Andrew Wiles, the person who eventually proved it in the 1990s. He spent about seven years working on this problem full time. And the reason I mentioned this problem is because there is, you know, a very important theory of problem solving, what are we doing when we solve problems? What are the constraints on that process that was developed by Herbert Simon and Alan Newell, in the 1970s, which still is a sort of, I would say, a foundational theory for understanding problem solving today. And Andrew Wiles, his process really fits nicely into that. And this is this idea that when we’re solving a problem, there is a space of possibilities, a space of things that we can try. And we are trying to maneuver through that space to find a good answer. And for a proof, it has to be a correct answer. But if you’re writing an essay, it’s a space of words that you could write next in there to write an essay that’s persuasive. Or if you’re doing a business, it’s like some product that serves a customer need. So there’s many, many, many things that you could possibly do in your business, and you want to do the right things. And the reason that I wrote this chapter and the reason this first is because not because this concept is necessarily like immediately suggest practical stuff, although it does suggest some things that don’t work, is because you need to have this framework to understand what learning is and what getting good at something is. It’s about finding a way through this problem space, finding good solutions, finding good methods that help you navigate this problem space. And so if you don’t appreciate that difficulty is very difficult, I think to understand a lot of the other advice to understand why it’s important to, let’s say, learn from other people, because again, to use the Tetris example, there’s many, many ways you can hold a controller, only some of them are particularly effective for being really really good at it. And so it’s much more helpful if someone can show you how to do that than to just invented on your own. So this chapter, I think, was an important building. So because it really helped solidify for me, this is the right way to think about how we solve hard problems and what the constraints are in that process.

Clint Murphy  09:58

What I really liked about this chapter and if you could take people through a few examples is Simon and Newell had this concept of strong methods of researching versus weak methods. And there are times where the strong methods can be used, like we have a law or we have different things that we can look to and say, well, this works this way. But other times, we don’t have that. And we’ve just got to brute force our way to answer what are these strong versus weak? And what are a couple of each that people can kind of wrap their minds around, Scott?

Scott Young  10:33

Right, so one of their first observations is that when you study people and problem solving environments, they tend to use what like, especially if these are sort of new situations. They don’t have a lot of practice or training, they don’t know any methods. They tend to use what Herbert and uhmm Simon call “weak methods”, and they call them weak methods, because they don’t actually guarantee that you’re gonna get the right answer. They’re just helpful. So another way of calling them is heuristics. Although ,sometimes there’s slightly, there’s lots of different terms that are floating around for these things. But the idea of these weak methods is that we tend to use these as a default, so we don’t actually brute force search things. like, you know, I use the example of a Rubik’s Cube, it has some, you know, something like 72 quintillion possible combinations. Nobody, even someone who has no idea about how to solve a Rubik’s Cube ever tries to solve it by just iterating. Through those combinations, it would never work. No one even ever tries that.

Clint Murphy  11:23

30 years ago, before we all knew the algorithms, that’s how kids did do it. Well, they wouldn’t go through each combination, would just they would just screw around with the cube, right? Because no one had, you know, there was no algorithm on Wikipedia, there weren’t YouTube videos. Now the kids are all racing each other to solve it in 12 seconds.

Scott Young  11:43

Well, exactly. So this is a good point that, you know, if you have the right method, I think mathematicians prove that you can solve any Rubik’s Cube in 20 moves. So 72 million to 20 is like a pretty big difference in terms of, you know, possibilities. But the idea here of weak methods is that we have some strategies that we use to solve unfamiliar problems, or even familiar problems. But the part of the problem that we’re dealing with, we, you know, haven’t solved before, we don’t have any method for solving it. And these are things that tend to be fairly universal. So these are not things that I would I’m not like teaching them to you in the book you already do them. I’m just describing them. So one of those things is means-ends analysis, which is the idea that you like, pick some goal that you have, and then you figure out well, what will be a way of reaching that goal. And if you can’t do that thing, then you make that a new goal. And then you do it. So like the example that it’s like, a little bit comical, but you know, someone saying I need to take my son to the nursery is like, okay, what’s the problem one of distance? Well, how do I solve this as well, I can drive him with my car, but the car is broken. So how do I do that? Well, the problem is that, you know, I need to get the engine fixed. And so how do I do that? Well, I will call a mechanic. And so it’s just this sort of iterating over things. And this tends to be a fairly universal process, this sub goal kind of method that, you know, when they study people solving math problems, this is what they do, you know, you’re okay, while I’m trying to solve for this quantity. So what do I need to get that? Well, I’d need to maybe use this equation, but I’m missing this thing. So people kind of work backwards in this way to solving it. And this is a fairly universal feature of learning that when we encounter new problems that are general problem solving, we tend to reason backwards, we start with the goal, and then we work backwards to figure out what we’re supposed to do. Whereas if you’ve already solved something before, or you have strong methods that you sort of like well learned procedures for dealing with it, you tend to work forward. So you study physics experts, they don’t solve a problem by being like, well, I want that I want to solve for x. How do I get x? Well, there’s this equation that has x. And then they don’t do that. They’re just sort of like, oh, well, you want to start, here, here here, like they start from the beginning and move forward. So that’s another observation from this is that means that analysis is what you do when you don’t know how to solve some problem when you have to kind of reason this way. That’s one of them. There’s a bunch of other ones they’re talking about hill climbing, planning is another method where you like, take the complexity of the actual task you’re doing and simplify it to something that you can solve more easily, and then try to generalize that solution. So if you’re writing an essay, you know, writing an outline is like a simplified version of the essay. So if you can solve that problem, it will give you some strategy for helping you solve the bigger problem. These are all things that work some of the time and they help you some of the time, but they are not bulletproof. And so the idea here is that people like Wiles, who saw Fermat’s Last Theorem, they don’t do it because they’re good at the weak method is not because they have some really good general problem solving ability. They do it because he has so much knowledge of mathematics, that he has these strong methods. These abilities to kind of cut through huge amounts of the problem space, you just go like, you know, the people doing the Rubik’s Cube in 20 moves. He knows what the 20 moves solution is. He doesn’t have to do the 72 quintillion thing or the sort of, you know, only marginally more effective trial and error hill climbing thing that you know, people often actually try to do when they solve Rubik’s Cube. So this is, I think, an important insight that the way that we solve problems is that we build knowledge we build methods, we build sort of specific strategies for solving this problem solving space and a lot of those that we acquire come from other people. They’re not ones that we actually invent ourselves.

Clint Murphy  15:03

And when you think about Wiles, what comes to mind as you were using that example, with his ability to cut through is, is having that deep, intimate knowledge of specific areas. And it makes me think, Scott, of Charlie Munger, and how he would say, you know, you need this mental latticework of some of the biggest ideas across multiple fields so that when you’re faced with a problem, you’re not the man with the hammer, and every problem is a nail. And the solution is just hitting it. Does that tie in now to this area of problem solving, where we want to expand our mental capacity across certain domains to allow us to more easily cut through when we’re looking at these problem sets?

Scott Young  15:44

Well, I think about Richard Fineman, and in a later chapter, I talk about a quote from him, where he talks about how pretty much like there are many different ways of mathematically representing the same physics. So you know, in quantum mechanics, turns out, you can do them with differential equations. And you can also do some of the same things with matrices. So there’s like, those are two completely different branches of mathematics. If you haven’t studied this before, they’re totally different in how you do the computations. But it turns out for certain kinds of phenomena, they’re like, mathematically equivalent, you get the same kind of answers from them. And so what his argument was, is that even though, you know, we’re talking about the same underlying thing, having different ways to mentally represent the problem is super, super useful, because sometimes something a problem that is like almost intractable in one representation is really easy. And another. And so this idea of not just having one model of the world, or not just having one idea, or one way of thinking about things, but many different ways of thinking about things. And many different sort of, well, you could do this, you could do this, you could do this. It’s very important for especially for someone like Wiles, where you’re trying to solve a problem where most ways of solving it aren’t going to work. Like most techniques, most ideas, most methods that you would try will not get you to the answer. And so if you don’t have a real wide variety of tools that potentially apply to this problem, you’re just almost overwhelmingly likely to get stuck. And so this, I think, is an important insight in lots of fields. Because, you know, the person who is an expert in business, let’s say, is not just because, okay, I know how to do this one thing really, really well. I mean, that there are some people who are like that, but usually, because they have enough examples, cases from, you know, their past businesses they know of. They know lots of different things that could work that they could try. And this helps them find, okay, for this particular problem, I have these 8 methods, this, you know, method number 6 is going to work best. And so I think that’s an important idea. And I think that’s one of the reasons why, you know, Munger’s investment philosophy is so popular and why he’s been so successful is because if you cultivate a lot of different mental models, if you can alternate a lot of different ways of representing problems, then you just have more ways to get unstuck, which and getting stuck is the default when solving problems like that’s the thing is that not being able to solve a problem is the default, it’s not the case that just, oh of you just try hard enough, you can solve any problem. Most problems are unsolvable. It’s the fact that we can solve some of them. That is really the sort of insight that I think Herbert and Simon brought to this.

