Update: Get Better at Anything, with Scott H. Young (Science, Education, Learning, Self-Improvement)

This episode delves into effective learning strategies and the science of mastery with author Scott H. Young.

1. Mastery involves understanding the psychological triggers of learning.
2. Intrinsic talents play a role, but they are not the sole determinants of success.
3. Effective learning heavily relies on social interactions and learning from others.
4. Mastery is applicable to both mundane tasks and specialized skills.
5. Young introduces a structured approach to improve learning efficiency through his new book.

1. Introduction

Scott Young discusses his background and the motivation behind his new book. He shares personal updates, including becoming a father. Scott Young: "I've spent the last five years working on this new book."

2. The Science of Mastery

Young explains the concept of mastery and its relevance not only to professionals but also to everyday learners. Scott Young: "Mastery isn't just for the elite; it's for anyone who wants to improve."

3. Learning from Others

The importance of social learning and its impact on personal and professional development are discussed. Scott Young: "We learn most of what we know from other people."

4. Challenges in Learning

Young talks about the common barriers to learning and how to overcome them using various strategies. Scott Young: "It's often about overcoming the barriers that we face in learning."

5. Conclusion and Takeaways

Summarization of key points and where listeners can find Young's book. Scott Young: "I hope this book helps people understand the art and science of learning."

1. Embrace continuous learning: Apply Young's strategies to stay curious and engaged in learning new skills.
2. Leverage social learning: Learn from others as much as possible through collaboration and social interaction.
3. Understand your learning style: Tailor your learning methods to suit your personal preferences and strengths.
4. Set clear goals: Define what you want to achieve in your learning endeavors to maintain focus and motivation.
5. Reflect on progress: Regularly assess your learning journey to identify areas for improvement and celebrate successes.

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

People

Scott H. Young

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Books

"Get Better at Anything" by Scott H. Young

Guest Name(s):

Scott H. Young

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Scott Young
What it is that makes humans so great is that we're just so much smarter than every other animal. That's not what it is. It's that we are really good social learners. Chimps, despite their problem solving ability, are really bad at learning from other people. It's so ironic.

We like to say monkey see, monkey do, but it's not. Monkeys can't see and do. Top leaders meaningful conversation actionable advice bulldoze complacency ignite inspiration create impact produced by southwestern family of companies, this is the action catalyst.

Are you interested in advertising? With the action catalyst, our listeners could be hearing about your brand right here, right now. For details, shoot us an email@infoctioncatalyst.com dot. Scott Young is an author, programmer and entrepreneur whose book ultra Learning was an international success. We hosted Scott on the action Catalyst back in 2019, but now he's back with a new book, get better at anything.

Who doesn't want to do that? Scott, welcome back. And before we dive into the new book, catch us up on what's been going on in your life since your last appearance. Yeah, I mean, I became a father. I have two kids now.

Scott Young
Um, I also spent a good chunk of the last five years working on this new book. So reading hundreds of books, hundreds of papers to make something new that I thought would be helpful to people. So the new book, get better at anything, is a deep dive into the science of mastery. To start us off, let's set the table and tell us exactly how you define mastery. Well, so the thing I bring this up is that why I was so interested in writing this book is because we all know the experience of things that you've spent a lot of time doing, and you're just, you don't get that much better at it or things that you tried it and you failed at it.

You weren't very good at it. And we also have experiences of, like, oh, we're just clicked and you just got it, and you got really good at it. And for me, you know, those highs and lows can be so extreme. Like the, oh, my God, I found a new hobby, a new sport, I got a new job. I'm being allotted by my peers versus, man, I suck at this.

It can be such a big extreme emotionally to try to understand, well, what are the ingredients? What are the reasons why? Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. So the book is not specifically about, like, how to become tiger woods at your golf game or how to become a world concert violinist. It's to be better.

How do we figure out wherever you are, whether you are just at the beginning or whether you are, you know, you've spent decades doing something. How do we get better? And what are those ingredients? And I think diving into the stories, the research, the science, the kind of, like, systems of learning, that was really fun for me to try to bring that out so that these principles could be available to people who want to use them. Is there anything that it's better to just be okay at rather than great?

