Bookworm Transcripts

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All right, Joe, both you and I have the same follow up from last time, which is to talk

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about our failures.

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I think we should probably start by talking about how we failed so we can complete this

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one.

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Okay.

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How did you fail?

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How did I fail?

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Well, this is harder than I thought it was going to be.

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Like I knew I was going to do this, but now that we're here, it's kind of difficult.

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Actually, so like as in, it's harder to talk about it or it's harder to admit it or...

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Yeah, it's easy to conceptually say, "Yeah, I want to talk about my failures."

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But actually doing it is something totally different, which is kind of the point why

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I decided to open with this.

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So I guess I'll talk about one of the things that I consider a failure over the last couple

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of weeks is that I have been trying to arrange things in my life so that I am not stressed

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out by a long list of things that I should be doing, but I found myself creating a situation

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where I couldn't live up to my own expectations.

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It wasn't even impacted or influenced by somebody else saying, "Hey, you should really be doing

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this."

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I just kind of did it to myself, but last week it kind of all came to a head.

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I couldn't keep up and I noticed I was in a bit of a funk for a couple of days.

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And I feel like it took somebody calling me on it for me to even realize that this was

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happening and it was affecting my relationships with other people, not just my family even,

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but people at church, people that are around me every day.

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They saw it, I didn't, and right away I'm like, "I did it again, failed again, and I

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better talk about this on bookworm since that's what we said we were going to do."

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Nice.

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I'm sorry.

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So, Mike is a failure.

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Have you failed?

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Yes.

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I can't say that I have something that's like that large to say here, but I had quite

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a few cases.

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I work in IT, so I screw things up a lot.

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I've just become more willing to talk about those failures.

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One of those in particular that I was doing this, I think it was right after we recorded,

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actually.

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A couple of days after that, I got a phone call on a Sunday afternoon and it was from

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our youth worship band leader who had a very simple question.

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Do you know where our keyboard is?

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Yep.

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It's in the back of my truck.

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Whoops.

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Totally screwed that one up.

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I was supposed to have set up a handful of things on that stage for them before Sunday

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night and I just completely spaced.

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I had it written down.

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I just didn't even get to the list, so it didn't even register.

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I had to, last minute, after dinner, hustle, take a keyboard back to the church, set it

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all up, make sure they were ready to go, and then come home, put the girls down for bed.

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Don't do that again.

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But, you know, I simply told them, I'm sorry, I just completely screwed this one up.

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I will do my best not to make this happen again.

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So yes, despite all the Omni-focused stuff and reminders and do app and all the things

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that are supposed to tell Joe what he should be doing, I still forget things and screw them

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up.

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Such is life.

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Yeah.

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It's kind of interesting, I think, like our examples here, and I hope this kind of inspires

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some other people to think about maybe some of the ways that they've failed because my

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takeaway from doing this exercise live on the air is that...

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Which he did not warn me about, by the way.

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Nope, I just threw this on you.

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Figured it's about time I got you back somehow.

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No, but the interesting thing observation right now, I think, is that as we share these things,

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no matter how big the failure happens to be, it doesn't have to be a fatal mistake.

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Like, once you verbalize these things and you recognize that, yeah, I made a mistake,

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it's kind of like the act of expressing that you have failed as the words come out of your

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mouth that lessens the gravity of the thing.

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It's like that's the thing that allows you to move on to the next thing, which I think

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was kind of what Ed Catmull was getting at when he was talking about in the last book

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Creativity and How They Were.

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I'm trying to fail as fast as they could because it's like, okay, until we fail and recognize

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that we failed, then we're never going to get to where we really want to go.

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So we're not looking to fail, but when it happens, we just recognize it.

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And then from there, we can course correct.

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That's kind of like a save point for us, you know, and we can continue on our journey.

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So there, now we can both check off our action items.

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I do have one more action item.

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I do.

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Yeah, you want to talk about this one?

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Yeah.

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I'm trying to take the concepts and principles that came from the book, Creativity, Inc, about

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how to build a culture and an organization that is able to continue to be creative and

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successful in that creative endeavor.

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I was trying to figure out how does this apply to our church because I feel like our nonprofit

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religious organization could follow a lot of these same principles and go down that

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same path.

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And although I don't have anything really concrete I can share here, I can say that

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it's a fascinating endeavor to at least explore with other people in leadership at the church

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because the two or three, four people that I talked to about it all immediately saw how

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the church is a very creative organization and had all kinds of questions about it.

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So those have at least started, but I don't know that I could really share that.

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It's not really my place to do that because it comes from my leadership at the church

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and all buying closed doors at this point.

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So sorry, I can't say much more than that.

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So, but it has been a fascinating conversation to say the least.

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Nice.

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There's that.

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One last thing before we jump into today's book, and I told Mike this as we were jumping

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on here, I've been doing a bunch of things on Instagram lately and trying to get that

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where I want it to be and have been doing some things with like the Instagram stories

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here and there.

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So if you are on Instagram and you want to see some book stuff and you want to keep up

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with Bookworm link in the show notes, click the link, follow us.

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I never thought that of the two of us, you would be the one driving all the social media

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stuff, but good job.

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I know, right?

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It's one of those things where I don't like a handful of people have already reached out

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to me and said, "Joe, you must be on this a lot."

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No, no, I just spent some time early on in the week and set it all up.

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And then I mostly just sit back and watch.

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So I get to watch it just like everyone else.

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Oh, yeah, I forgot I said that.

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Yeah.

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Oh, right.

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I did set that up.

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That's kind of cool.

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Nice.

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That's a cool picture.

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Good job, Mike.

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Today's book is "Ultra Learning" by Scott Young.

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This was my pick.

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It was a highly recommended book from the Bookworm Club.

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And the basic premise of this is applying this idea called "Ultra Learning" to advance

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the skills that you want to develop without doing it the traditional way.

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I think about this as a book that teaches you how to learn outside the traditional learning

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mechanisms.

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Yeah.

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So it actually starts in the first part here, which I've labeled what is "Ultra Learning."

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Let's actually just briefly talk about the structure of this book because you probably

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could break it down into a couple of different sections, but he doesn't.

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He's got a bunch of different chapters.

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There's 14 different chapters.

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We're not going to try to go through all of them.

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I've attempted to put them into sections in our outline here.

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So chapter one is, "Can you get an MIT education without going to MIT?"

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This is based off of an experiment that Scott Young did.

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We'll get into that in a second here.

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Chapter two, "Why Ultra Learning Matters."

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Chapter three, "How to Become an Ultra Learner."

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So these three, I think, maybe comprise a section, but I've broken it into two points.

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What is "Ultra Learning?"

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Then "How to Become an Ultra Learner?"

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Because there's a couple different things inside of each of those that will unpack.

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And then the majority of the book is nine different principles of "Ultra Learning," which

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in the mind of a file is kind of weird because it's like chapter four, principle one, chapter

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five, principle two, chapter six, principle three.

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Yeah.

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Because there is no section header for these, right?

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Right.

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But there are nine principles that he talks about.

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So the first principle is, "Metal Learning," principle two is, "Focus," principle three

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is, "Directness," principle four is, "Drill," principle five is, "Retrieval," principle

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six is, "Feedback," principle seven, "Retention," principle eight, "Intuition," principle nine

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experimentation.

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And then picking up in chapter 13, your first "Ultra Learning Project."

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I've got steps for you to apply this stuff and pick an "Ultra Learning Project" for yourself.

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And then chapter 14, "An Unconventional Education," talks about how you can encourage others to

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embrace "Ultra Learning," whether those be children, coworkers, etc.

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So that's the bones of the book.

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We're going to start here with what I'll call the first section, just what is "Ultra Learning."

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Because again, we're not trying to recreate everything that's in this book.

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We want to tease out some of the key concepts that really stood out to us.

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But it is interesting how he starts with what he terms as the MIT challenge.

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Before you get too far into that, can I, a couple of things here?

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One, the forward on this is written by James Clear.

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This is after, so it's a recent book.

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It's a 2019 book, right?

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Yes.

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And...

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I think so.

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James Clear wrote this after "Atomic Habits" was out, or at least in its process of coming

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out.

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And he absolutely loves a lot of the stuff in this book.

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It also has a lot of accolades from Cal Newport as well.

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So between those two, I can't say that this was a book that was on my radar.

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But because those two have such high remarks about this, it kind of put it at another level

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for me before I even got into it.

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So just wanted to point that out.

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There is quite a bit of credibility behind this, even though it's been out very short

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amount of time.

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Yes.

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Yeah.

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Thanks for pointing that out.

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It's kind of funny if you look at the very last, like at the end of the book, he's got

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like his page of thanks.

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Right.

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Right.

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And he says, "Thank you to Mr. Calvin Newport."

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Yes.

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Or some of her heard him called Calvin.

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I'm like, "Wait a second.

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Oh, Cal Newport."

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Right.

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Who are you talking about?

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Who's Calvin?

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Yeah.

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Makes sense, though.

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I mean, these three guys seem like peas in a pod.

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Yes.

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Yes.

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So Scott Young, going back to chapter one, his story, which kind of lays the groundwork

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for everything that's in this book is what he calls the MIT Challenge.

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This is when he wanted to get an MIT degree.

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So a little bit of his background briefly, he went to the University of Manitoba.

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He got a bachelor's of commerce degree.

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He didn't like it, but he also didn't like the idea of going back to school, taking out

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more loans and investing several years to get a different degree.

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So he found some MIT classes online for free.

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He signed up.

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He decided to try to get a degree without the paperwork through these free online classes,

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because all he wanted was the skills.

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So he tried to recreate an MIT computer science degree using these free online courses and

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then challenge himself to do it in only 12 months.

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So the book starts with the story of him right before he takes a final exam for one

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of these classes that he signed up for.

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And he's basically cranking through one of these classes every week.

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So he's like, this is really stressful.

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I'm taking his final exam on stuff that I just started learning this week.

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And next week, I have to do it again, which is not something you really want to hear if

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you're going to MIT.

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Yeah, true.

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Oh, this guy just went through my entire class in a week.

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Yep.

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That's that's not something you really want to hear.

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Yeah.

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Well, I have my own buyer's remorse around this from when we went through the personal

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NBA to tell you the truth, because I went to a private liberal arts college here in Wisconsin,

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which was super expensive and got a business degree.

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And when we went through the personal NBA, I think I learned more about business from

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that book than I did in the year.

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I remember that.

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100,000 plus, you know, I invested in the degree.

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So yeah, there's a lot of other reasons you may want to go to college.