Clint Murphy  18:04

So let’s think of, you talked about the business an example. And that business person you mentioned, you know, they’ve had success in this area and that area. And that brings us to another area that you talk about on this see section, which is how success can be our best teacher. And one of the things that jumps out at me for that is this idea that confidence comes with competence. So the more you’ve been able to achieve in a certain area, the more confident you get, the more you’re able to be successful again. Can you take us through that idea? And then we’ll jump into a second part of it that I love.

Scott Young  18:38

So the best example of that is what we were talking about earlier, with the problem solving example, that a lot of what you’re doing when you’re learning anything is trying to find the right way of doing it, or a good way of doing it if there’s no right way of doing it. And there’s a much, much larger space of possibilities of bad ways to do things than right ways to do things. So a lot of what learning is is trying to hone in on what are those good ways of doing something and I don’t just mean like explicit methods, but even just, you know, you have to sort of like your brain has to kind of fine tune in to like, be able to execute skills well in this kind of thing. So it’s happening at an unconscious level as well. And one of the challenges is that if we are experiencing a lot of failure, we might be very far away from the right method. And so each time you experience it fail, you don’t actually learn that much. So if you’re dealing with, let’s say, a business that fails, well, business can fail for many, many, many, many, many reasons. So in some senses, when you fail at a project, failure is overdetermined. Like, there’s so many different ways you could fail, you don’t actually learn that much about, well, this specific reason is why I failed. And so sometimes we leap to conclusions, and we say that it was x, but it may not be x, it could be something else. There’s lots of things you can get wrong, most businesses fail, most things don’t succeed. But if you do succeed, then you immediately know that you must have done something right. Right, like you immediately have this wide reduction in the possibility is that, well, if I succeeded at this, then I must be doing something, right. And this is why I think, you know, again, if you don’t have the ability to like have someone tell you the right way to do it, which is the best way to learn a skill,  is if you have some sort of grounding, like this is a good method, this is what works. And then you do want to like do this, like sort of prototyping to find some early success and then build out from there because of this very reason. But this sort of so this is sort of an information point of view of like, why kind of just logically speaking, it’s better to have the successes and why you learn more from those experiences. But there’s also a motivational component because we as human beings, when we get stuck with something, it’s very natural, it’s even kind of rational for us to be like, well, you know what, I’m not very good at this, I should invest my time. And so if you can experience those small wins early on in the process, and build your confidence, that is the thing that will sustain motivation, sustained confidence, is saying you to take on larger projects, larger challenges. So it’s definitely not the case that for you know, a completely new pursuit where you don’t already have this wellspring of confidence that you want to be, you know, okay, I’m going to experience all this failure for like, two, three years. I mean, some people will persist through that. But it’s, You have to have an extremely high motivation, I think, intrinsic motivation for what you’re doing to persist through that. So it’s much better to approach things from an angle of “How can I get small wins?” “How can I build from those accomplishments?” Not only for learning, but also for motivation.

 

Scott Young  18:38

Yeah, so I mean, the basic idea here of success being the best teacher is that there is a kind of idea, I think, you know, using the business example, especially in like entrepreneurial circles is just the importance of failure, failure being a good thing. And I don’t want to deny that often in life, we face setbacks and failures and difficulties nor do I want to deny that like, you know, once you’re already pretty good at something, or once you already have some confidence facing challenges, facing things that are like near the limit of your ability is important. But I think sometimes that advice gets stretched too far in that, well, it’s just all failure is good. And like you learn more from failure than success. And, and I think this is just straightforwardly false.

Clint Murphy  21:57

And so when you think about that, Scott, I’ve always thought about, I’ve talked about this concept of building your get sh!t done muscle. And for those people who’ve never built it, they’ve never done those challenging things. You’ve done a lot of challenging things. I’ve done a fair amount of challenging things. And so the idea of get better at anything that rings a bell for me. It’s like, oh, yeah, okay, I want to get better at anything. And I’m going to choose something really audacious and you’re going to do the same thing. You’re like, oh, okay, well, I learned three languages in three countries, in one year by going there and only speaking that language there. Okay, that’s pretty audacious. You can do a lot of difficult things. But for that first person who hasn’t done anything audacious, it’s taking that get better at anything and breaking it down to the tiniest thing and get better at something small. And once you get better at that, apply these techniques and get better at something small. And to borrow from your friend James Clear is teach yourself that you are someone who can get better at things, and then build on that over and over until all of a sudden you are flying to Spain, and you’re only going to speak Spanish.

Scott Young  23:08

Yeah, I think what you’re saying is absolutely right, that like, we need to choose challenges that are in our sort of range of difficulty. But the other this other sort of idea of this sort of building from successes, not like obviously, scoping the challenge is a very important part. You know, if you don’t believe you don’t have confidence that you can succeed at a goal, it’s kind of the wrong goal for you, right? It’s having a goal that is like, well, there’s no way I can do this, is I would say most the time not motivated. You have to believe something is going to be challenging, but that you can do it in order to ask a lot of resources toward it. So there is that motivational aspect. But I also think there’s this idea of, if you’re going to learn some complicated, difficult skill, you want to build up from the right foundation. So if there are places where you could just get success, like you can just be figured out how to do X and not have to do a lot of trial and error, not to have to bang your head against the wall, do those things first build those building blocks. And so that’s an important part, I think, for building complicated skills. That sort of shows up in a lot of areas that if you can get those those foundations in place, you can increase your odds of success, you can reduce the amount that you have to learn through trial and error. And you can build your confidence, you can progress forward more quickly.

Clint Murphy  24:13

And that brings us to the second half of this idea, which really, really became more relevant, I believe, through COVID. And it’s this idea of hiring help and inner Scott, one of the realizations I had during COVID was wait a second, if I’m doing these group meetings on Zoom, if I’m doing calls with this on Zoom, I can probably reach anybody on Zoom. And as an example, right before COVID had been on a silent retreat, and one of the teachers I thought, wow, this person personifies mindfulness. So I found that he taught on Zoom. And so he became my Buddhism coach, and I read three books on Shadow Work, How to Be a Man by an author. And I said, wow, I really want to work with this guy and found him on Zoom, and started attending his workshops. And so this ability to say, what do I want to get good at? And holy crow, at no other time in history I think have you had the other than, you know, back in the day, someone would fly across the world and say, I’m going to study with the Zen master in his monastery. But you don’t even have to do that anymore. It’s, I’m going to click a button on my computer and train with some of the best people in the world at specific things. So how important in getting better at anything is this idea of hiring help and hiring the right help to get you there?