I mean, the truth is that most of the things that we do, we don't really care to get better at it. Like, I know if I went on YouTube right now and I looked at, like, videos on how to tie your shoes, I could find, like, someone doing some, like, crazy knot that I've never heard of before that, like, doesn't come untied, but, like, for me, I don't need to do that. Like, I'm fine tying my shoes. 99.999% of the things that you do in your life is okay to do whatever you're doing. How you do your laundry, how you walk to work, how you do everything.

But the thing is, is it's just because that .001% of the things that we're doing loom so large in our life, you know, the skill that we do at our job that determines whether or not we get a promotion, like the hobby, whether or not we enjoy it, really depends on, you know, do we feel like we're good at it? Do we feel like we could get better at it? And so I wrote this book for that. Zero, zero, 1%. So you're absolutely right.

There's tons of things where, you know what? I'm not going to worry about getting better at this, but for the things where I want to get better at this, and you don't know how. That's what I wrote the book for. You mentioned the balance of joy and proficiency, kind of a chicken and the egg thing. Which do you think leads into the other?

I mean, you hit the nail on the head. Like, I have a whole chapter where I write about Albert Banduras theory of self efficacy, and this was his idea that our motivation to do things comes not just from, like, would this be good for us? But also, like, am I capable of taking the actions that are necessary? And if you're not capable, the motivation might be low, even if the outcome is very valuable. And this plays into learning in a lot of ways, because if we don't know that we can do something, if we don't think that we can achieve something, then our motivation to pursue it goes down dramatically.

And in some ways, this is adaptive. I don't want to say this is like a bug in our software. There's a million things you could be doing. It often makes sense to do the things that come easier to you. This is just sort of natural hardwiring, but where it can be disadvantageous.

If there's something you need to do, you can't avoid doing it. And you struggle in the beginning, then getting that motivation off the ground can be really hard. And similarly, you can have false starts where you, like, you start out motivated and you're doing something, but then you get stuck, and then you get frustrated and you give it up halfway. And so I think it's about recognizing this feedback loop of, like, being good at something and enjoying it and understanding that. That makes understanding, learning so important, understanding that process, because otherwise you just get in these situations where, like, well, yeah, I used to have these hobbies, but then I gave them up because unconsciously, at some point you felt stuck, or at some point you felt like, you know what?

I can't. I can't get better at this or I can't improve at it. So in some ways, learning how to learn is also about learning how to, you know, enjoy life, about learning how to enjoy your job, enjoy your hobbies, things like that. You mentioned earlier that while some people have to really learn a skill, for others, it just clicks. How do you account for that?

So there's a couple factors. I mean, obviously, and I don't want to deny it, there are people who have maybe some intrinsic intelligence, talent for a particular domain. I don't want to make the claim that, like, well, Tiger woods, just because of, like, something his dad did, was the reason why he's, like, on the Mike Douglas show at two years old, lobbing golf balls. I mean, that's just. That's just incredible, right?

And people tend to fixate on talent, but I kind of don't like talent. Not because, you know, it's inconvenient for my book, but just because it's sort of a residual concept. It's sort of just like, well, this is the stuff we can't explain, so therefore, it's talent. Right. And one of the things that we've learned from psychology is, is the importance of background knowledge and background experience.

So I know there's this study that I really like that was talking about reading ability, and they were looking at people reading sort of a description of a baseball game. And what they found is that the amount that people learned from this context depended way more on whether they knew about baseball than whether they were good readers. So I think what happens is that sometimes you maybe have a little bit of ability. You have some extra ability, and you gain some proficiency in a skill. And maybe the environment also works out so that, like, you know, maybe you're not doing that great at it in the beginning, but because, let's say you're a kid or because of the environment you're in, you're not getting punished, you develop some of this proficiency, then you move to a different environment, and you're stacked up against people who either have tons of proficiency or who've never taken it before.

And depending on where you're put in that group, you can feel like, oh, I'm actually. I have a lot of aptitude for this. And so you keep going on, and you get better at it, and other people don't. You know, my favorite story about this is I had a friend is a woman who got a masters in civil engineering. So this is like, you know, she's doing, like, advanced calculus and this kind of stuff.