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But to get the skills that are going to help you in the workplace is not the primary one,

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especially for something like a business degree.

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I remember looking at the $100 NBA by Omar Zenhome when it came out.

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Yeah.

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Omar is a pretty smart guy.

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And his story, I think, kind of articulates this really well.

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I'm going to paraphrase it.

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But basically, he was teaching business at a university, if I remember correctly, and

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he wanted to implement some new material into the curriculum because everything in the curriculum

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was basically like, here's how you manage people in a factory.

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He's like, well, that's not going to help my students in the 21st century.

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So he found some stuff.

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He submitted it and like, all right, we'll review this and we'll get back to you in 18

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months.

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He's like, what?

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By that point, like everything will have changed again.

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Yeah.

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So he's like, this is ridiculous.

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Like I want to equip people with the skills they need to be successful.

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Maybe the university setting isn't the right way to do it.

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So he just took what he knew and created an online video course called the $100 NBA,

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which I had gone through.

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And there's some good stuff in there.

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I don't know that you could do like an apples to apples comparison of like that versus an

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actual NBA.

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Same thing with like the personal NBA, the book.

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But the long and short of it is if you're looking for something that's going to move

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the needle, especially respective to the amount that you're going to invest in it, you can

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do a lot better than a college degree for a lot of things.

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Now, some careers, you need the degree, you need the certification, whatever.

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So that's a little bit different.

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But just in terms of what you're going to learn, ultra learning is kind of challenging

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the idea that you have to do it this way.

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For a lot of different reasons, I mean, there's something specifically about the university

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setting, the classroom setting that Scott Young argues isn't set up for ideal success.

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So you're kind of working with a broken system if you're really just trying to maximize

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the amount that you're trying to get from what you're doing.

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But therein is another principle, which I'm sure we'll unpack as we go is like, do you

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really have to pick the most effective way to do everything in your life?

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I've been thinking a lot about that lately.

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And I don't know.

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I mean, I think personally, I'm at this point where, and I've been here for a little while

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where it comes to the efficiency, like, I just am done with that.

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I want to be effective.

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But I guess what I'm realizing more and more is that effective doesn't even mean the shortest

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distance between two points necessarily.

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Sometimes it's worth going a little bit slower.

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So you can enjoy the journey.

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Yes.

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And you can apply that a lot of different ways to your specific situation.

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Only you can really define what the best way to do that is for you.

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But the tone of ultra learning is just go, go, go, on the next thing.

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And that I have to admit kind of rubbed me the wrong way.

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Sure.

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Well, I kind of have a different, a little bit different take on this because so my degree

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is an agricultural business.

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So I've got a quasi business degree as well.

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In my case, there was a lot of agriculture classes that came with that, which were extremely

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helpful and I actually still use in a lot of ways today.

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But when I went to work outside of that, I was doing soybean seed research and learned

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about all the data that goes into seed research and got into the statistical side of things.

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And although I had never taken like a statistics type of class, I had to deep dive statistics

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and understand it at a much deeper level in order to do my job well with the data side

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of it.

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And I kind of did a miniature ultra learning project.

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If you would call it that in that sense in just doing tons and tons of online research

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and reading books on it.

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And that allowed me to then pick up a job as a data analyst where I continued to work

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on those analysis skills, but it also taught me how to work with computers at a higher

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level.

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That then led to me doing a lot of the online web development stuff that I still do on the

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side today.

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So I've taken like a couple of these different scenarios, done some of these, I would call

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them small ultra learning projects in order to continually grow my overall career.

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But like what you're saying, I think Mike is like that particular, like that journey

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that I just explained to you was a 10 year journey.

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Like those two, maybe three of these projects took 10 years to work through that.

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It was not something like, Oh, I want to do this next in my career.

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I'm going to go pick up statistics and then I'm going to run with that.

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No, that wasn't the case at all.

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This was a process of me just like, Oh, this is interesting.

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My current job needs me to do this.

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So I'm going to pick up that and then it allowed me to continue to grow with that.

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But I think what he's like, I didn't come away from this thinking that everything you

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do needs to be an ultra learning project.

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You need to go at it with full force and learn it at the deepest levels.

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I don't see that.

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Like I didn't see that from this book, but maybe that's because I just didn't catch it.

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That was my take on it.

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Whenever there's something that you want to deep dive or that you want to learn a deeper

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skill or an adjacent skill, like that's when you can use this process to do that.

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Do you follow me, Mike?

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Yes.

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So I kind of think my career path is probably similar to yours where I have implemented

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pieces of this.

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And as we go through the different principles, I've applied some of these, but I also am

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projecting here, but I believe that Scott Young would say you guys weren't ultra learning.

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That could be because the examples that he shares, like it's a very short timeframe

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that you're doing this stuff in.

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And in the first chapter, he's got a couple other examples of people who like learn to

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speak and master a language in three months.

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And the popular belief when it comes to the best way to learn a new language is immersion,

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right?

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And he's even saying like immersion, going to the place where they speak the language,

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that's not good enough.

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Because if you're there with a friend, you're going to speak English when things are hard

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and you have to push yourself into those positions that are hard and force yourself to do the

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thing.

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And I'm guessing that both you and I didn't put our necks on the line when we were trying

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to develop a new skill, we did it on the side.

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There was a safety net there.

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We could always go back to doing what we were doing previously.

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Yeah, that's true.

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It wasn't like, okay, I'm going to walk away from my job and I'm going to become a writer

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I've never written before, so I'm just going to write as much as I can in three months

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and by the end of it, boom, I will be a professional writer.

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That wasn't the process we took.

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So I don't know, maybe that's just my definition, but I do think in this first chapter here,

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he talks about ultra learning and how it's pursuing these extreme self-directed learning

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projects.

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And either of ours were really extreme.

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And I also think maybe you don't have to push yourself to the extreme all the time.

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As he's talking about all these different ultra learning projects, I'm like, well, yeah,

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you're acquiring a lot of skills quickly, but aren't you going to burn yourself out?

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Like, at some point, you're just going to be like, this is dumb.

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Why am I doing this?

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You're going to walk away.

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Sure.

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There's no way you're going to do this till you're 85, buddy, you know?

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And if you do, you will be a very wide learned, why would it be a wide ranging expertise on

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that person?

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You're going to be an expert in these things, but you're not going to have any friends.

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Or that while speaking so many different languages, they can't all get together.

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Yeah.

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Yeah.

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And that's a little bit unfair of a characterization, but it's a couple of other characteristics

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here of ultra learning, just to kind of paint the picture for what Scott Young defines

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as as all ultra learners are unique.

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He says, but they do share some common characteristics that usually work alone.

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Their interests tend towards obsessions.

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They're aggressive about optimizing their strategies and they care about learning above

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all else.

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And that's the thing that doesn't really sit well with me is like, well, why do you want

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to learn this stuff?

00:22:22

Is it so that you can check a box is that so that you can say I have achieved a certain

00:22:26

level of mastery?

00:22:27

Or does it actually impact your day to day?

00:22:32

But I'm more and more realizing the older that I get is that the day to day really is

00:22:36

not about what you get done during the day, but about the relationships and the people

00:22:40

that you you interact with.

00:22:42

And Chris Bailey is the one who said the reason for productivity is people.

00:22:46

You know, I'm realizing that more and more.

00:22:48

And so it doesn't matter if I write 10,000 words a day.

00:22:53

If I don't make a positive impact in somebody's life, because I'm too busy, that's a failure

00:22:58

of a day.

00:23:00

And not every time, obviously, there's different scenarios and different seasons and all that.

00:23:08

You know, you got to keep the right thing at the right time, keep the main thing, the

00:23:12

main thing.

00:23:14

But more and more, my main thing is less about what I'm able to crank out and more about

00:23:20

how I'm able to make people feel.

00:23:22

That part is like completely missing in this book, I believe.

00:23:25

I think that maybe depends on how you approach your ultra learning project.

00:23:30

Sure.

00:23:31

Because there were cases and even one of the principles when it comes to like drilling

00:23:38

and such, you don't necessarily want to spend 12 hours a day doing this in order to learn

00:23:47

a skill.

00:23:48

Like you do need to space it out somewhat.

00:23:50

And I think a lot of how you come at the project and how successful it is with the definition

00:23:58

of success being you're learning an extreme amount of information and an extreme skill

00:24:03

in a very short time frame and maintaining relationships like that, to me, success in

00:24:09

this ultra learning project would have both aspects tied to it.

00:24:14

I think if you were to understand that going into it, it would have a very different feel

00:24:21

than this is your one and only thing you're going to do.

00:24:25

I get where some people, because he tells stories of folks who wanted to learn a language

00:24:31

and they go spend three or four months in Spain in order to pick up Spanish kudos to

00:24:37

them.

00:24:38

I think that's going too far.

00:24:41

It's taking you to the point where you're abandoning all relationships in order to pursue your

00:24:47

own internal goal.

00:24:50

That's very inward focused in that.

00:24:54

This comes back to some of our complaints with the four hour work weekly.

00:24:57

It's very inward focused.

00:24:59

I was just thinking that.

00:25:01

It's not necessarily outward, but I think in this particular scenario, I don't think

00:25:05

Scott would say that we're wrong in saying that.

00:25:11

I think it's just all and what your intent is behind it, because I didn't really get

00:25:16

that this has to be internal focused.

00:25:18

Yeah.

00:25:19

That makes sense.

00:25:20

Did I misinterpret it?

00:25:21

I don't know.

00:25:22

I mean, the definition that he uses of ultra learning in the next chapter is a strategy for

00:25:26

acquiring skills and knowledge that is both self-directed and intense.

00:25:29

The key thing that I get stuck on in the previous section is that the interest tend towards

00:25:36

obsession.

00:25:37

When you're obsessed with something, nothing else matters.

00:25:41

The people who go to a country to learn a language in three months, I think that's fine.

00:25:46

I don't necessarily think that act is inherently selfish or anything like that, but let's just

00:25:54

paint out hypothetical here, assuming you don't have somebody at home that's waiting for you.

00:25:58

You have the flexibility and the freedom to do that.

00:26:01

You go to a new country and your objective is to learn this language.

00:26:06

So every person that you talk to, the value that you're ascribing to them is as a tool

00:26:12

to help you learn that language, correct?

00:26:15

That's fair.

00:26:16

Yeah.

00:26:17

So you go there, you meet somebody who is completely enamored with you, but you're just

00:26:23

so obsessed with, no, I really don't have even have time for that right now because I got

00:26:27

to learn this language.

00:26:28

You're missing out.