Scott Young  25:44

Yeah, I mean, I think what you’re saying is correct. We’re now in an era where there’s a lot more access to coaches and teachers and things like this. One of the things that I’ll say that some sort of the motivation for this comment was that there was this psychologist Benjamin Bloom, and he had this paper, one was like, very highly cited paper talking about the two sigma problem in education. And basically, his comment was this a sigma is how you measure standard deviation. And statistics is sort of the typical Greek letter used. And so the idea is that, you know, you have some bell curve of performance. And what they found is that in some of these studies, you’re able to get about two standard deviations better than you normally get, which is, you know, better than about 95%, if you have one on one tutoring. And so this means that on the one hand, because you can do this with one on one tutoring, it suggests that we can learn a lot better than we can in the standard classroom environment. For the average student, I don’t want to say that, you know, this is every single person would increase by this much, because a lot of the benefit is also for the weaker performing students. But this idea that one on one tutoring, at least has this potential to go, you know, quite a bit better than we have with the regular classroom environment. But obviously, one on one tutoring is expensive. So his whole thing was like, can we find ways of doing this what actually works in the classroom. But to me, a big takeaway of that is that, well, if it turns out that just like one on one, tutoring is like one of the most effective ways we know to learn these skills, then we should probably be hiring more one on one tutors, we should probably be doing that more often because it works better. And so I do think that when you are hiring a coach, where you are in the process of learning also matters. Because if I’m hiring someone to teach me the basics of a field, I would probably lean in favor of someone who has a better teacher than a better expert. So if I’m learning physics, and I’m like a high school physics student, I really don’t need to have a Nobel Prize winner teaching me physics. What I need to have is like the best explainer in the world, the person who has a lot of experience teaching high school physics, that that person is going to be sort of the best bet for me. And even now, you don’t even really need to have even the best explainer working with you as a tutor, because you can go online and watch videos from the best explainer. So maybe it’s just the person who’s able to sit with you and encourage you and be like, oh, maybe you made a mistake here, this kind of thing. Like that kind of tutor. It’s even easier to find that kind of person and this sort of thing. So I think the idea with coaching, is that coaching is good. But also don’t make great the enemy of good don’t make, you know, like finding the best possible person in the world, the enemy of finding someone who could help you. Because again, like, you know, it would be great to be coached on investing by, you know, Warren Buffett or something, but I’m sure there’s lots of people who, you know, have their CFA who could be like, okay, this is how you get your money stuff in order. And that’s probably going to be good enough for the person who’s not, you know, making multibillion dollar deals. And so this I think an important important principle to have. But I think what you said is very correct that often, the access to even high level experts is is easier than we think.

Clint Murphy  28:39

But so a couple things to chew on there, because you brought a good point. You know, when you think of as a father, got kids, and you see this rise of sports as a business. And you know, everyone decries it a little in that, you know, you used to when you were young kids would go down to the court with a basketball and get better at basketball, they play at school, and good kids stood out and went to college, and then went to the NBA. Now, academy is everywhere. And your kid’s not even going to make a school team unless they’re in one of these academies, unless they’re that one kid out of 100, who’s just a phenomenal athlete. And even if they’re in an academy, if they’re in the right school, where all the kids are in an academy, and they’re not even gonna play. And there’s definitely some downsides to that. At the same time when you see the skills, so for example, let’s pick hockey and hockey has a lot of these academies now. When you see the speed, and the skill, and the footwork, and the ability of these players, there’s clearly something. It almost, I’ll say it’s that Tetris, like, feeling of these guys are doing things at the margins in the details that we never saw 20 years ago. What’s the good, what’s the bad of that? Because clearly, they’re moving it forward by paying for it. What does that do from a society perspective?

Scott Young  30:05

I mean, I think these things are what you’re talking about is just an observation of how learning works, right. So I’ll use a different example. So the, you know, there was a great cognitive psychologist, Anders Ericsson. And he was writing a lot about expert performance. And one of the claims he made was that musical ability has gotten better over time, that there were piano composers who wrote sheet music, that at the time, no pianist could play them. They were just too technically challenging to actually play music that had been written, that now we have people playing. And in his argument was that well, what’s shifted is that we’ve gotten a lot more serious about musical education. It starts younger, it’s more rigorous, in some ways it’s more grinding and grueling. And so I think it’s easy to stand back from that and be like, well, you know, is that what we want? Is, is that what we want people to get good at, is to just be like this able to perform these virtuosic performances on the violin, but you have to basically devote your entire life to it. And it’s like, kind of almost soul crushing kind of work to be able to get to that point, I think there’s sort of two points that are important to raise about this. So one, is that getting better at anything, or this idea of improvement in general, is a little value agnostic, right? Like you can define any dimension as being better. And then what would be the way that you get more of that dimension. So if it’s just like playing more virtuosic performances, or reaching a higher level of athleticism in a sport. I mean, there’s probably some way that you could be more serious and more like efficient about practicing that to an extreme, but that’s not necessarily the goal that we have, right? So I mean, for me, I’m not an athlete, I think most kids are not going to be professional athletes. So I tend to take the viewpoint that while excellence in athletic is athletics is something to be admired. It’s I’ve tend to be much more of the opinion that, you know, giving people sports that they can enjoy lifelong and you know, keeping people in shape is a much better goal for 99% of people than choosing this kind of excellence. But that’s a value opinion that I apply to sports. Some people don’t have that opinion. The idea is that like, well, I want my kid to be, you know, the best that they can possibly be at hockey, even if you know, the NHL is not necessarily a realistic dream for most athletes. And I mean, you could also ask me the same thing that like a lot of our school system, and our academics is sort of designed from the top down, basically, to push the best students into careers that really require these things. So you know, we do all this, calculus, precalculus, you go into engineering, this kind of stuff. A lot of these courses are designed so that, you know, the people who are at the PhD are at the highest level, they have the best talent pool coming in. But I mean, for most students, this is the thing that like I learned a lot of math in school, that’s useless, right? Because the system was designing them to be elite. Well, not designing them to be elite mathematicians. But basically, the assumption was that this is the pinnacle of math, that we’re trying to get you higher and higher to that pinnacle, rather than, you know, it would be for people who are of this persuasion. It would be sort of admitting failure and giving up if we were to say, well, we just want people to be a little bit more numerous in their daily lives. Like that’s not what we want, we want them to be able to understand differential equations goddamnit. So I think there’s this tension here, sometimes between what it means to be better at something. And I’m somewhat agnostic to that in my in this book. I’m not here to promote a particular vision of better, but rather to be like, this is how learning works. And so whatever dimension you choose, you’re going to make different trade offs. And so for me, I think, how do you enjoy a sport? Well, I definitely think you want to be taught it well enough. And you want to be given the right kind of practice so that you can enjoy it. But does that mean that you want to be in these sort of like high stress pressure cooker systems to like, get elite performance? I don’t know, that’s a personal choice that I don’t think I can make.

Clint Murphy  33:55

I mean, it is probably the most the area where it’s one of the most emblematic of the whole book. In that when you go to these academies, you’re ticking off every single one of those boxes, right? You’re watching them do the drills, and you’re doing the drills over and over. And the coaches like looking at your feet being okay, when you shoot basketball as an example, your elbows slightly out, let’s get your elbow in, and now you’re drilling that elbow in. And they always use that example, the beginner or the good player will practice until they get it right. The bad player will or The great player will practice until they can’t do it wrong. And so it’s really just that feedback mechanism on steroids. But let’s go in a different direction.

Scott Young  34:38

I just want to I just want to switch topics because I think this is an important point because I think there is also sometimes a mistake, and I don’t want to say that that’s necessarily wrong, but there is a lot of I would say controversy in the research about whether that kind of approach of this sort of like microscopic analysis, we’re going to like drill this particular movement pattern until it is like exactly exactly performed perfectly. There’s a lot of controversy of like whether that’s actually the best way to do it. So even if we’re just putting aside, even if we’re just putting aside the like, you know, is this the worthy goal to have, which is the conversation we were having before. Let’s just assume for argument that we want to create elite athletes, is this the best way to do it. And so there is a kind of school of thought that argues in favor of this sort of approach to athletics. But there is also another school of thought that argues that well, part of the problem is that when you do these very rigid drills, in very particular, unique circumstances, they don’t create as much generality, as much flexibility, which we really need for all round athleticism. And so if anyone’s interested in this, I also recommend the book by Robert Gray, Rob Gray, How We Learn to Move and he makes sort of a compelling case, I think, for why we actually probably need more variability, we need more kind of organic situations, like we don’t need like just doing the Passing Drills around the little orange cones. And he gives arguments for, you know, exceptional performance of like Brazilian soccer athletes. And they’re often you know, playing in these kind of like narrow street situations where you just sort of the complexity of the environment force you to learn a level of athleticism, that you’re not necessarily going to get by just having a coach be like move your elbow in this way and that way. And so I don’t want to say, you know, the book is not necessarily about adjudicating this particular debate. And I think there are, it’s probably one of those things, it’s a bit of both. So the actual answer is more complicated than one or the other. But I do think even from the perspective of getting really good at something, you can, I think, go too far in that direction. So if you’re learning a language, something I know a little bit better. And your approach was, well, I’m just going to grind flashcards memorizing vocabulary patterns and grammar patterns. And like, that’s how I’m going to learn the language. That probably helps to a point. But actually, if you want to be really good at a language, you probably need lots of exposure to organic situations where you’re actually speaking and listening to real conversations in noisy environments with multiple speakers. Like that kind of practice is actually what you need to get better. And so this get better at anything, I don’t want to overly stereotype it is that like, well, I’m just advising people to go this, you know, academy route of drilling things, I think the research is not actually so clear that that’s always the best way to do things. It’s good for some problems, but I don’t think it’s good for everything.