And she told me with a straight face, you know what? I did this intro programming class, and I was just. I wasn't smart enough to do it. And it was like, how could you say that? Well, the reason she said that is because the other kids in the class were popular with people who, like, picked up programming in high school.

So she's going in there with zero, they're going there with ten, and she just feels like, oh, I can't do this. And so, again, to me, I think, like, going back to principles, going back to, what are the factors that motivate learning? They don't transform you as a golfer into Tiger woods, but they give you a map. They give you a way to make progress. And making progress, I think, ultimately, is what it's about.

In the book, you list out three main steps in the roadmap to learning. Could you share those with us? Yeah. So the book is organized around these three sections, these three big ideas that influence learning. The first is, see, this is the idea that actually, most of what we know how to do comes from other people.

Scott Young
So things that make it easier to learn from other people will accelerate our progress. Things that make it harder to learn from other people will slow our progress. And you can see this across many domains. Like, you know, the example I used to open the book is Tetris proficiency, whereas, like, the game was super popular and people are obsessed with it, but actually, if you look at their scores and their rankings, they're not actually that good. The kids, they're like 13 year old kids who play Tetris today who are obsessed with the game are much better.

And the reason why, because the Internet created the ability to like every single technique and strategy is now learnable and accessible and instant. You can watch replays of the best players playing the game, whereas before it was just like, you know, your big brother's friend who could live. You like, oh, yeah, you got to do this or something to get at the game. And I mean, Tetris is a bit of a trivial example, but the principle is universal. This ability to learn from others and whether or not it's easy or not makes a huge difference.

The second is do. Obviously, to get good at something requires a lot of practice, but there's a lot of nuance to this. The kind of practice matters, too. Our brains are effort saving machines. We are hardwired to try to avoid expending effort.

And expending effort is often what's required for learning. And so often what we get involved with this practice is trying to overcome this natural tendency to not use effort. So, an example I talk about is, like, retrieval practice is a big idea. This is the idea that we remember things better when we try to remember them than when we see them right in front of us. So if you already have encountered some information and you try to recall it, that active effort is going to make you remember it more, because it's as if the brain saying, oh, well, the paper with the answers is in front of me, so I don't actually need to store this in my head.

And so this do component, I also break this down into four, like, maxims that are covering some of these ideas, but fine tuning the practice, super important. And then the last one, of course, is getting feedback corrections for our actions. Not just a teacher saying, do this right, just do this this way. But also just even just interacting with the situation we're having. Like, realistic practice is so important for gaining proficiency and something that's often missing when we're starting out learning skills.

Are those three weighted at all, or is there a resistance to one over the others? I could see potential resistance to feedback, for example. So I guess it depends on the feedback we're talking about, too, because in some ways, like, if you are skiing down a mountain, the most important feedback is the one coming from the hill through your feet. Like, if you didn't have that, you couldn't learn to ski. So I take feedback in this kind of broader sense than just like, you know, the teacher's red pen.

Scott Young
But the thing I would say, the thing I would say about that is that these three ingredients, it's like if you're making a cake, you need like flour, sugar, and like an egg or something. And if you're missing one, it's not going to taste good. And so I think part of the problem is recognizing when one of these elements is deficient, and it's going to really depend on your situation. You know, we were talking about tetris. This sort of being able to see other players was the major breakthrough.

Players playing the game. They got tons of practice. When you play the game, you know, whether you win or lose, you get quick, immediate feedback. That wasn't the problem. The problem was that techniques which were rather subtle, which were not obvious and took a while to develop, someone, could develop it, but then it would stay with that person, it wouldn't get transmitted.

And this is true in many domains that we struggle to learn because the best practices, the way to do it, are stuck inside the heads of experts and we have difficulty getting it out. But for other skills, it's not like that. Like, if you want to learn, I don't know if you want to learn basic math or something like that. There are like thousands of books and like, every single thing giving you how to do it. The difficulty is often getting practice, getting feedback, figuring out, well, what are the concepts that I have that are mistaken?