00:26:30

You're missing the main thing, right?

00:26:32

So recognizing that the people in the relationships, that's the valuable thing.

00:26:36

And that's the piece that's missing here because it's by definition self-directed.

00:26:40

There's nobody else involved with this.

00:26:43

And if you're obsessive about it, this is dominating your time.

00:26:46

It's dominating your attention, like nothing else or at least everything else is secondary

00:26:50

to this.

00:26:51

And I know like, as he talks about how you can apply this, you can do it in small chunks,

00:26:57

but that's kind of going against the picture that he's painting here at the beginning of

00:27:02

like, you just got to go hard on this thing for a short period of time, then you've got

00:27:05

it, then you move on to the next thing.

00:27:08

I don't know, that just doesn't seem appealing to me.

00:27:13

Yeah.

00:27:14

No, I think I get your point.

00:27:18

I think this is potentially a classic example of I'm trying to translate it into how I

00:27:24

could use the information here.

00:27:27

And as opposed to taking it as he says it, like point blank.

00:27:32

So this is where I think I'm coming at this from the stance of, yes, I'm okay doing smaller

00:27:39

pieces because I do have some projects that I am going to apply some of these principles

00:27:44

to.

00:27:45

I still haven't figured out how to word it into an action item.

00:27:49

So maybe by the time we're done here, I'll get it figured out.

00:27:52

But this is where I'm trying to extrapolate the principles or his way of coming at this

00:28:00

because I think the core of what I picked up from the definition of ultra learning and

00:28:08

the examples he gives of people who have done it is that if you want to learn a skill and

00:28:12

you want to retain that and be extremely good at it, this is an excellent way to do that

00:28:19

really fast.

00:28:20

Now, do you have to do it really fast?

00:28:23

No, of course not.

00:28:27

Should you do it fast?

00:28:28

That's your call.

00:28:30

It really depends on how quickly you need it for whatever your mission is, whatever your

00:28:34

intent or purpose is behind wanting to learn the skill.

00:28:38

Like I tell students this all the time who want to get into programming, well, show me

00:28:42

the apps that you're building.

00:28:45

If you want to get into programming, that's the way you need to do it because I talked

00:28:48

to a high school student here just two days ago who is taking programming classes and

00:28:54

they're teaching Java.

00:28:55

I don't know anyone firsthand who is building applications in the real world on Java.

00:29:01

Everyone is leaving Java from what I can tell and they're still teaching it.

00:29:05

So come at me if you're a programmer and you love Java, but I just don't understand why

00:29:10

they continue to do that.

00:29:12

So that's why I ask these students, like, what are you building?

00:29:15

What is it you're doing in the real world because that is where you're going to learn

00:29:19

all the nuances and the subtleties of that particular skill set.

00:29:24

That's I think the mindset that I'm pulling out of this in order to apply it to what I

00:29:30

do on a day to day basis because I would love to take some of these ideas and potential

00:29:37

skill sets and condense down the learning process on them so that I could become more

00:29:43

proficient in them quicker.

00:29:44

I could see doing that in some cases.

00:29:46

Like I've wanted to pick up photography for a long time.

00:29:50

I could see taking a lot of this methodology and using that in order to pick up photography

00:29:56

at a higher level.

00:29:59

Do I have the time to just say I'm going to go make money at being a photographer and

00:30:03

then dedicate three months of doing that?

00:30:05

No, that's ridiculous to me.

00:30:07

Like I would not do that, but I would maybe spend three or four hours a week in 30 to 45

00:30:13

minute chunks working on it using this mindset.

00:30:18

Like I would definitely do that.

00:30:20

But again, I'm simplifying it, which is what I tend to do.

00:30:25

Well, that's actually a good jumping off point for how to become an ultra learner.

00:30:29

There's a couple different things that he mentions here in chapter two about why ultra

00:30:34

learning matters.

00:30:35

He has three cases where ultra learning new skills can apply and that is accelerating

00:30:41

the career that you have transitioning to a new career, cultivating a hidden advantage

00:30:45

in a competitive world.

00:30:46

The thing that's missing from all of those is obviously the personal stuff, but he does

00:30:49

say that you can apply ultra learning to either your personal life or your work life.

00:30:55

There's a lot of reasons why ultra learning is important if you are looking to climb the

00:31:01

corporate ladder or develop the skills that are going to set you apart from everybody

00:31:06

else in the workplace.

00:31:07

I think that's where a lot of the Cal Newport deep work stuff maybe comes into play.

00:31:11

Ultra learning is the method that you can use if you want to get to the point in the

00:31:16

quickest possible, the shortest possible path, to setting yourself apart from everybody else

00:31:21

would be applying ultra learning.

00:31:24

And there's three ways to do that, which there's new part time projects like you were

00:31:29

talking about where you're doing it in smaller chunks.

00:31:32

He says that one, but I kind of feel like it's a concession.

00:31:35

Like he's got to throw it out there because he knows otherwise no one else will.

00:31:38

Everybody who's working in nine to five is going to be like, well, there's no way I can

00:31:41

do this.

00:31:43

But the other two are learning sabbaticals and then re-imaginating it, re-imagining existing

00:31:48

learning efforts.

00:31:50

So if you are going to school for something, you know, how can you create your own education

00:31:56

system where you can develop those skills faster, I really like the idea of the learning

00:32:00

sabbatical where you just take off three months to go to a country and learn a language.

00:32:05

That's his kind of definition of a learning sabbatical.

00:32:08

Don't think that that one applies to me re-managing existing learning efforts, probably not applying

00:32:13

to me new part time projects.

00:32:15

Yeah, that one could apply to me.

00:32:18

And it's interesting because some of the stories that he shares in here, like kind of

00:32:23

hit a chord with me.

00:32:25

There's one in chapter three about actually how to become an ultra learner where he mentions

00:32:31

he did this test and there were 12 readers of his blog.

00:32:34

One of them was this guy named Tristan DiMontabella who decided to try and apply ultra learning

00:32:40

to public speaking.

00:32:42

And if I remember right, English was his second language.

00:32:47

So he joined a Toastmasters group and then six weeks after he joined was the deadline

00:32:55

for competing for the world championship of public speaking.

00:32:57

I'm pretty sure it was two weeks.

00:32:59

Maybe I typed that wrong.

00:33:00

It was pretty short.

00:33:01

It was quick.

00:33:02

Yeah, he had to do 10 speeches in a couple of weeks basically in order to qualify to even

00:33:09

compete in this world championship of public speaking.

00:33:12

Now there's several different levels to this.

00:33:14

I have competed in this, not at the world championship level, but there's the club level.

00:33:21

And then I always get these mixed up.

00:33:22

There's like an area level and then a division level, I believe.

00:33:27

And then from there, if you make it past the division level, that's where you're competing

00:33:31

against everybody in the, they picked the world champion, which by the way, a derivative

00:33:39

of that is the humorous speech contest.

00:33:41

I think I've told the story before.

00:33:43

I entered the humorous speech contest because it was a skill I wanted to develop and I recognize

00:33:49

I didn't have.

00:33:51

And I ended up going as far as I could with that, which is a division level.

00:33:55

There is no world championship of humorous for the humorous speech contest in Toastmasters.

00:34:00

But the division level for the division I'm in is the entire state of Wisconsin and the

00:34:05

UP of Michigan.

00:34:07

So I lost in the finals of the humorous speech contest to a professional comedian.

00:34:14

So it did not feel bad about that.

00:34:16

Well I was there.

00:34:18

I met the keynote speaker there was a guy named Aaron Beverly and he actually did some coaching

00:34:24

with me and he recently, last year was the world champion of public speaking for Toastmasters.

00:34:33

So that's pretty cool.

00:34:34

I'll put a link to his speech in the show notes.

00:34:37

Josh pointed that out to me.

00:34:39

He's like, hey, didn't she used to work with Aaron Beverly?

00:34:40

Yeah.

00:34:41

And he's like, well, he won.

00:34:42

Oh, that's cool.

00:34:43

I just looked it up.

00:34:44

DeMannabelo showed up to his first Toastmasters meeting 10 days before the deadline to be eligible

00:34:51

to compete in the world championship of public speaking.

00:34:53

Yeah, so you were right two weeks.

00:34:55

10 days.

00:34:56

Let's nuts.

00:34:57

Now I cranked through, I thought, my speeches and I, when you do those first 10 speeches,

00:35:03

you get what's called a CC a competent communicator.

00:35:07

And then there's different levels after that all the way up to distinguished Toastmaster,

00:35:11

your DTM, that's kind of like the highest level you can have just from the accomplishments

00:35:15

that you do in the club.

00:35:17

And then there's like these contests too.

00:35:20

But he wasn't really worried about achieving a certain level he just wanted to do what he

00:35:24

needed to do in order to compete.

00:35:25

So he gave us 10 speeches and then then he qualified.

00:35:29

Now I understand how hard that is because I did mine and people thought I was flying

00:35:36

through these in about 10 months.

00:35:38

I basically did like one a month, which is difficult, especially for someone like me

00:35:45

who tends to memorize their speeches.

00:35:47

Yeah.

00:35:48

But so I have a frame of reference here for what he actually did.

00:35:55

And I was completely fine going through it in the period of 10 months.

00:36:00

There is absolutely no way I would even attempt to do this in 10 days.

00:36:03

That just seems stupid to me.

00:36:04

Yeah.

00:36:05

Like good job Tristan, but there's no way I'm going to do that.

00:36:10

I'll sit back and watch.

00:36:12

Well, here's the other thing, right?

00:36:14

So he's competing and I forget in the book they mentioned like what place he took.

00:36:18

So he actually did do pretty well.

00:36:20

He made it into the top 10.

00:36:21

Top 10, that's right.

00:36:22

And then from there he started a coaching business with his mentor that he found in

00:36:26

his Toastmasters group and it kind of changed his professional life.

00:36:30

I think that's kind of the impact story that Scott was going for there.

00:36:35

It was like, look how this changed his life.

00:36:38

But you're not completely changing your life every 10 days.

00:36:41

Like he got to pick the projects that are really important.

00:36:45

But to me, I knew I wanted to develop my public speaking skills.

00:36:50

So I applied myself and developed these skills and me speaking into a microphone even right

00:36:56

now is very different than me before I attended a Toastmasters meeting.

00:37:00

I listened back to some of my old podcast episodes and hear all the umbs and all the filler

00:37:05

words and I'm like, man, you're horrible.

00:37:07

Of course, I don't listen to you hear that because I always edit those out.