Clint Murphy  37:15

And let’s go back because you hinted at something, but I want to beat it up a little more was this idea that sometimes experts actually are the worst teachers. So you didn’t necessarily say that. But sometimes, you know something so well, that you forget why you know it. Yeah. And you talk about this idea of using stories or the PARI method in something I want to throw out, see how it lands with you is I’ve always said at work, when it comes to teaching new colleagues, what I want the people on my team to do is, you know, as opposed to that old method of just sitting beside them and kind of trying to say what you do, because I think you forget everything you do is use a tool like Loom and capture yourself doing it, and talking through it as you do it and do it three or four or five times and just capture yourself doing it, your typing, people might not be able to see but you’re typing on your computer, and you’re talking and it shows you in the screen, and it shows you talking through what you’re doing while you’re doing it. And it feels like that forces a bit more of the oh, yeah versus here’s what you do.

Scott Young  38:22

Yeah, well, so the basic idea here is that one of the features of skill development of the path to expertise is in automating of some of the components skills. So the easiest to see in his examples, if you’re like learning to read, or some kind of procedural skill like this. So when you first learn to read, you learn the names of the letters, and then you have lots of difficulty and you start to recognize the letters usually capital letters first, then you do the lowercase letters, and then maybe you start to learn the letter sound. And then you learn to maybe put some simple letters together a couple, you know, like consonant vowel concept. So this whole kind of progression of sequence eventually evolved to the point where you just look at squiggles on a page, and you just hear words in your head. But when you get to that point of proficiency with this skill, it’s often the case that you forget how you actually learned it, like what you forget the sequence of things that require to learn. And as I cover the one of the chapters, there’s actually been a controversy for like decades over, like, what’s the best way to teach reading, in part because fluent readers don’t seem to read the way that we like teach kids to do it. But it’s partly because so much of the skill of reading has been automated by these unconscious neural circuits in our brain, that we can’t even introspect and see how we’re reading anymore because it’s not happening at that level of conscious awareness. So not all skills just become totally intuitive, totally outside of conscious awareness. But there is a general tendency for things, you know, if something requires to a beginner, they require broken down into 10 steps, you do it in two steps, right? Because you just leap from one to the other. They’re missing those other eight steps. So when they see your two step explanation, they can’t figure out what’s going on at all right. So the claim of the book was not the experts make the worst teachers because obviously the people who knows nothing about something make the worst teachers. Yeah. But that learning to teach and being a good teacher is two skills, it’s first learning the skill. And then second learning how to break it down so that someone else has sort of essentially this ladder that they can climb to get to where you’re going. And so I think that if you are learning in the field, if you’re learning a skill where you don’t have a teacher, you have to be kind of creative about how you extract that knowledge. Because most people, by default, are not good teachers, they’re not going to just be able to tell you in the best, most efficient way how to learn a skill. And often they’re going to focus on things that are irrelevant or focus on things that are not important. They’re gonna skip over a lot of stuff. So there’s this whole family of psychological tools called Cognitive Task Analysis, which are trying to do this, trying to figure out how do experts perform skills. What knowledge are they using? What procedures are they using? And the sort of insight of the field I think, is that experts are very bad at recounting this, they’re very bad at actually just saying what they know. And so some of the strategies that have been come up, and like one of them is just to like, watch them and solve a problem, in part because, you know, you can stop them be like, Why did you do this? And then, you know, maybe they wouldn’t have explained it if they were just explaining it, but they can explain it. And second, because a lot of that knowledge is really only active when you’re in the problem solving environment. If I asked you, you know, how do you read something, maybe you’re not thinking about it. But when you’re actually reading, you’re like, well, I start here, and I do this, and I turn the page this way, stuff that would, you know, you’d totally forget if you weren’t actually doing it. And so that’s one method. Another method is to ask people to like give you sort of detailed blow by blow stories of what happened in a particular situation, rather than overarching advice. Because again, focusing on the details of actually what happened, elucidates the sort of problem solving steps, the knowledge that’s required, rather than, you know, here’s my big takeaway from this, which is obscuring all of that. So these are, I think, important methods. If you can’t learn from a teacher, if you don’t have you know, like, what we’ve just been talking about this coach with 20 years of experience instructing people, you know, I think it’s very important to be able to do that yourself.

 

Clint Murphy  42:01

And the other thing, possibly, and I’ll throw it out as a question to you is this idea of stories, if we have them tell stories, we are also more likely to remember the story. So they tell us the takeaway, even in your book, Scott, at the end of each chapter, you have takeaways, am I more likely to remember those takeaways? Or am I more likely to remember the story of the fighter pilots and the little mask that went from one guy’s mouth to the other guy’s ear? I’m probably more likely to remember that story and say, Well, what did that story tell me? That story told me that the best way to learn to fly a plane was to fly a plane? Yeah, right. Well, why don’t we jump into that one as an example. You know, is that accurate on storytelling? And then why don’t we tell people about that example is we jumped from see to do.

Scott Young  42:51

Well, so I’ll go first with the story point, because the psychologist Daniel Willingham has a point that like stories are a kind of privileged form of representation for information that we are kind of hardwired to retain stories in a way that we’re not hardwired for retaining other information. And so that’s a big part of the reason why I make stories a big part of these books I write because I definitely could have written this book with just I could have deleted the stories and just be like, here’s the research on learning in this kind of, you know, not only would that have been a more boring book, which is, you know, part of my goal here is to make it an enjoyable read for the reader and not just slogging through a literature review. But at the same time, I think if you delete the stories, it’s often a lot harder to understand these things. Because I can talk about, you know, an abstract principle like contextual interference, for instance. But that doesn’t really make sense to you unless I pair it with some instance where it’s being applied. So something like you know, learning jazz improvisation.

Scott Young  43:44

And so what you were talking about about the piloting example, this is a very interesting example, because piloting is this dynamic skill. So it’s not something that you can learn sort of theoretically, and then just go do it. Like I just like teach you this is the principles of flight. And like, if you had then now you can go out and fly an airplane, you have to do it, because you need feedback from the environment. And Major Smith Barry, he was one of the first sort of trainers of pilots sort of right after they were invented. And, you know, he made great improvements in the world war one flight school efforts, and with the British against the Germans, because he actually put students in the seat and he had, you know, a second steering wheel so that they wouldn’t crash the plane. And this was a major improvement over things. Another thing that improves flight performance is using flight simulators in the beginning. So this is another thing that like, I guess it shows up in a lot of areas that yes, you learn better by flying a plane than obviously by doing textbook study. But how important is it to fly a real plane versus a simulator? And it turns out that that really depends on how far along you are in the skill curve that you actually learn more in the simulator right at the beginning. Because simulators are simpler, they’re easier to understand, they’re less stressful, and then it reaches a point where you learn more in the plane than in the simulator, but because simulators cost like a 10th as much and they’re less dangerous, you maybe want to even you know if you’re in some learning to fly like a fighter jet or something, some $50 million fighter jet. Like, clearly, they probably want you on the like, you know the Gameboy version of that for a little bit longer just to make sure you’re really good at it before you’re flying the real thing. And so these are also, I think, sort of useful lessons to learn about. Not only that realistic practice matters, but when it matters, and it particularly matters at this sort of increasingly matters as you go further into his skill just because so many of the details that you would be using to guide your performance are just not going to be there if you’re in some sort of artificial situation.