Getting the right level of practice, that's the difficulty. So in my mind, you know, I kind of present the book not so much of a, it's more like if you had a recipe and you're like, oh, this is what's missing, or this is what is happening. And it's going to vary from person to person. But laying out all the ingredients is very important. I was really grateful to be able to tie in Joseph Henrik.

He's a Harvard anthropologist and economist. His work on cultural evolution. And he makes the argument, kind of somewhat provocatively, that there is some experimental evidence that shows that some of the great apes, like chimps and orangutans, when you compare them to small children. And admittedly, we're not talking about adults, partly because just all adults are encultured and socialized, possible to remove that. But when you're dealing with very young children, they actually do better than those children at some kinds of raw problem solving tasks.

I mean, one of my favorite demonstrations is he showed this video. It's a chimp doing some kind of memory task. There's the numbers one to ten on a grid, and they like, blink on and then they disappear immediately. And it's like, incredible. The chimp knows to like go like one in order of all these ten.

And it just goes like, click click, click, click, click, click, click click. And it gets it right, like it's practiced. But at the same time, I mean, this is a chimp. This is not even a person and is doing it so well. And he uses these examples to sort of challenge the idea that, like, what it is that makes humans so great is that we're just so much smarter than every other animal.

And he argues that's not what it is. It's that we are really good social learners. Chimps, despite their problem solving ability, are really bad at learning from other people. And so I just, I love this because it's so ironic. We, we like to say monkey see, monkey do, but it's not.

It's because monkeys can't see and do. It's because they can't do that. That really makes a massive gulf in our proficiency. If we didn't have all our accumulated culture, if we didn't have this imitative ability to learn from the examples of other people, I mean, people are really inept. He gives his stories of just explorers getting lost in unfamiliar lands and just doing things that to the native inhabitants.

It just seems so stupid because of this. I think this is our real human strength and how we're able to tweak that makes a big difference. And these principles don't just apply to hard skills. You say they work in the artistic realm as well, and we're even on display in the renaissance. Part of the problem with talking about the scientific research is that a lot of the cognitive psychology is really grounded in math and this kind of stuff.

So a lot of the original research is done with this. And it's just like, I can't do another chapter that has math. And so this was a little bit my own kind of dovetailing because you see a lot of the same themes in different subjects. And so one of the themes in mathematics research was this kind of tension between showing people how to do it and letting them solve the problems themselves. And I found John Swellers work to be really instructive here is that hes kind of created this edifice of research called cognitive load theory, which tries to explain when its more beneficial to solve a problem yourself and when its more beneficial to see a demonstration.

And he kind of proposes, somewhat counterintuitively, that it is possible to solve problems without learning how to solve them. It's possible to do something to solve the problem and not infer, like, well, this is the procedure for solving problems of this type. And his theory there is that part of the issue is that when you're solving a problem, it's very mentally demanding, and that mental bandwidth is devoted to solving the problem and not recognizing what the pattern is for solving it. And there is something analogous here in artistic training, because during the Renaissance, Leonardo, da Vinci, Botticelli, Mikani, Otisian, these, like, great painters worked under an apprenticeship system. And this wasn't like some kind of design that, like, oh, this is the right way to teach.

It was just because this was an artisanal class of people who were like, they weren't seen as artists. They were seen as, like, laborers, right? And Leonardo was actually one of the first people to sort of change this perception. But the idea was that you go to this studio and they'd get you like, okay, we're going to show you how to paint leaves, and then you're going to paint leaves, and you're going to work on that. Work on that.

Now you're going to paint this face, you're going to work on this. And this idea of this, like, progression from simple elements, copying someone and then working on it. And then as you get better and better, you're, like, developing your own ability, and you're developing these sort of more sophisticated creative talents. This very much mirrors a lot of John swellers work with mathematics and learning. And I also think it's very interesting that in a similar way in artistic movements have kind of, you know, the pendulum swings back and forth.