00:37:12

Oh, of course you do.

00:37:13

But the live people know it, the live people know.

00:37:16

So um, there we go.

00:37:18

What I'm trying to wrap my head around here is like, is there something wrong with my

00:37:24

approach because on the surface, I've kind of got the same goal.

00:37:30

In fact, when I started working with Aaron Beverly, he asked me what my goal was and I'm

00:37:35

like, well, I want to compete at the world.

00:37:37

I want to be a finalist in the world championship of public speaking.

00:37:40

I know you've gotten there.

00:37:41

Like you can help me get there.

00:37:42

I'm willing to do the work, right?

00:37:45

And then a bunch of work stuff happened and we kind of lost touch and I didn't have the

00:37:48

time to do it and trying to feed my family, all that kind of stuff, right?

00:37:52

So life happened basically.

00:37:55

And that got put on that got put on pause.

00:37:58

But even before then, I was okay with developing the proficiency and the skills without getting

00:38:05

the award.

00:38:07

So while initially I wanted to, yeah, let's go for something big, right?

00:38:14

What I realized as I progressed on that journey was that I achieved a level which for the

00:38:20

time being was good enough.

00:38:23

And with ultra learning, I don't think there's any room for that, I guess, in the definition

00:38:32

that Scott Young puts forth.

00:38:34

Like you're either doing this to achieve a certain level of mastery or you are failing

00:38:41

because you're not doing it fast enough.

00:38:45

And the whole goal is to get to the finish line, put a bow on this one and then go do

00:38:50

it again somewhere else.

00:38:54

And so my Toastmasters experience, I feel like I'm one through one perspective is kind

00:39:00

of a wines with this.

00:39:03

But from another perspective is like a textbook case of how not to ultra learn.

00:39:08

Sure.

00:39:09

Well, I think that there's, I think there's a lot to come from this and I get some of the

00:39:17

qualms that can come from trying to be an ultra learner or the process of that.

00:39:24

But let's dive into, he's got nine principles here of ultra learning that help you in achieving

00:39:36

the best possible way of learning a skill or knowledge at the best of your ability.

00:39:43

That's essentially what this is.

00:39:46

Now his concept here is to condense it down, of course.

00:39:51

But let's just kind of walk through these, Mike and try to explain each one.

00:39:56

But I don't want to spend a ton of time on these because it really is a whole methodology

00:40:02

of following and just being aware of each of these principles.

00:40:06

And then I want to know if you're going to do an ultra learning project.

00:40:09

That's ultimately what I want to know when we're all done with this.

00:40:12

So principle number one, meta learning.

00:40:17

Now whenever you choose your project, because this all starts with you choose your project

00:40:22

and you decide what your mission or your goal is for that.

00:40:27

So with public speaking, like in Mike's case, making it a finalist in the world championship

00:40:31

of speaking.

00:40:33

So if that's the goal, first what you'd have to do is figure out what are the metrics

00:40:40

around that.

00:40:41

What are the specific pieces of it?

00:40:43

So you're planning your project and learning what it is that you need to learn.

00:40:48

So you have to start with a research base and learn about the thing you want to then

00:40:54

learn in the reality, thus meta learning.

00:40:57

You're learning about the learning process for that.

00:41:00

Now if you're into computer programming or want to learn computer programming, you would

00:41:04

learn like, what is a computer program?

00:41:07

What does it look like?

00:41:08

I even had some relatives at one point asked me like, people talk about coding all the

00:41:13

time.

00:41:14

I don't even know what code looks like.

00:41:15

What is code?

00:41:16

Like here, let me show you.

00:41:17

Like I've got it on my phone.

00:41:19

Like I will put it right here in front of you.

00:41:22

Even that level can be helpful.

00:41:25

But before you get anywhere, you have to learn what the mechanics are of the skill that you

00:41:30

want to pick up before you ever jump in.

00:41:32

Yes.

00:41:33

So as I, as you were describing that, I was thinking back to Tim Ferriss and how he won

00:41:39

the Chinese kickboxing championship.

00:41:43

A cheating?

00:41:44

Because he was meta learning and he was doing the research prior to competing and he found

00:41:47

the loophole that he could exploit.

00:41:50

Right.

00:41:51

Finding the loopholes and exploiting them, I think definitely fits into this definition

00:41:56

of meta learning, which doesn't necessarily leave a great taste in my mouth.

00:42:02

But I think it's a good example of what he's saying and you don't have to use it in a negative,

00:42:08

in a negative sense where you're trying to game the system, so to speak.

00:42:11

Right.

00:42:12

Really, it's like you said, doing the research before and after your ultra learning project.

00:42:17

So in the short term, you know, and then in the long term, the more ultra learning projects

00:42:21

you do, the larger you set a general ultra learning skills become because you start to

00:42:24

connect all these things and tie them all together.

00:42:27

So this is something that probably a lot of people, and I think myself included kind of

00:42:34

struggle with where you get an idea for I want to do this thing and then you just start

00:42:39

doing it without really digging into what are all the moving pieces here.

00:42:46

Now I kind of think that's okay.

00:42:50

You can start doing something and then realize that well, actually this thing in this form

00:42:56

isn't what really moves the needle for me, but it does show me that this ancillary thing

00:43:03

over here, that sounds really intriguing.

00:43:06

I'm going to try that thing.

00:43:08

I feel like without doing all the research, you can kind of experiment and make those

00:43:13

connections.

00:43:14

If you're trying to find some stuff that really is fulfilling to you in that sense, maybe

00:43:21

you don't want to to all train, maybe you want to, I don't know what what the opposite

00:43:27

of that would be experiment.

00:43:29

That's part of the process though.

00:43:30

So I don't know.

00:43:32

But I just think when it comes to the research prior to embarking on a project, you don't

00:43:39

want to overthink it necessarily.

00:43:41

And that's what I tend to do.

00:43:44

I will either, okay, so let me back up a little bit.

00:43:46

I will either jump in with no clue of what I'm doing and just try some things or I will

00:43:52

sit there and research it to death.

00:43:54

I have trouble reading this section on meta learning and finding the point where, okay,

00:44:00

this is enough research that now this is the optimal point for moving forward in learning

00:44:05

this skill or embarking on this project in the most efficient way possible.

00:44:12

That just doesn't seem to work for me.

00:44:14

Yeah.

00:44:15

My wife does this.

00:44:16

She researches to no end.

00:44:18

There are a lot of times I've told her, it's like, okay, here's a deal.

00:44:22

You get one hour.

00:44:24

I want a decision in one hour.

00:44:26

Yeah.

00:44:27

And that's really the way to fix it.

00:44:29

I mean, he does give you a rule of thumb that if you're going to spend a budget of so many

00:44:34

hours on this thing, you should invest about 10% of your expected learning time doing the

00:44:38

research prior to jumping in.

00:44:40

Right.

00:44:41

And then you do continue to do the research as you learn, but at that point, there's diminishing

00:44:45

returns.

00:44:46

Yeah.

00:44:47

So you're not doing as much of it.

00:44:48

So principle number two, focus, sharpen your knife.

00:44:54

When you think about it, whenever you start your project, whenever you have your sessions,

00:44:58

when you're doing your ultra learning, you essentially need hyper focus to stay on task.

00:45:05

Yep.

00:45:06

Essentially, what I came away from this was this is a summarized version of how you should

00:45:12

do deep work.

00:45:14

Obviously, Scott Young is a fan of Cal Newport.

00:45:18

And this is kind of a quick and dirty tips and tricks for beat procrastination, avoid

00:45:24

distraction, stay focused on your task.

00:45:28

That's what this is.

00:45:29

Yes.

00:45:30

So this section, I've got really two different breakdowns in my mind.

00:45:35

Notifile.

00:45:36

One is the three problems of focus, feeling to start focusing, feeling to sustain focus,

00:45:40

feeling to create the right kind of focus.

00:45:42

And then he's got tactics that go along with each one of those.

00:45:45

If you have read anything in the productivity space in the last 10 years, you already know

00:45:49

what's in there.

00:45:50

Yes.

00:45:51

The other section is how you can develop your ability to focus.

00:45:56

This is interesting to me because the two things he really says here are recognize where

00:46:02

you are and start there.

00:46:04

And I quote, "Start small and slowly increase."

00:46:10

So apparently, you can't ultra learn the ability to focus.

00:46:16

That's a fascinating point.

00:46:18

I didn't catch that one.

00:46:20

Well done, Mike.

00:46:21

Did you just find a loophole in the whole ultra learning process?

00:46:23

Well, I don't know.

00:46:26

I do admit that as soon as I read that, I'm like, "Okay."

00:46:32

So this is very different than all the other advice that you've given us.

00:46:35

And yeah, it's a little bit different because this is like, there's physiological stuff going

00:46:38

on here that you really can't control.

00:46:42

You're not going to go to the gym and ultra learn the ability to bench press 400 pounds

00:46:47

either.

00:46:48

You know, you have to, there are certain limitations there.

00:46:51

But when it comes to your brain, it's kind of like those all get, those all get, get,

00:46:58

get shocked like they don't really matter.

00:47:01

Sure.

00:47:02

And I think the truth is probably somewhere in the middle that maybe your brain is a phenomenal

00:47:08

supercomputer that can move a little bit faster than other things that you might, you might

00:47:15

imagine.

00:47:16

Like if you were to chart growth physically from going to the gym and mentally from ultra

00:47:23

learning, that curve probably is quite a bit higher because of the neuroplasticity and

00:47:29

stuff like that.

00:47:31

But there are, I believe, limits there, which come out in the advice that he gives you right

00:47:37

here.

00:47:38

Sure.

00:47:39

So the whole idea of ultra learning then does have to be framed of there are places where

00:47:46

this works and places where it doesn't.

00:47:49

And I don't think that's necessarily a knock against ultra learning, but it also opens

00:47:56

up the argument of, well, maybe ultra learning isn't the right thing here.

00:48:02

Insert whatever arena you might be considering applying this to.

00:48:06

Sure.

00:48:07

Yeah.

00:48:08

I don't know.

00:48:09

I think the focus piece here is helpful.

00:48:12

Like I get that.

00:48:15

But again, it's a muscle that you need to build up over time.

00:48:20

I like your point about you can't just go ultra learn how to lift 400 pounds on the bench,

00:48:25

but you also can't go ultra learn how to stay focused for six hours straight.

00:48:31

Like that's, this is not going to happen without a long period of time and building up that

00:48:36

muscle.

00:48:37

So there is a bit of a physical and physiological barrier here, but he does call out meditation

00:48:43

here, Mike.