Clint Murphy  44:10

And for the listener, or the viewer. At this point. We’re not even talking about just doing,we’re talking about the doing with the feedback, because what he was really trying to say on that, well, I need the people in the air and I need to be able to show them what they’re doing is wrong is they were training these people on how to fly a plane without actually ever flying a plane. And then some of the people were dying on their first flight. And this was back in was it World War One,

Scott Young  45:58

World War One Well, yeah, the plane was invented. And then it was like 11 years, I don’t know, I have been screwing it up. It’s about 10 years that the plane was invented and then World War One happens and you start using it, you know, you have these rudimentary fighter jets where they have like a machine gun strapped to it. And I mean, there’s lots of like, part of the reason I tell these stories too, is just there’s like, full of interesting details, like what you were talking about, like, you know, these planes are so noisy, like you can’t just be telling versus like, oh, do this, and this and this. So they had to invent this tube that went over the instructors mouth and then like went over around the ears, because this is you know, 1911 technology, it went over the ears of the persons otherwise, you won’t be able to hear the instructions that were given to you. So I mean, these are fairly basic things, but they allowed you to get students into a plane and train them safely. Because before that, I mean, instructor didn’t want to give you flying time not because they thought that textbook study would make you a better pilot, were because they were afraid that you were gonna crash the plane and killed a few times. So they weren’t entirely wrong and sending you untrained to the battlefield because they’re like, oh, no, I’m not letting this kid fly the plane, he’s gonna kill me, right? And so there were all these innovations Smith Barry implemented that allowed them to, you know, not just fly the plane under ideal conditions, but like, okay, I’m going to try to put it into a tailspin, and you have to get out of it. Right. And so this was another thing that made a big difference is like sort of increasing the difficulty of the training. So now when you go to a flight school, they do this, like the simulated engine failure, and you have to pull yourself out of it with the plane, you can’t just you know, okay, we’re gonna do a very smooth takeoff and landing and then let you fly a 747 route, right?

Clint Murphy  47:28

We’ll go backwards and we’ll tie what you were just talking about there with simulating the difficulty. And early in the conversation, we talked about choosing a goal that matches our level of difficulty. And so as we go to the do, can we talk a little bit about Octavia Butler, who said “obsession is about not being able to stop just because you’re afraid and full of doubts, it’s about not being able to stop at all”. You share some of her story with the audience and how it ties to this idea of a difficulty sweet spot.

Scott Young  48:03

You know, Octavia Butler is an interesting person, because I found when I was doing the research on her I read, you know, there’s like whole books of collected interviews and stuff that she had. And I read a biography that was written about her and this kind of stuff, as I was preparing the research that this is someone who like ostensibly is so different from my life experience, you know, she’s growing up, you know, decades before me, she’s a black woman in America, like so many ways, she’s completely different from me, but I just found this profound sympathy and like relation to this person when I was writing, like, this was someone who was a real dreamer, you know, she comes from this sort of background where like, there’s not really that much expected of her and she just wants to be a science fiction writer. Like, that’s just what she wants to do, even though it’s kind of like weird, and she shouldn’t maybe want to have that goal, because it’s like unrealistic for her. And she just struggles at it and struggles out and struggles at it, but like, does not give up for years and years and years. And I think in some ways, it kind of felt similar to like, when I was getting started as a writer, and doing these things of like having this kind of weird obsession, you know, not exactly the same way. But I can definitely empathize with a lot of her feelings going through it. And one of the big takeaways that I have from her experience is, first of all, she’s sort of another example of this success being the best teacher that she just like, struggles really hard for years, she doesn’t sell anything. She just has tons of rejection slips, until she starts going to these workshops, where people are like teaching her how to actually do this kind of writing. And then all of a sudden, she goes to this, I think, was a week long workshop in Clarion, Pennsylvania, and she finally started selling her short stories. And then shortly after that, she’s selling novels, and then you know, multiple novels, and then MacArthur Genius Grant, like her career kind of took off after that. And it shows that like, if you don’t have that kind of instruction, if you don’t have that access to feedback to the right kind of practice, you can just butt your head against the wall for a very long period of time. The other thing I think it shows though, too, is that sometimes our own fears, our own trepidations about what we’re doing can also hold us back. There was a long period of career where she was just writing short stories because that’s what she was comfortable with. But it was only once she started writing full novels that she actually had her career take off, in part because the market for novels was better than the market for short stories. So there’s sort of an economic incentive, but also because I think challenging yourself to do those bigger works pushed her writing abilities. One thing to hold the story together over a chapter. But it’s another thing to have it make sense and be compelling and held together over an entire book. And so I think she kind of really epitomizes this idea of navigating this sweet spot of getting the right kind of practice environment, but also practicing at the right level so that you are sufficiently challenged, but you’re not floundering that’s very important to actually making progress.

Clint Murphy  48:56

And as you talk about this practicing, there are a couple of concepts that you talk about in the book that I thought would be very valuable for the audience. One is this idea of creating a practice loop. And the second one is the copy, complete, create method, can you take us through those two?

Scott Young  50:55

Sure. So the practice loop idea is that we want to so I’ve kind of broken in this book, these sort of broad concepts of learning from other people learning from practice and feedback. And I don’t mean to say that this is always the case that these are just like in some kind of particular sequence. But one way you can integrate that is just to see examples, practice it yourself, and then get feedback on your attempt to then just to repeat that, so she did this in his workshop method, where this is often what you’re doing, you’re seeing a bunch of other people’s short stories, you do your own, and then people critique it, and you repeat that process. But you can apply this for many, many fields. If you’re studying for an exam, here, you see the sort of worked example of how to do this kind of problem, you try it yourself, and then you get feedback on whether you did it right. And this sort of basic loop of seeing doing and feedback is something that you can apply to many, many, many skills. And it ensures that you’re not going to be too far off from the ideal approach. So that’s one idea the other day to talk about this copy, complete, create. And so one of the things that has been discovered, and I talked about this in the second chapter is that for certain kinds of complicated problems, if you get people to solve them themselves, they can actually solve the problem, but not learn as much as someone who actually studies the example and then just sort of like, does what they just see. And this seems surprising, because usually, we get the impression that well, when you solve the problem yourself, you not only understand it more, but you understand it more deeply. But the psychologist John Sculler makes a good point that sometimes the cognitive load of the situation is high. So you can just sort of, I don’t know, you can kind of think about like the Rubik’s Cube example that you just happen to jiggle it in a certain way. And you get sort of some pattern of faces on one side. And because you’re so focused on what you’re doing, and I’m trying to get all the Reds over to this side, you don’t actually notice, oh, it’s this general pattern of do this, this this that makes you make this maneuver that you’re trying to do every time, you’re not able to learn this general pattern, what psychologists call a schema that will allow you to solve similar problems, generalize it to new situations in the future. And so this idea of learning from examples is important. But obviously, if I just watch videos of people solving Rubik’s Cubes, I’m not going to be able to do it myself necessarily, because you need to have practice. And also because when you are just given the solution, you often don’t pay attention to it, you don’t really read through it and understand it. And so this idea of trying to find a hybrid so you can get the benefits of both was caught by this statue, researcher, Jerome Vannerbor, where he argued that if you’re trying to teach someone, let’s say a programming skill, one way you could do that is you start off by showing them the full example so that they can try to understand it, and then you delete one step and get them to fill in. And what this means is that because one step is missing, you actually have to read through the whole thing to figure out what it should do at that point. But because you don’t have to create the whole thing yourself, you don’t have to have all these additional things that you’re trying to keep in mind of planning and setting the goals and the sub goals in this kinda to try to actually solve the problem you’re just filling in one step. So it’s sort of a way of like smoothly transitioning to writing your own code. And so this was one of the ways that has been suggested that there’s another examples of like fading examples of so you start off with lots of examples and then you have less and less and more practice attempts over time are generally found to improve learning outcomes because they manage this sort of difficulty gradients. So you it starts off and it’s easy but then you’re gradually reducing the amount of support and help until you’re performing the full scale yourself.

Clint Murphy  51:06

And when you think about it is an example copywriting Scott. You know, as you were sharing I kept saying that word over and over to myself because a lot of great copywriters suggest to people who want to be copywriters, the number one spot to start is to have a swipe file, otherwise known as other people’s material, and to simply take some of the best material and copy it by hand over and over to train the brain to say this is what good writing looks like and to just try to take their idea and make it your own. And now that we even talk about that I often say to people, when someone says who do you admire? I don’t necessarily pick people, I pick attributes that people have. And I say to myself, oh, the president of my company, when we’re doing public speaking, he has a very specific way of enunciate words, or he has a very specific tone, and I’m going to change my tone to be that tone. And so I’ll copy that until it becomes part of me. And then I’ll go take another attribute from someone else and make that a part of me. So is this idea of seeing something and just copying, just copying it until we make it ours? Is that part of what we’re talking about here, too?