But for a long time, there was a swing away from this. There was this idea of, like, teaching kids how to draw perspective, teaching them these basic principles, getting them to go through drills, getting them to work with black and white before color, all these ideas that were really foundational not only to the renaissance, but the whole academy system that produced just fantastic artists was seen as this is dated. We want people to be creative and use their creativity and just get them to use ideas. And in some ways, that really stunted a lot of artist development. You have experts, you have people who had a lot of proficiency that managed to persevere nonetheless.

But I thought that was very fascinating that these, these principles that, you know, are in such wildly different domains still apply. And the other thing, too, which creates attention. And I, like, I just had a conversation with someone else about this. But as you get better in a skill, the problem solving becomes more important because you are able to kind of decompose the skill into different chunks in your mind so that you can do it with less bandwidth. So it just to use an example, like, think about the first time you drove a car, like how much you had to think about all the little things you had to do.

And now, I mean, you can listen to a podcast, maybe you're listening to this one right now about driving a car and you've just missed your turn off or whatever, because it's so obvious to you. And this tendency for skills to be extremely effortful, to go to, almost automatic, is universal across skills. But what it means is that what works best for learning is also going to change depending on where you're at in the beginning, seeing examples are important because solving the problem is so taxing that you might not realize, oh, all the problems are solved this way, you know, because you're just kind of like, you know, fidgeting with things to try to figure them out. And so that's why the examples and instructions are so beneficial at that stage. But as you get later on and you know those things and you have them kind of in the back of your head, then the practice, the problem solving, works on the other end.

Like we were talking about, about this retrieval. Like, if you have the pattern in memory and you can recall it, it strengthens that memory more. It adapts it to more of that situation. And so this tension often comes up, because when you have someone teaching a class, when you have someone telling you, well, what's the right way to learn something, they're usually an expert. They're usually on that end, where, like, they benefit more from experimentation, from practice, from problem solving, from, like, increasing the difficulty.

And that's not necessarily what's beneficial at the early stage. So I find this sort of framework, this way of thinking about it, very valuable because it's not just about what's the right learning technique, but it's like, when does that technique matter? When is it helpful for you? So what's something that you personally have learned lately that you've applied these steps to yourself? Part of the reason my interest in this subject is because I just have such a, like, a laundry list of things that I want to learn.

So very selfishly, I'm, like, trying to learn it so that I can understand how those work. So, I mean, something that I've been doing recently is painting. I really like painting. Particularly, I've been doing, like, watercolor painting, which if you're not involved in this kind of sphere, you don't know anything about it. One of the real challenges of it is that unlike oil painting, where you can kind of paint over, so if you make a mistake, you can paint over it.

Watercolor is like, is, is transparent. So once you put something down and it dries, you're kind of stuck with it. And so it does create challenges because you're a little bit more technically constrained. Like with oil painting, you can kind of almost do anything you want if you just, like, are painstaking enough, whereas watercolor, you know, it's drying time and this kind of thing. And so these principles that I've been sort of looking at have definitely played a factor because it's been looking at like, well, why am I getting stuck here?

Like, when I'm having difficulties? And it's sort of like, well, is the issue that I need more instruction or is the issue that I'm trying to do practice, but the practice is too complicated and I need to make it simpler. And I don't know, I just, to me, a lot of these research and all these things have been feeding back into my own practice. Maybe even when I get a chance to finish the promotion for this book, I might even do a project specifically about that, about applying these techniques to this hobby of mine. I mean, the thing that you realize when you're doing research on this topic is like, oh, my God, this is such a big topic.

There's so many things you could talk about to cull it down to a book. I think the bibliography has 500 references to get it down to, okay, this is manageable. This is understandable for a person. That was the real challenge of this book, was not how do I fill another chapter, but what do I got? So this book, I hope people will find it valuable.

I hope they'll enjoy the journey through stories that to me, I had to write them because I found them so fascinating when I first encountered them. Really just, you know, even if they just enjoy the ride, maybe it'll give them some tips for, for how they can improve the skill they care about. So, I mean, the book is available Amazon, audible, wherever you get your books. And, and they can also come check out my website at scott hm.com if they want to read some of my essays or find out more about the understanding the art and science of the learning. Scott, thanks for joining us today.

Thank you so much. It's been great being here. Thanks.

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