00:48:44

He does.

00:48:45

Of course, I noticed that still on my, my, my current trajectory of meditating regularly.

00:48:52

So and you're using Oak.

00:48:54

Correct.

00:48:55

I'm not using 10% happier.

00:48:57

Are you?

00:48:58

So did you subscribe?

00:48:59

I did.

00:49:00

That's how I got myself to do it.

00:49:01

This is interesting.

00:49:02

I figured if I put money towards it, I would actually follow through.

00:49:05

Did, okay, this is a tangent now, but I did you play with like headspace or calm or any

00:49:13

of the more major ones.

00:49:15

I used to be a calm user way back when I first tried it.

00:49:20

I was on calm and then they moved to a subscription model that was like 40 bucks, 50 bucks a

00:49:26

year or something like that.

00:49:28

Yep.

00:49:29

And in my mind, that was ridiculous.

00:49:32

Currently it's 60.

00:49:33

Is it?

00:49:34

Okay.

00:49:35

Maybe that was the discount price because I was a part of their system before that.

00:49:40

But then I played around with Oak for a while, but then it's like, well, I like Oak, but

00:49:45

I kind of wanted some of the guided stuff.

00:49:48

So I looked at headspace for some reason.

00:49:50

I just didn't like it.

00:49:52

And I figured, well, if anything, I'm going to give 10% happier a try and I liked it.

00:49:59

So they at least have a trial that I could play around with it before I jump in.

00:50:04

But I like that one.

00:50:05

Well, it's interesting.

00:50:06

I'm experimenting with all of these for an article that's going to come out on the

00:50:09

sweet setup at some point.

00:50:11

Yeah.

00:50:12

So literally this week I've downloaded all of these.

00:50:15

Interesting.

00:50:16

They basically all have a trial now.

00:50:17

Yeah.

00:50:18

I don't know if that's an iOS 13.

00:50:20

Some of them you can use the sign in with Apple things so you can keep your email private

00:50:25

if you want to cancel it.

00:50:27

And I know I know 10% happier does that now too.

00:50:30

Yep.

00:50:31

10% happier.

00:50:32

Definitely has the best design.

00:50:34

It supports the native dark mode.

00:50:35

It looks great, but it's also the most expensive.

00:50:38

It's a hundred bucks a year.

00:50:39

It is.

00:50:40

And even Headspace now is I think the same price as Calm are very similar.

00:50:44

It's here $60 or $70 a year.

00:50:46

It used to be like one of those you get 40% off the first year, then it recurs at like

00:50:51

$130 a year.

00:50:53

Right.

00:50:54

And that's not the case anymore.

00:50:55

It seems like the market for meditation apps has kind of leveled out.

00:51:00

Do about that $50, $60 a year.

00:51:02

I will say this.

00:51:03

The 10% happier.

00:51:05

Like they a lot of like Headspace and such like they have these guided lessons, if you

00:51:13

will, as either part of or before the meditation itself.

00:51:20

And the 10% happier lessons really resonated with me.

00:51:25

Okay.

00:51:26

Like they for whatever reason, the way that they are explaining things because they do

00:51:30

kind of like an interview process with a couple of folks before the actual guided meditation

00:51:36

to teach you the purpose of that meditation before you do it.

00:51:42

That to me was gold like that.

00:51:45

That's what sold me on it.

00:51:46

Yeah, those are cool.

00:51:47

So anyway, let's move past focus.

00:51:50

Principle number three, directness.

00:51:53

The easiest way I can think to explain this is with an example and it might be a dig on

00:51:58

you in the process, Mike.

00:51:59

All right.

00:52:00

Apologies before I get there.

00:52:01

Let's do it.

00:52:02

Directness.

00:52:03

If you want to learn a language, taking yourself to an area where people speak that language

00:52:11

is the most direct way that you can learn that like putting yourself in the scenario

00:52:15

where you are actually using those skills all day long every day.

00:52:23

Another example of this would be like if you wanted to learn to do programming, like

00:52:27

what I mentioned earlier, go build software.

00:52:30

Like that's what you would do.

00:52:32

That would be the direct route with the language piece.

00:52:36

He actually in this book on page 90 because I wrote it down.

00:52:40

He actually has a dig on Duolingo.

00:52:42

He does.

00:52:44

Of how Duolingo uses gamification of sorts in order to help you memorize things, but it

00:52:52

doesn't allow you to fully engage with the language in its entirety.

00:53:00

I know that Duolingo is your primary way of learning a second language at the moment,

00:53:05

so I'm curious what your thoughts were on this particular chapter.

00:53:09

Yes.

00:53:11

The quote that I wrote down in this section on Duolingo because I definitely wanted to

00:53:17

talk about this too.

00:53:18

He says it provides English words and sentences and then asks you to pick words from a word

00:53:22

bank to translate them.

00:53:25

That is the description that he gives for Duolingo, which is in my experience, limited

00:53:33

experience admittedly as a Duolingo user.

00:53:37

That is the surface level of the app.

00:53:39

So the way that it's broken down, there's basically like a knowledge tree that you work

00:53:44

your way down from top to bottom, it gets progressively harder and there's built in

00:53:47

checkpoints.

00:53:49

And to move your way down the tree, you have to complete level one in each of these little

00:53:53

areas, but there are up to five levels in each of those areas.

00:54:00

So you can complete level one and get exactly what he's describing.

00:54:06

When you get to level four, you're hearing the words being spoken in English or Spanish

00:54:13

and then you're typing out the sentence.

00:54:16

So I don't really think that's fair.

00:54:19

And he does say in the footnote, in fairness to Duolingo, there are ways of using the app

00:54:23

to get more direct forms of practice, but these tend to come only from repeatedly practicing

00:54:27

the same lessons on the mobile version of the app.

00:54:29

Not exactly true, Scott.

00:54:32

If you're not just trying to fly through it to say there, I did it, then you're going

00:54:37

to experience this the right way.

00:54:40

But I do also, in fairness to him, see how he got to the conclusion that he did.

00:54:50

My opinion on this is that Duolingo is not built for ultra learning, and that's the way

00:54:56

I like it.

00:54:58

Nice.

00:54:59

All right.

00:55:00

I was curious because he really did rip on it for quite a while.

00:55:04

So that's why I was asking.

00:55:05

He did. Now also, keep in mind, my goal is not to become fluent in Spanish and achieve

00:55:11

a certain level.

00:55:12

He talks about this.

00:55:13

I forget what the language tests were that he mentioned, but there are tests that you

00:55:21

can take and there's two levels at the very top and he was always shooting for at least

00:55:27

the second level when he was trying to learn a language.

00:55:29

That was his friend who learned like 18 languages.

00:55:33

Yep. And then he basically was like, oh, that sounds like a good idea.

00:55:36

I'm going to do it that way.

00:55:38

And that's not what I'm trying to do.

00:55:42

Number one, I don't know when I'm going to go to a Spanish speaking country again, or

00:55:46

if I'm going to go to Spanish speaking country again, I probably will at some point, but

00:55:50

the goal is not to, by the time I get there to be fluent and be able to speak Spanish and

00:55:55

converse with people whenever I get there.

00:55:57

It's just that I recognize that I have removed a bunch of things, which are time wasters

00:56:04

on my phone, but the most effective way to break those bad habits and create new ones

00:56:09

is to replace that with something else.

00:56:12

So I'm going to put something that to me and Duolingo is entertaining and I'm learning

00:56:17

something along the way.

00:56:19

So that's going to have a whole bunch of ancillary benefits, not necessarily just associated

00:56:24

with learning the language itself.

00:56:27

Not for checking the box, but just causing my brain to have more dots to connect if that

00:56:33

makes any sense.

00:56:35

So that's really my objective here.

00:56:37

And Scott Young would be like, well, that's dumb.

00:56:42

Right.

00:56:43

So different, different goals here, but I do want to share this because I was looking

00:56:47

at this the other day.

00:56:48

I'm going to post this in the live chat.

00:56:52

I found a link and this is admittedly on the Duolingo forum, but it links to a study, which

00:57:00

was an external study, which was started to chart the effectiveness of a tool like Rosetta

00:57:07

Stone.

00:57:08

And they found that if you buy Rosetta Stone and you practice 55 hours in Rosetta Stone,

00:57:15

that's essentially the equivalent of one semester of college.

00:57:19

Duolingo is completely free.

00:57:22

Yes, there is a plus plan you can buy, but you can go through the whole thing for free

00:57:27

and just watching the occasional ad.

00:57:29

Duolingo takes 34 hours to achieve the equivalent of a semester of college.

00:57:37

So I am happy to pick away at that 34 hours, five minutes here, five minutes there, rather

00:57:43

than get a plan and put my life on hold so that I can learn a language.

00:57:48

And again, different strokes for different folks.

00:57:50

Like my situation is different than Scott's.

00:57:53

I'm not going to walk away from my family for that length of time.

00:57:57

Maybe he doesn't have those things holding them down.

00:57:58

Maybe that is honestly the better, better option for somebody like him.

00:58:05

But I don't know.

00:58:07

I thought the whole description of Duolingo here kind of showed a certain level of ignorance

00:58:16

of the product.

00:58:17

I personally would not have said what he said about Duolingo because even for somebody like

00:58:24

me who hasn't been using it super long, I think I sent you a screenshot.

00:58:28

It's like 52 days in a row or something like that now.

00:58:32

So I'm no expert in Duolingo, but I've been using it consistently and I can spot the

00:58:38

holes in his arguments.

00:58:39

And what that does is destroy credibility right or wrong.

00:58:44

Not only is he attacking one of my preferred applications on my phone at the moment.

00:58:51

So there's a little bit of defensiveness right there.

00:58:53

But when you can see what he's saying and it's a very brief section, he doesn't unpack

00:58:58

this all the way, right?

00:59:00

He's just throwing something out there.

00:59:01

And then you're like, "Well, you don't understand this.

00:59:04

Maybe he does understand this."

00:59:05

But the way he phrased it makes it seem like he doesn't completely understand it.

00:59:10

And at that point, you're like, "Well."

00:59:13

You done lost me.

00:59:14

Exactly.

00:59:15

And I feel like there's so much in here and there's so many different topics that he touches

00:59:19

on where there are page, two pages.

00:59:23

They could be entire books.

00:59:25

It's very dangerous to try to summarize all of that stuff into just a couple of sentences

00:59:30

or a couple of paragraphs.

00:59:32

You've really got to be skilled in doing that or you're going to ostracize some people

00:59:38

like me.