Scott Young  55:33

I think it can be. So the way I would put it is that when you are learning, let’s say a skill, like copywriting go down to this problem solving analogy here. There’s many, many, many ways you could write copy, most of them are bad, most of them are not persuasive. So a good way to set yourself up for success or to reduce that space of difficulty is if you start in the zone of well, this copy works, right? You’ve already massively eliminated a lot of the search space. Now, obviously, you don’t want to just copy things word for word, right? So this is the problem of creativity of you want to use what works in that example, but not do the exact same thing. So what we’re doing when we’re copying is we’re internalizing some kind of pattern. And I think the key that separates creative people are really successful people is not that they’re avoiding this process. It’s not that they’re just, okay, I’m setting aside everything I know, and creating something new. Because that doesn’t actually work. There’s too many things that don’t work if you’re just trying things randomly, rather, what it is, is that you’ve copied enough stuff, you’ve generalized it enough so that it’s not just oh, well, they use this word or this phrasing, but they’re trying to accomplish this particular goal. You know, they’re using this structure, they’re doing this kind of this sort of maneuver to like solve the problem of persuasion, in a sales page that you have the sort of internalized so that when you face a problem, you don’t only have just like the little sound bites and catchphrases and words and this kind of thing. But you also have all these different ways that you could approach it. And so Octavia Butler even had this suggestion for students that when they were struggling with something, let’s say openings in a story, she would say, go find, like a dozen books that you like, a dozen stories you like and copy them out word for word. And the idea is not to copy those people’s not that oh, well, that’s what you’re going to write in your story. Rather, it’s the copying it out forces you to realize, this is one way of doing it. This is one way to solve this problem. This is another way to solve this problem. And she said, you want to have about a dozen, because if you just have one that you’re just copying someone, but if you have a dozen, then you see this sort of, you have all these maneuvers you could make right, and that allows you to create something original. So in some ways, copying is the sort of the foundation for creativity, because it gives you options, it allows you to select meaningfully from things that are going to be successful. And that when we do not have this to copy from, then we do not have this sort of breath to copy from very often, we’re just sort of doing this kind of almost a cliche and sort of like a pastiche of like what we sort of recall that people do in this scenario, because we’re not actually studying it. We’re not actually figuring out what is the method here, what is the way that they’re actually solving that problem.

Clint Murphy  58:04

When you talk about that and you talk about learning the frameworks and really understanding different ways to do it. And then we talked about content creation, it brings up this idea of creativity in content creation in one of the things you talk about, and for I give it away, I’ll tie it to my own experience on social media is since you and I talked, the first time I’ve had a lot of growth on social media is predominantly Twitter. And some people may look at it today and say, How did that happen so fast? Or, you know, how did you get so good at x, but what they’re missing was between you and me talking, it was writing on that platform almost every day, it was at the time you go back two years ago, threads were a way to grow on the platform, and long form content broken out into bite sized pieces, because you didn’t have long form tweets yet, you only had 280 characters. And so you had to learn how to string you know, almost write a synopsis of the book in twelve 280 character little sound bites. And so for 77 days in a row, I wrote a thread. So it’s that idea that and for the first 30 It probably really sucked Scott was this idea that to get to quality, I’m gonna take my path through quantity. And so the idea is how can quantity lead to quality and you know, the people that are listening are gonna say to you and me, they’re gonna say, well, Clint, Scott, like it’s great for you to to say quantity leads to quality, but there’s only so much time in the day. How can I do more  and so maybe let’s talk to them about wanting to leading to quality and then what are some suggestions for that person who tells you they don’t have more time to be able to get some of that quantity? What can they be thinking about?

Scott Young  59:57

Yeah, so I mean, there’s lots of stuff have to unpack here. So one of the maxim’s of the book is quality comes from quantity. And this is actually based on a psychologist, Dean Simon, his research that I found fascinating. And he did a lot of research, particularly in the 80s and 90s, where he was studying eminent individuals in different fields. So painters, composers, well sighted academics. And one of the findings that he had is that if you look at someone’s career, and you look at the sort of shape of their productivity curve, it follows a pretty typical curve. So people sort of ramp up in the beginning, and then they have this period of peak career productivity, and then it sort of has a slower decline over their lifetime. And one of the things that he found out from this was that it didn’t actually the age didn’t seem to matter, it seemed to be when you start your career. So if you start your career later, you have the same curve, it’s just shifted. So it isn’t probably like some biological reality that you know, you’re going to be your most productive when you’re like 35 or something. And then, you know, it’s not like that, because if you started earlier, you started later, you have the same kind of shape of curve. But one thing that he found out, which I thought was extremely interesting was that there was this regularity that if you look at a person’s most acclaimed works, to the amount of work they’re producing, there’s a ratio, this sort of hit ratio of what they’re doing. And it tends to be fairly flat, so that it’s not the case, you know, what you would naively think I think, this is sort of going to your statement is that maybe there’s some deliberate practice you’re doing and so you’re just getting a better and better hit ratio, like your quality is going up over time. That’s one theory. Another theory is decline. So that you know, you have your best ideas in the beginning. And then you just become sort of like a cliche of yourself by the end of your career, and it’s going down. Um, you can also posit different things. So some authors posit like a curve, so that there’s, like, certain kinds of innovations are made by young people and certain by old people, and all these kind of things. And he basically went through a lot of these explanations, and tried to dismiss them statistically. And he made this argument that when we look at the data, you know, a reasonable first approximation, I don’t want to say that this is like, you know, explains all the data perfectly. But a reasonable first approximation is that there’s this equal odds baseline, which is that every single sort of creative attempt you make has about equal chance of making an impact. And this is particularly true if we’re like considering equal sized units. So you know, a poet or an academic, publishing a paper or a novelist, working on a novel or playwright working in a play, like, they have to be kind of the same size, you know, obviously, if I’m comparing writing a blog article, or writing a book, a book maybe has a better chance of being successful, just because it’s sort of like a larger unit has more kind of creative product. And so this supports his theory, that sort of a process of random combination explains a lot of the results we see about creativity. And I think this is a very interesting kind of explanation, because I think it goes against how a lot of people think about these kinds of creative work. So a lot of people likfe this sort of description of, well, you know, there’s some way you know, I can’t figure out how to do it myself. But there’s some way that you could just like engineer it, so that you could like only have successes, right? Or that you’re only going to be able to make things work out perfectly. And what he finds and he’s arguing here is that there’s actually if you’re looking at the data, it’s consistent with there being a lot of randomness. And so the people who have a prolific output end up succeeding a lot more in the long run, simply because they’re taking more chances, there’s more chances for them to do well. Now, I don’t want to say that there’s no, like, there’s not no such thing as quality, no such thing as skill, because all the samples he’s dealing with, are people kind of at the peak of their field, right, like eminent samples. So, you know, I use the example of Thomas Edison. And it’s probably the case that I think he epitomizes this model. He was a very, you know, he’s trying lots of things. There’s lots of combinations, he’s, you know, trying filaments for his light bulb, and he has like, 10,000 things he tries, and he’s trying to get natural, like a substitute for the rubber tree for sort of natural latex. He’s trying like some ungodly is fat is little Menlo Park, things like 30,000 different plant materials for their latex content. But he had this very combinatorial process to doing isn’t meant to work. But he was an extremely prolific inventor. He’s, in some cases, maybe the most patented individual in human history. And so this idea here is that yes, there is a buildup, there is a skill development to reach the frontier. And most of us are probably not at the frontier. And so we would probably benefit for like what you’re saying, you know, you don’t do a lot of social media, not doing a lot of tweeting. So you are kind of on this skill curve where like, there’s still a lot you can learn from other people, there’s still a lot you can learn through observation, and then through your own practice, to make it your own, your quality is going to be rising up. And this is also seen in fields where, you know, if you look at eminent artists, for instance, they very rarely have a masterwork credited before about like five to 10 years after they start their career, because it just requires that much practice to be even able to get good enough and similar for poets and composers, psychologist John Hayes did a lot of these studies, arguing that about 10 years was necessary to reach this frontier for the people who eventually reach it like I mean, we’re still talking about eminent individuals, a lot of people never reach it. But the thing is, is that once you reach that point in your career, a lot of what works, a lot of what is creatively successful depends on these factors that are inherently unpredictable. There are things not, as the creator, yourself, know, the right thing to do. And some of this is because, you know, once you’ve learned every single strong method that’s out there, you’re now using weak methods to go further into the problem space. And so there’s a lot more of that trying all the combinations of the Rubik’s cube to see if you can figure out a new pattern that will allow you to make some kind of new innovation. So there’s some of it’s that some of it is just the inherent unpredictability. I mean, I could write a book, and it could be a huge phenomenal success, or it could be a flop. And some of that’s going to be on my writing skill. I want to be hopefully near that frontier of writing, you know, competent nonfiction books. But also a lot of it is just did you happen to hit the right Zeitgeist. And I mean, I have some friends that are massive, massive bestsellers. And they’re about as surprised as anyone that their book is as popular as it was not because it’s not a good book. But just because so many books that are probably similarly good, or similarly catchy, just for some reason don’t happen to do as well. And so I think this idea that once we’ve reached this level of skill that if we want to sort of maximize our chance to create a success, productivity, the ability to just sort of like how can we, you know, have a high creative output is very important. I think it’s an underrated idea. Certainly, that’s sort of my takeaway from Simon, his research.