00:59:39

Sure.

00:59:40

Well, I'll take your word for it because I have no clue.

00:59:45

But the thing I do know is that the easiest way to learn a skill and to learn it really

00:59:49

well is be very direct about it.

00:59:51

Yep.

00:59:52

I'll pull this back onto the outline here.

00:59:53

I've got one other thing here for directness.

00:59:56

Oh, yeah.

00:59:57

You got more.

00:59:58

Yeah.

00:59:59

So I have worked for many years with a family business that sold software to special education,

01:00:06

specifically special education programs in schools.

01:00:10

And we have worked with programs that teach students with moderate to severe needs, which

01:00:17

at that point they're sometimes nonverbal, but a lot of times like can't read and you're

01:00:25

focusing on life skills, independent living skills.

01:00:29

So for many years, the family business has had a product called the functional skills

01:00:34

system where we will shoot live action video basically as soon as digital video was a thing.

01:00:40

We were doing this.

01:00:42

We would shoot live video of the correct way to perform a social skill in a specific situation

01:00:49

or even just like basic sign and word recognition so that when somebody is at school and they

01:00:55

can't read, they can still function independently because they know which is the boys restroom

01:01:01

and which is the girls restroom because they recognize the signs.

01:01:04

Makes sense?

01:01:05

It does.

01:01:06

Okay.

01:01:07

The interesting thing about this, because this has been effective for a very long time,

01:01:11

specifically with students with autism, this has kind of become the defacto way to develop

01:01:18

these skills with people.

01:01:20

Is this concept of video modeling?

01:01:22

So teachers and special education programs know this stuff works.

01:01:26

They know they can get these videos and that means that they don't have to physically take

01:01:29

the person to a job situation and put them in that, that have them experience your boss

01:01:36

asking you to come in on a Saturday when you don't want to.

01:01:39

And if you can show them the correct behavior, they can generalize that and they can apply

01:01:44

that to their situation.

01:01:47

So that's really the transfer that he's talking about in this directness chapter where you

01:01:52

learn something in one context and you transfer it to another.

01:01:56

And he talks about how this is a big problem in education.

01:02:01

So this whole idea of video modeling is interesting to me and he didn't really touch on video

01:02:07

modeling here, which I was kind of surprised that he didn't because I think this is one

01:02:12

of the most effective vehicles that anybody can use to transfer knowledge.

01:02:19

A lot of athletes use the concept of video modeling.

01:02:24

Michael Phelps famously, not only watch video of the right way to do things, he'll rehearse

01:02:31

it in his head.

01:02:32

There's kind of a famous story of his coach before he jumps in the pool.

01:02:35

He's like, "Put in the videotape."

01:02:37

And he's playing through in his head this mental rehearsal visualization basically that's

01:02:41

kind of at the heart of this video modeling concept.

01:02:44

He's visualizing himself in everything he's going to do the entire race and then he just

01:02:48

goes out and does it.

01:02:49

He doesn't have to think about it in the moment because he's seen it and he's rehearsed it

01:02:54

mentally so many times.

01:02:56

And there's a really interesting study about this, which it's kind of hard to find out

01:03:02

exactly where this was done.

01:03:04

There's a couple different places it's attributed to.

01:03:06

The most popular one I think is University of Chicago.

01:03:10

And just trying to summarize this real quickly.

01:03:11

They took three groups of students and they were all basketball players.

01:03:17

For 30 days, the first group practiced shooting free throws for an hour a day.

01:03:22

The second group did not touch a basketball, but they visualized themselves taking and

01:03:29

making free throws every single day.

01:03:31

And the third group did nothing.

01:03:34

So after 30 days, the difference, forget the specific numbers, I think it was like 28%

01:03:39

improvement for the ones that actually did it.

01:03:41

And there was only a 1% difference for the ones that practiced mental rehearsal visualization.

01:03:45

It was like 27%.

01:03:46

I may be screwing up those numbers, but the basic idea is that it was essentially the

01:03:51

same without physically doing the thing, which is kind of crazy when you think about it,

01:03:58

right?

01:03:59

Sure.

01:04:00

But that's what a lot of really successful athletes do is they'll look, they'll video

01:04:04

themselves doing something and then they'll just kind of redo that over and over and over

01:04:08

and over again in their head.

01:04:11

So I wanted to call that out in this directness chapter because I think depending on the skill

01:04:15

that you're trying to develop, obviously learning vocabulary, you can't apply video

01:04:20

modeling to, but pretty much anything physical.

01:04:23

This is a tool that you should definitely be using.

01:04:26

Sure.

01:04:27

No, I think that makes a lot of sense.

01:04:28

Alright, principle four, drill.

01:04:31

Attack your weakest point.

01:04:33

I don't really have a lot to say here other than once you're learning your skills, you

01:04:39

have to come up with ways to test yourself and make sure that you understand things.

01:04:45

If you go into the world of blogging, drilling yourself might be releasing blog posts because

01:04:50

they're kind of small tests to see how they work and get some of the feedback, which is

01:04:57

a later principle here we'll get to soon.

01:05:00

That concept of drilling yourself in order to continually improve is what you need to

01:05:04

be doing.

01:05:05

Yeah, there's one key concept I think which is worth calling out here.

01:05:09

The rate determining step, the story that he uses to illustrate this is kind of interesting.

01:05:15

By the way, each one of these principles he does open up with a story.

01:05:18

Some of the stories we've heard before, some of them were new.

01:05:22

This one on Benjamin Franklin at the beginning of this chapter was interesting because Benjamin

01:05:26

Franklin, the success that he had was because he was a great writer.

01:05:30

It was a skill that helped him in all of his other professional endeavors, but the way

01:05:36

that he became a good writer was that his father pointed out his arguments weren't very

01:05:41

good when he was engaged in a debate for the education of women.

01:05:47

He's like, "Well, I'm going to fix that."

01:05:48

He focused first on the mechanics of writing, then he moved on to vocabulary, and then style,

01:05:52

that would be persuasive.

01:05:53

This skill has provided benefit to him in all these different areas, but he had to recognize

01:05:59

that there was this thing that was holding him back, and then he attacked that thing.

01:06:04

And that thing changed as he developed those skills, but recognizing the rate determining

01:06:08

step actually in chemistry, this is like the bottleneck.

01:06:11

It's the slowest part in the chain reaction.

01:06:14

Scott Young is saying, "The same thing happens in learning, so what you should do is you should

01:06:19

pick that rate limiting step and you should drill on it over and over and over and over

01:06:24

and over again."

01:06:26

I think the easy application and example of this would be something like a musician.

01:06:32

I grew up playing Suzuki violin, classically trained.

01:06:36

I could play the four seasons by the time I was 12, but I couldn't sit down and jam with

01:06:42

somebody because this is how I was taught.

01:06:45

You listen to this thing and you find this tough section in the piece, and then you play

01:06:51

it slowly, and then you play it faster, and you play it faster, and you play it faster

01:06:55

until you're doing it at normal speed, and you play that one section maybe a hundred

01:06:58

times before you can actually play it without thinking about it.

01:07:03

So I have an example of this from my childhood that I can fall back on, but I can't think

01:07:09

of another one where I would actually want to apply this.

01:07:13

So can you help me out?

01:07:16

You have anything?

01:07:17

Well, that's why I brought up the blogging thing, because that's kind of where I do that.

01:07:23

Maybe newsletter too, but publishing things and actually releasing things is a form of

01:07:30

a drill in my mind.

01:07:32

So anytime I'm releasing...

01:07:34

Is there a rate determining step in there?

01:07:37

Not really.

01:07:38

Yeah, exactly.

01:07:39

I can't find another one.

01:07:41

I'm sure they're there, but I don't know, this whole chapter on this principle is kind

01:07:47

of like, "Look for this thing and then fix this thing."

01:07:50

Yeah.

01:07:51

And then I'm like, "Nah, I'll just write.

01:07:54

I'll just publish."

01:07:55

I'll do it the old school away.

01:07:58

Yeah.

01:07:59

I mean, this one for the long haul, I'm not trying to do it quickly.

01:08:03

And you know, maybe that's an argument against the whole doing it quick thing, because Benjamin

01:08:06

Franklin, which is his example, he did that over decades.

01:08:11

His writing process was not one that he perfected in a short amount of time and then just kept

01:08:15

doing it.

01:08:16

He spent a long time writing.

01:08:20

So how much of that was because he did the drills and how much of that was because he

01:08:26

just wrote a lot and published a lot.

01:08:29

Who knows?

01:08:31

Maybe a little bit of both.

01:08:32

So I think drilling does have some value.

01:08:35

If I were to summarize this though and kind of put it in terms for just about anybody

01:08:40

can apply this, I would say, forget the thing on the rate determining step for the most

01:08:44

part.

01:08:45

If you can really identify that, if it's really obvious, go for it.

01:08:48

But otherwise, just be intentional about drilling intentional practice.

01:08:53

It kind of comes back to the Anders Erickson book, Peak, that we read a while back.

01:08:58

In fact, Scott Young mentions Anders Erickson in that book specifically several times throughout

01:09:03

this.

01:09:04

The deliberate practice is really the thing.

01:09:06

You don't have to pick your weakest thing and make sure that this is the bottleneck and

01:09:11

that's the thing that you should be focusing on every time you sit down and practice or

01:09:14

drill, I would argue.

01:09:16

Sure.

01:09:17

Principle number five, retrieval, test to learn.

01:09:20

In other words, test yourself and figure out where you're at in the process.

01:09:26

But it's very important that your mechanism for retrieving the information or testing

01:09:33

yourself is done in a very certain way.

01:09:36

Now think about how you go about doing final exams and in college with cramming last minute.

01:09:44

You're trying to go over things quickly beforehand.

01:09:46

It's like one of the worst ways you can prepare for a final exam.

01:09:51

Another way of doing this is to rewrite the questions in a way that you can, like you're

01:10:00

forced to come up with the answers, but you don't really have the facts in front of you

01:10:04

to review them.

01:10:06

That's kind of a second, but you're still using material to get those questions.

01:10:10

The third way here and the one that he highly recommends and the one where his story comes

01:10:14

from is where you just try to write down what the answers are or even what the process

01:10:22

is, like what the methodology is.

01:10:25

You're trying to get this out of you without prompts.

01:10:30

And that is by far the best way to retrieve information.

01:10:34

Now, the story that he tells here is about a man named Srinivasa Ramanajan from India

01:10:41

who was an amazing mathematician.

01:10:46

And he had one book that had some equations in it, but it didn't explain where the equations

01:10:52

came from.