Clint Murphy  1:00:00

Scott, something I want to think about that I had fun talking with you last time on the show was this idea of our mind as a muscle. Now, and I know that I know, this is one of your favorite ones to have a little red dot. Last time, we talked about the idea of studying for IQ tests. It is this idea that a lot of people like to think, well, if I train my brain over here, I’m gonna get good over here. Yeah, and so you talk about this idea of transference, I believe is what you call it, and that you want to do something that has high transference to what you want to be good at. You don’t want to be doing something over here that absolutely doesn’t transfer to what you’re trying to get good at. Can you share a little bit about that idea with people?

Scott Young  1:07:20

Yeah, so the basic metaphor of the mind being like a muscle is like, well, we exercise our body. And we understand that if someone goes to the gym, and they lift weights, and they, you know, run on the stair machine, and they do all that kind of stuff in the gym, that we would be surprised if they’re good at hiking and carrying groceries and wrestling or, you know, their muscles being stronger are going to assist them in all these other endeavors, not 100%. I mean, I’m not making you know, even with muscles, we don’t have the expectation that like, okay, well, if you do a lot of deadlifts, you’re necessarily going to be lifting suitcases or cars. But we expect that muscular strength is this kind of simple property of the muscle, that if you train in the gym, it will work elsewhere. And otherwise, why would we even go to the gym, it wouldn’t work, right? So makes sense. As an analogy, why don’t we have gyms for the mind, and we should do brain training. And so there are whole companies that have set up their proposal really hinging on that’s their argument, that’s the metaphor is that we have gyms for them, your muscles, we should have gyms for our mind and train it in the same way, we’re going to work on challenging cognitive tasks, usually a little game that you play on your phone. And that’s going to make you smarter in everyday reasoning. And I gotta say, if you look at the evidence, it’s pretty bad. It’s pretty bad. These are like some of the biggest, most statistically controlled studies that I cover in the book. I mean, one of the studies had 11,000 participants, and there’s no benefit, there’s no benefit outside of basically fairly narrow transfer to like similar kinds of games and tests, and just sort of colloquially, I have a psychologist friend and she was sort of she was also kind of crapping on these brain training things. But she was making the claim that like, well, part of the problem is that they design these brain training games to be very similar to the tests that cognitive psychologists use to measure these constructs, like working memory and fluid intelligence stuff.

Scott Young  1:09:12

So it’s a little bit like your example of like, well, people talk about like IQ tests, like there’s some kind of mythical test. Now they’re there. They’re like a test that’s like an English test or a math test or anything. They’re just designed to not rely as much on content knowledge, like a lot of them even have a lot of content notion like the verbal part of an IQ test. You know, tells whether you know words like obviously, you could study for that. But people have this idea that an IQ test is like it’s testing something real. No, you could definitely study for an IQ test. Like, you know, the whole reason that test works is because you’ve never done a test that’s quite like this before. If you studied for it, you would be better at that test. So these brain training games are often designed in such a way that the psychologist inventory that they use for general mental performance, they use these tasks that people never practice. And so they’re fairly faithful representations of the sort of latent capacity. So working memory capacity is very strongly linked to intelligence, it’s an extremely important thing. If you’re going to talk to the, you know, cognitive fairy, and they are going to give you some mental enhancement, you would ask for greater working memory capacity, that’s what you would want. Because that’s what basically allows you to think smarter, you can hold more ideas in your head at once. And one of the ways they test this is with this end back training thing where basically, I’ll give you a sequence of numbers. And then I say, Okay, what was the third number back that you said, and you have to keep all of them in mind, because you don’t know when I’m going to stop you and ask you. So most people can only remember a few numbers back like you can’t go that far. But if you can remember, statistically speaking, if you remember further back, you have a larger working memory capacity. Now, this is a task that is useful for measuring this. But it’s not like you can’t train it, you can definitely train it. I mean, one of the examples that shows up in the skilled memory literature, Anders Ericsson worked with this guy for months and months on basically this task. And he had like a digit span in the hundreds. Now, I mean, that’s a sort of a rare example. And it’s, it would be hard for normal person to even get to that. But it was because he found all these techniques. And these ways of remembering the numbers that isn’t, a normal person wouldn’t be able to figure it out on the fly. And so the brain training games, I think, are really deceptive, because they’re often marketed as this way to provide general cognitive enhancement. But when you do careful tests, they don’t do that. They tend to make you good at the kinds of tests that you’re doing. So I mean, this is a kind of a pessimistic point, people would like it if the brain work this way. I mean, it would certainly be winning my job easier. I’d love to write a book, like how to train your puppy smarter. Yeah, no. Yeah. I mean, that would be a great book, I’m sure it would sell a lot more than turns out, that doesn’t work as an idea, right?

Clint Murphy  1:11:45

And does that apply to the end back training programs as well. So as an example Lumosity where I’m playing a game where I’m Matt, like moving the train in the right direction doesn’t work, the ones that are end back training, do they apply to working memory,

Scott Young  1:12:00

Here’s the thing it would get like, basically, the way that you’re gonna get good at the end back training program, is probably by coming up with ways that you can work around your working memory limitation. So we do this all the time with other skills, like our working memory bottleneck is really only a bottleneck with unskilled activities. There’s activities that we have not sufficiently practiced, you know, if you’re learning to read, for instance, the amount of like cognitive work that your brain has to do to decode letters and assemble them into words and do all this kind of stuff, like I mean, any kind of back of the envelope calculation, you have to be keeping track of more than like three or four things at a time. But it’s just because you’re not consciously keeping track of them, your brains found some way to, like, let other parts of the brain do those calculations for you. And similar, there’s all sorts of like models. Chunking is one of them, like retrieve like there’s all these sorts of models for like how the memory palaces, it’s, well, I’m not even talking about like, that’s a very explicit technique of using a memory palace. But I mean, that would be one way. Like, if you are trained in mnemonics, for instance, you could probably like hack the end back tests. Because if you could create visual imagery to chain these things together in enough, like fast enough, you would be able to keep up with them just telling you the numbers over and over again. And you might have like an almost infinite chain, because you just have to, like go backwards in your like link thing to, oh, you want 15 numbers back and then you just like, it’s a seven, right? Like, I’m not saying that you should. But the thing is, is that if you trained this, yes, you would have this ability, but it wouldn’t help you with all the other things that we want the working memory for, like it wouldn’t help you for like, okay, now we’re doing some kind of physics problem. And I’m going to introduce this like complex conceptual scenario where you need to like keep, like the upper limit of your working memory capacity in mind, in order to understand the problem, like the memory palaces isn’t going to work for that. So the issue is that, like, you’re kind of you’re teaching to the test, so to speak, like, if you’re training, you’re training the end back, you are probably going to get better at it. Or at least, I would say that it’s possible to get better at it in theory, but the test is no longer as valid. It’s no longer measuring what you want it to measure anymore, because it’s measuring this memory palace skill you’ve developed and not this sort of general feature of your cognition, which is what it was trying to measure in the first place. So the idea here is that this metaphor doesn’t work. The mind is not like a muscle, it doesn’t work this way. So what metaphor should you use instead? And I think a much better metaphor is that the mind is a collection of tools made out of knowledge. So what we are really trying to do when we are trying to enhance yourself mentally, is expand the amount of knowledge we have. And I don’t just mean book knowledge, but I also mean skills, procedural skills, these heuristics, these strong methods, the larger this collection is and the more acutely you’re able to tune what knowledge you’re able to recall in particular situations, the effectively the smarter you are. And so this is an incredibly important point. So it suggests a different practice regimen. It doesn’t suggest something like go to the gym, and I do my 10 reps of this every day. It’s expanding the things you know, it’s learning about more stuff. It’s having more examples. It’s having more different scenarios where you’ve applied knowledge in the past. I mean, that is a lot of work. There’s no way around it. But it is sort of a profitable path for being smarter, as opposed to, you know, doing the brain training games, which, I mean, admittedly, it’s probably a dead end.