01:10:53

So he was trying to, without having the information of where these equations came from, was manufacturing

01:11:01

how to come up with this in his own ways, having no training whatsoever in mathematics.

01:11:07

And he was discovered because he sent some of his proofs solving these renowned problems

01:11:15

that no one could solve.

01:11:16

He had solutions to them and he sent them to people.

01:11:19

I forget the college.

01:11:20

It was an Ivy League school that he sent them to.

01:11:23

And this seems right, but his mechanism for getting there is just so weird that they couldn't

01:11:32

explain it.

01:11:33

If you want to know more about that story, there's actually a movie on Netflix about

01:11:36

it.

01:11:37

I've actually seen this.

01:11:38

It's actually a pretty good film.

01:11:39

So whenever they mentioned Ramanajan in the book, when Scott mentioned him, it's like,

01:11:44

"Oh, I know this story."

01:11:45

So some of what I just told you, I think I may have given more than what was in the

01:11:50

book, but if you want to know more about it, the man who knew infinity, it's on Netflix.

01:11:56

Go watch it.

01:11:57

All right.

01:11:58

I don't have a whole lot else to add to this section other than the desirable difficulty

01:12:05

thing.

01:12:07

He talks about how there's a certain level of hardness that helps things stick and low

01:12:17

intensity learning strategies usually involve U.S. or easier retrieval so they don't stick

01:12:23

as long.

01:12:24

I think there's some truth to that.

01:12:26

You should do hard things.

01:12:28

That kind of comes back to the discussion on grit that we had, the book by Angela Duckworth.

01:12:34

But I also don't think you have to apply ultra learning to something that is hard necessarily

01:12:41

to get the benefit from doing the hard thing.

01:12:44

I think these are two separate concepts here.

01:12:46

They're not tied together.

01:12:48

I think the process of ultra learning combined with desirable difficulty produces something

01:12:58

like cramming.

01:12:59

In fact, he says in this section, "The quicker you test yourself after learning something,

01:13:04

the more you're going to retain."

01:13:05

Anybody who has ever stayed up the night before a test to cram and then passed the exam recognizes

01:13:11

that that helps you in the short term, but in the long term, maybe not so much.

01:13:17

I don't know exactly.

01:13:20

He does kind of say later on that cramming is really not the right approach here.

01:13:26

In this section on desirable difficulty, it sounds like the goal being to pass a test.

01:13:33

Yeah, go ahead.

01:13:37

And I don't know.

01:13:40

Another example of how you can manipulate the system, I think, to achieve a desired outcome.

01:13:49

But holistically, that doesn't really jive with sustainability.

01:13:58

Not just in terms of retaining the information and being able to retrieve it later, but just

01:14:04

are you going to be alive when you're 16 years old if you continue to try all these different

01:14:10

ultra learning projects?

01:14:11

I think these got to be spaced out.

01:14:14

You got to pick and choose these.

01:14:16

The more sustainable long term thing is to not ultra learn, but to go at your own pace.

01:14:23

All right.

01:14:24

Well, the next principle is feedback, which-

01:14:27

I like this one.

01:14:28

This one I get, if you're going to continue to learn things, you really got to have good

01:14:33

feedback mechanisms that tell you if you're doing better or if you're learning what you

01:14:38

actually set out to learn.

01:14:40

This is one that just- it's what you would think it is.

01:14:44

You need feedback to know if you're progressing or not.

01:14:47

I don't really have anything else other to say than that.

01:14:50

This one, I'm trying to find this in my Amazon orders, but I read a book not too long ago.

01:14:58

It was not, I think, a gap book, but it was something that somebody in my mastermind group

01:15:05

told me about.

01:15:07

It was essentially how to give and receive feedback.

01:15:11

If I find it, I'll put the link in the show notes here.

01:15:16

But I do think this whole idea of feedback, this is really interesting.

01:15:19

Again, I've got a whole book on this that he's trying to condense it down into a couple

01:15:24

of pages.

01:15:25

It's Thanks for the Feedback by Douglas Stone, the science and art of receiving feedback

01:15:29

well.

01:15:31

I think that this chapter specifically, he mentions outcome feedback, information feedback,

01:15:37

creative or corrective feedback.

01:15:40

I think there's a lot of gold here.

01:15:42

The outcome feedback, the question this is really trying to answer is are you doing it

01:15:46

wrong?

01:15:47

It's going to tell you something about how you're doing, but it's not going to offer you any

01:15:50

ideas as to what you're doing better or worse.

01:15:52

It comes in the form of a grade like a C on a report card.

01:15:56

This is the easiest type of feedback to get, but it's not that useful.

01:16:00

The next one up is information feedback where you find out what you're doing wrong, so

01:16:04

it shows you what you need to fix, but it doesn't tell you how to fix it.

01:16:08

The example he uses here is a blank stare from somebody you're trying to communicate

01:16:11

with in another language.

01:16:13

Then there's corrective feedback, which is how can you fix what you're doing wrong?

01:16:17

This is typically available through a coach mentor or teacher.

01:16:20

This requires someone who can pinpoint your mistakes and correct them for you.

01:16:23

This is the highest level of feedback, but requires a correct answer from somebody who

01:16:26

knows what they're talking about.

01:16:29

This is where something like a mastermind group really is valuable.

01:16:32

In my opinion, he talks in this section about the problem of giving and receiving feedback,

01:16:40

being that sometimes people will receive it wrong.

01:16:43

They may say, "I want to know the truth," but you tell them the truth and they get offended

01:16:48

because you're attacking them in their minds, even though what you're trying to do is attack

01:16:54

the wrong behavior, if that makes any sense.

01:16:57

This is something that I think everybody should meditate on this for a little bit and think

01:17:02

about how they can apply this to life.

01:17:05

I feel like if you understand the sources that you're receiving feedback from and you

01:17:10

recognize whether they're any good and also grading the quality of the feedback that you

01:17:16

are getting from those sources, and if you're getting feedback from not high quality sources,

01:17:21

changing some of those sources, and then also being able to disassociate any corrective

01:17:27

feedback that you might get from an attack on your character, that is one of the quickest

01:17:32

ways to see positive improvement in your life, because you will quickly see the things

01:17:36

that you're doing wrong.

01:17:37

Sometimes you'll have people who will give you a prescriptive plan for fixing those things.

01:17:43

Other times, just recognizing that the thing is wrong, that's enough to correct it going

01:17:47

all the way back to the beginning of the episode where I was sharing my failures about

01:17:50

trying to make all this stuff work.

01:17:52

I recognized just because somebody had pointed out, "Hey, you're doing this wrong."

01:17:56

"Ah, you're right.

01:17:57

I'm doing it wrong again."

01:17:58

"I already know what to do to fix it."

01:18:00

I just get caught up in the default that it takes one of those outside perspectives to

01:18:06

put my focus backwards should be.

01:18:08

Sure.

01:18:09

Principle number seven, retention.

01:18:12

How do you hold on to all this stuff you're learning?

01:18:15

There's some science that goes into this, but the core of what I came away from this,

01:18:22

because I'm extrapolating out a little bit here in that maybe this is where I've got

01:18:28

some of the transfer from other things.

01:18:31

To me, whenever it comes to retaining information, it has to do with connecting it to existing

01:18:36

information in some form, whether it's a song, whether it's artwork, whether it's programming

01:18:44

concepts.

01:18:46

It could be mathematical number patterns.

01:18:50

I use a lot.

01:18:51

I don't know why number patterns work for me, but the whole concept to me is that you need

01:18:57

to connect the new information with something that's existing.

01:19:01

You have a note here on sketch noting, which I'm sure plays into this wholeheartedly.

01:19:09

For me it does.

01:19:10

Again, this is not something that I would say I have learned or developed because #ultrallearning.

01:19:17

I've been sketch noting for a couple of years now and it really has helped me.

01:19:24

It ties back.

01:19:25

The reason I got into this is I came across this study, which I will again put in the

01:19:31

chat here for the people who are listening live.

01:19:33

This is an Oppenheimer and Mueller study, I believe.

01:19:36

The pen is mitered in the keyboard.

01:19:38

The gist of this study says that students who took notes by hand tend to retain more

01:19:43

information than those who took notes with a computer because the people who typed their

01:19:49

notes could keep up word for word, but all they ended up with was an exact copy of what

01:19:54

people were saying, whereas when you're taking notes by hand, you can't keep up so you have

01:19:58

to synthesize this stuff.

01:20:00

That helps you retain the information.

01:20:02

For sketch noting, for me it does that to the nth degree because not only am I not able

01:20:08

to keep up with the words, I am taking those words and I am formulating them into a picture

01:20:15

and then that picture that I create, that is something that gets imprinted in my brain.

01:20:20

I've had this happen over and over and over again where I've captured something via SketchNote

01:20:24

has nothing to do with the quality of the drawing that I create.

01:20:28

I don't really think I'm that much of an artist to tell you the truth.

01:20:31

There's a lot of people who can do sketch noting a lot better than I can.

01:20:34

In fact, Mike Rodey, the SketchNote guy was recently on an episode of Focus, so we'll

01:20:40

put that in the show notes too.

01:20:43

I think that this is something that you can do to retain more information which again

01:20:51

doesn't necessarily jive with ultra learning necessarily, but I do think that it is a form

01:20:57

of the memory mechanism number four where he talks about how to prevent forgetting where

01:21:01

it's kind of like a mnemonic.

01:21:04

He says that the keyword method is something that he uses to take a foreign language and

01:21:09

convert it into something that sounds familiar and that's kind of how he remembers these things.

01:21:15

Sketchnoting takes these ideas which may be new and you create a picture based off of

01:21:20

things that you already know kind of to your point and then that helps it stick regardless

01:21:24

of how artistic you are.

01:21:28

Nice point.

01:21:31

Let's get through these last two.

01:21:33

Principle number eight, Intuition.

01:21:35

I have to say this is the one where his explanation I really struggled with.

01:21:42

The rest of these I can see, yep, get that one.

01:21:45

Check.

01:21:46

Oh, got that one.

01:21:47

Check.

01:21:48

But this one, I think I followed what he was saying, but all I came away from this with

01:21:56

was develop, experience and intuition will follow.

01:22:00

That's really all I came out of it with and I'm still not even sure that that's his point

01:22:05

in this.

01:22:06

Did you get this one?

01:22:07

Yeah.

01:22:08

So, the point he's trying to make is that people who are intuitive, people who are intuitive

01:22:14

problem solvers solve problems differently.