Clint Murphy  1:12:28

Let’s finish up with one on the feedback section. And one of the important things you talk about is not just learning, but this idea of unlearning. It really made me think of a similar example, when I was working with a coach. And we were, you know, we talked earlier about taking behaviors from people. But the other half of that is how do I drop behaviors in the first half of the way we did, it was through this box, and it was starting with unconscious behaviors that are undesired. So let’s call it bad behavior, I’m not aware of it, the first thing to do was to make yourself aware of it. So now we have bad behavior, but we’re aware of when we do it, then it was, hey, let’s replace bad behavior with good behavior. And we still have to be aware of it. Because we’re, it’s still okay, we’re learning. But we’re gonna do that good behavior long enough, until the good behavior becomes we’re unaware of it. Now we’ve adopted it. Now we can pick another bad behavior that we want to replace. Yeah. So when we think of unlearning and you had like these three steps? Is that a similar path to the unlearning? Is that how you look at it?

Scott Young  1:16:16

Yeah, so I mean, the research is kind of funny. I know a lot of psychologists that don’t like the word unlearning, because unlearning implies erasure. And it’s not even clear that that’s possible, it’s not even clear that we can actually in this wave, truly forget things. So once you’ve learned something, it may be just something that’s like, you’ve made a kind of permanent mark on your brain. So a lot of what I learning is, is really learning something new, that competes or the old thing. So there’s lots of different ways that this applies. I mean, in the context of that chapter, I’m talking about Tiger Woods and his somewhat maligned frequent swing coach changes, where he’s like rebuilding his swing multiple times where he’s at the peak of his career. And you know, some of those probably paid off for them, maybe not all of them did. But one of the things to illustrate was, you know, the athleticism that was created and the risk involved, because when you have a very well learned motor behavior, and then you want to do something differently, it’s very difficult to get that new behavior to a level of automaticity, that it will successfully compete with the old one. And particularly under stress, like in a tournament, or this kind of thing, often, the old pattern re emerges in ways that are not helpful, right? Like you, you’re trying to do a shot in a certain way. And then you do it in the old way. And so it has sort of unexpected effects, it’s going to be worse than what you were going to be doing even if you hadn’t learned the new way. So the first thing to do is if we’re going to learn a skill, where that’s going to be the likely outcome, that we’re going to have a ton and ton of practice doing something a particular way, then we want to try to get it right from the beginning, or at least in the ballpark from the beginning. Now I don’t want to overly stress people because like, Am I doing this the right way. But what it means is that, you know, if I’m learning to play the piano, for instance, I want to have the right hand positions. Because if I had the wrong hand positions, it might be fine for the beginning, but I’m going to reach a point where maybe I’m not doing it efficiently anymore. And it’s gonna be really hard for me to change because I’ve been doing it wrong for so long that it’s really well ingrained. So that’s the first lesson. The second lesson is that again, as you said, Often we’re unaware of these things, we kind of get in a flow state when we’re applying skills. And so we need a certain amount of deliberateness to sort of kick us back to be able to even be aware of how we’re performing a skill. Now, the right level of awareness matters to here because again, with motor skills with physical skills, you’re using your muscles, awareness on the wrong part of the skill can actually be harmful. So if you’re swinging a golf club, for instance, and you’re very focused on how your body is moving, it turns out to be pretty bad. For like learning to golf, it’s much better to focus on let’s say, the club face. And similarly with sport like tennis, if you’re sort of like, well, you need to like you were using this example earlier of like, well, you need to move your elbow like two degrees in, that’s probably really bad advice to give someone because focusing on where your elbows moving is almost certainly going to result in like poor learning of that skill. Instead, you want to design constraints that will naturally move you away from the bad pattern. So an example that I can think of for racquet sports is let’s say you hit the ball, but you’re not consistently hitting into the center of the racket, maybe you just don’t have enough accuracy, or you have a bias you’d like to hit it from the top of the rack after some coaches made this determination. Like one thing you would do is just like work with the fake racket that has like a really small head, because now it won’t work, it won’t work if you try to hit it on the outside. And so this is a way of changing the constraints of the environment to force you to sort of adapt your motor skill in a new direction. And so that can often work with a lot of skills where it’s hard to be to deliberate about doing it and still perform the skill. If you’re writing for instance, and you are trying to like improve how you write, you can think about different constraints that you might add. So like a constraint might be you know, if I’m trying to improve my ability to do research, it’s like well, I’m gonna write this in a journalistic style. So I’m not going to be saying my own opinion, I’m only going to be citing experts opinions. Like that’s one constraint that if you felt like you know, I get too self indulgent and I’m just saying, This is what I think this is what I think I’m going to do that or you get to the top To say, you know, I’m not going to say anything if I want to have something that’s more personal. So these kinds of different constraints can push you away from well learn patterns of behavior. That’s another way of doing it too is that by changing the constraints of the environment, you can force yourself to practice in a different way. Because obviously, a new way of doing it is more effortful than the old way. And so that is such a gravity on our performance. It makes it hard to change out of things, even when we know we’re not doing it the best way possible.

Clint Murphy  1:20:25

Love it. So that was a lot for our audience to chew on today. I love it. You have time for a couple quick, rapid fire questions. Yeah, let’s do it. I don’t think we had rapid fire questions last time you were on the show. You know, what’s one of the books that’s had the most impact on your life, Scott?

Scott Young  1:20:40

Oh, too many. But I think David Allen’s Getting Things Done is probably one of my favorite from the productivity genre.

Clint Murphy  1:20:47

Love it. Love it. What’s on the shelf right now? What are you I see a lot behind you on the shelf right now. But what are you chewing on and reading on at the moment that you’re enjoying?

Scott Young  1:20:54

Yeah, so I have a few different books that I’m going through right now. One is going through sort of a classic book called Parallel Distributed Processing, which is about machine learning. This is like one of the like, first books in that sort of sequence. I read the first part, but I’m reading the second part now. And I have another book by a Japanese historian that’s talking about sort of historically different ways of thinking in East Asia. So nothing related to anything I’m writing about right now. But that’s how I like it.

Clint Murphy  1:21:19

What is something that Scott has bought in the last year under, let’s say, $2,000. And you’ve thought to yourself, this was a good buy, I’m glad I made this investment. I can’t believe I took so long.

Scott Young  1:21:32

I think having a good backpack. I had a better backpack. And I think like having the ability to like store the right amount of stuff and not have it be too heavy. This was a an investment that I was very happy with.

Clint Murphy  1:21:40

K, and what’s one mindset shift habit or behavior change that has had the most impact on your life?

Scott Young  1:21:49

I think and you know, not to be dissuasive of your being on Twitter thing. But getting off of social media has had one of the biggest positive impact on my life.

Clint Murphy  1:21:59

Yeah, I could see that. That makes’s sense. Perfect. And where can our audience find you?

Scott Young  1:22:06

So they can go to my website that ScottHYoung.com. ScottHYoung.com. And I have, you know, over 1000 articles about productivity, self improvement, learning in particular, also the book Get Better at Anything and the previous book Ultra Learning, available on Amazon, Audible wherever you get your books.

Clint Murphy  1:22:24

And then I always want to make sure the, you know, we went wide, we went deep. Yeah, but is there anything we didn’t hit that you want to leave the audience with?

Scott Young  1:22:33

I mean, that’s the thing I love about writing books in this way, where you cover a lot of different stuff. Is that like, there’s tons of chapters, we didn’t even touch on it. Sure. There’s lots of stuff. Yeah. Like, I could talk about this probably later in probably like a 10 hour conversation. Like really like, Okay, did we talk about everything? I think we talked about everything. So I just enjoy having these conversations with you. And I’m glad we got to explore some of these ideas. And hopefully that you know, if someone’s listened this long, hopefully there’ll be interested in listening further in the book.

Clint Murphy  1:23:01

Yeah, there’s so much more that we didn’t even touch on and even chapters we touched on, you know, we maybe touched on one of the five takeaways so definitely a lot to absorb and a lot for people to pick up. Go get the book grab, Ultra Learning while you’re at it. It’s one of my favorite books on learning. So you know, when there was the opportunity to talk again, for the people that are listening, they mean, I’d sort of stopped talking to guests and taken a bit of a hiatus but I broke the hiatus so I started recording again because I couldn’t not. So go out get the book and enjoy it. Sp thanks Scott.

Scott Young  1:23:34

Thank you.

Clint Murphy  1:23:40

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