01:22:18

They use a principles first way of thinking whereas beginners will look at the superficial

01:22:25

features of the problem.

01:22:28

I don't have a great example of that, but basically the more you develop your skill and

01:22:36

intuition, you're able to see the connections of like things and it's not always surface

01:22:43

level.

01:22:44

Sometimes you have to dig a little bit deeper.

01:22:46

The one example I think where you can wrap your head around this maybe is the idea with

01:22:51

like the chess grandmasters.

01:22:54

They showed that somebody who is a chess grandmaster can memorize much more of the pieces on the

01:23:00

board than a beginner can, but when the pieces are just placed randomly like they would never

01:23:06

be in an actual game, then they are just as bad as the beginners at recreating that scenario

01:23:15

because they've played enough chess to create all of these mental patterns in their head.

01:23:21

So they just flip through those mental patterns and they piece them together when they recreate

01:23:26

the setting on the chess board.

01:23:29

It's kind of like the guy from Peak where he was learning to memorize all of the numbers.

01:23:36

Same sort of thing.

01:23:37

He's not trying to memorize all the individual numbers.

01:23:38

He's memorizing the patterns.

01:23:41

I don't think there's a very clear for me anyways process to developing intuition by memorizing

01:23:47

patterns in specific situations.

01:23:49

The one thing I can think of is as a guitar player kind of like the fretboard patterns

01:23:57

and the fingerings and things scales basically for the different keys and stuff like that.

01:24:02

I don't have a action item with that though.

01:24:08

There's nothing I'm going to do differently about learning scales.

01:24:10

I'm just going to play the scales on my book.

01:24:11

I'm not going to play ultra learning to this.

01:24:13

Okay, this pattern plus this pattern plus this pattern.

01:24:15

I'm just going to do it.

01:24:17

I'm not going to do it super fast.

01:24:18

I'm going to do it over time and it's going to provide the benefit I'm looking for.

01:24:24

My experience is I feel like I've tried to build up a lot of intuition over my work

01:24:29

life especially and I've been very intentional about how do I develop intuition in different

01:24:35

areas.

01:24:38

I find that personally the way that I do that is actually from his ninth principle, experimentation,

01:24:45

explore outside your comfort zone.

01:24:46

To me what I've found is like, okay, if I'm going to learn how to build a Rails application,

01:24:55

the best way for me to do that at one is to actually do it but then to play around with

01:24:59

it and figure out how it works.

01:25:01

And then as I've done that, I learn a bunch of ways that it does work and a bunch of ways

01:25:06

that it doesn't which means that whenever I come to it again in the future, my intuition

01:25:11

then tells me how I should be coming at it in a different way.

01:25:14

Or like whenever someone asks me, how would you do X?

01:25:18

Well, my gut tells me to do it this way.

01:25:22

Whether I've done it or not doesn't matter but my gut tells me to do it this way because

01:25:25

I've done so many things around it and I've experimented with things in so many different

01:25:29

ways that I can get there very quickly.

01:25:33

So that's ultimately what I learned.

01:25:36

So like to me those two should almost be lumped together but he broke them apart so we talk

01:25:41

them out them apart but all that to say, principle nine, experiment, get outside your comfort

01:25:47

zone, try new things, play and have fun.

01:25:50

Yeah and if I were to recreate this book based on my own system, this is the one that I would

01:25:57

start with.

01:25:58

Yeah, yeah.

01:26:01

But he puts it at the end and the reason that he does that is I think for ultra learning,

01:26:08

you start off with a very specific goal and so experimentation at this point in the process

01:26:14

really is just tucking in the corners of the thing that you have decided to focus on.

01:26:23

Whereas I think it's valuable at the beginning of the process because when you start a project,

01:26:28

you don't know a learning project let's say.

01:26:31

You don't know what you want this project necessarily to look like six months, six years

01:26:38

from now and he would say it doesn't matter because in three months you're going to be

01:26:41

done and you're moving on to the next one.

01:26:43

So I get it how he applies it here but again my advice would be do this at the beginning.

01:26:51

Yeah.

01:26:52

Learn all the things you don't know or at least experience all the things that you don't know

01:26:58

because there may be something in there that you really enjoy going back to my rock climbing

01:27:02

story from the last episode.

01:27:05

Right.

01:27:06

Had I not been forced to experiment, I never would have realized that I actually enjoy that

01:27:10

quite a bit.

01:27:12

Yeah.

01:27:13

And that doesn't mean I'm going to radically change my day to day but it could and I think

01:27:20

that's where doing it at the beginning of the process has the most value is you may stumble

01:27:24

upon something that you had no idea it wasn't even on your radar and you're like oh my gosh

01:27:28

this thing is amazing.

01:27:30

That's kind of how I got to where I am with a lot of the stuff that I do.

01:27:34

I started writing, I wasn't a writer, I started speaking, I wasn't a speaker, I started podcasting

01:27:41

like none of these things were on the radar at the beginning and it was experimentation

01:27:45

that kind of helped me find these things that really move the needle for me.

01:27:50

Sure.

01:27:51

Well after he goes through these nine principles so again those are meta learning, focus, directness,

01:27:58

drill, retrieval, feedback, retention, intuition and experimentation.

01:28:04

Once he goes through those nine, he then gets into your first ultra learning project which

01:28:11

at this point we're very well aware that Mike is going to be 100% on board with picking

01:28:16

out an ultra learning project.

01:28:17

Oh absolutely.

01:28:18

I'm quite certain.

01:28:19

I'm going to do my research, I'm going to schedule my time, I'm going to execute my plan, review

01:28:23

my results and then choose to maintain or master what I've learned.

01:28:26

That's exactly what I'm going to do.

01:28:28

Okay, sure.

01:28:29

Basically I saw this as a pep talk.

01:28:33

That's the way I saw it.

01:28:35

What's fascinating about this chapter is he actually talks about alternate strategies

01:28:40

here.

01:28:41

Low intensity habits in my mind, no file I put, this is my preference which works well

01:28:46

when the learning is spontaneous, there's a low frustration level and the learning itself

01:28:50

is automatically rewarding.

01:28:52

That's what I'm trying to do with Duolingo and learning Spanish.

01:28:54

There's nothing goal oriented attached to that whole practice for me.

01:29:00

It's just the act of doing it that's rewarding for me.

01:29:03

I don't know.

01:29:04

That's again a page or two but I feel like maybe at the end it's almost like a concession

01:29:11

where here's ultra learning.

01:29:14

By the way, this isn't going to work all the time so here's some other stuff but really

01:29:18

ultra learning.

01:29:19

I think if I'm going to do anything, I don't think I'm going to devote as much to this

01:29:25

and have it in a short time frame like what he calls for but I am going to be trying to

01:29:30

up my game with photography.

01:29:33

Primarily iPhone photography because I ain't spending money on it yet.

01:29:39

Maybe at some point I'll pick up a whole DSLR but until that time my phone is on.

01:29:44

The phone will do just fine.

01:29:47

I've already been pursuing that to some degree but I'm grateful for having read this because

01:29:53

there are a number of these principles that I want to apply to that.

01:29:58

In a small way here or there, I didn't mean to jump in action.

01:30:04

If I'm going to be doing anything, that's what it's going to be.

01:30:07

Most of this in my mind is just a great thing to learn.

01:30:12

I guess this is maybe a meta learning thing like the book itself is a meta learning process

01:30:17

just to like what is the learning process look like and how does that compare to say

01:30:21

the school system?

01:30:23

How is this different?

01:30:24

That to me was the big part.

01:30:26

I should know the last chapter in the book is called an unconventional education and

01:30:33

we've talked about the Polger sisters before the ones who yeah, had taught them chess from

01:30:38

the time they were like negative six days old and he trained them up to be chess champions

01:30:45

and to this day they are phenomenal.

01:30:48

That story is one that he tells.

01:30:51

It was kind of hard for me to read it because I felt like I've been told this story.

01:30:54

I don't know how many times now how many books have we had this story in.

01:30:58

It came out yet again and I kind of--

01:31:03

Interesting details with it though.

01:31:05

Yeah, I mean there are some more pieces to it that I didn't know beforehand but I kind

01:31:12

of got the impression that he was making a call for the opposite of what we read in range

01:31:19

like trying to become a generalist.

01:31:21

He's calling for people to become experts and specialists.

01:31:24

He's like, "No, that's not right."

01:31:27

That's what I was screaming in my head at the book as introverts do and this was something

01:31:34

that I was like, "No, not doing this."

01:31:38

He even has a section on how to raise an ultra learner and the steps are start early, specialize,

01:31:44

make practice into play, positive reinforcement and don't course learning.

01:31:48

But as soon as I read specialized, I immediately thought of range too.

01:31:51

Yep, it was hard to ignore at that point.

01:31:54

So I will not be doing that.

01:31:58

We'll likely try to use some of the principles in deep dive in a wide variety of areas but

01:32:04

I'm not going to focus on one, especially not in my kids.

01:32:07

Agreed.

01:32:08

Do you have any action items?

01:32:09

What are you going to ultra learn?

01:32:11

I really wanted to have an action item but I can't.

01:32:15

I mean we went through this point by point for the different principles.

01:32:19

I kind of thought we were going to just skip over a bunch of them but as we talked about

01:32:24

it, I realized that I basically was saying this is what he says but this is what I think

01:32:29

for every single one of these.

01:32:31

Yep.

01:32:32

So I think I disagree with a lot of this book.

01:32:36

I think Scott, well actually before we move on, do you have any action items?

01:32:41

Well, I'm just going to do the photography thing like trying to apply principles to

01:32:46

that.

01:32:47

I like maybe that'll come out on my Instagram feed.

01:32:51

So if you really want to go see some of those experiments and I'm Joe Buleg there like I

01:32:57

am everywhere else.

01:32:58

But that's likely the only thing I'm going to be doing but not really anything beyond

01:33:04

that.

01:33:05

To me, it's mostly a book of this is kind of cool information to know and just be aware

01:33:09

of.

01:33:10

I don't think I'm actually going to go through with this.

01:33:12

Right.

01:33:13

Okay.

01:33:14

So style and rating since I kind of started on that anyways, I'll go first.

01:33:19

The majority of this book, I found myself trying to understand what he said and then

01:33:24

immediately being defensive and stating it in a different way of how I think it actually

01:33:30

works.

01:33:31

That being said, I think the method that he uses can be effective.

01:33:38

You kind of can't argue with the results that he's been able to achieve with like the

01:33:42

MIT challenge.

01:33:44

I just hear him doing that and I'm like, why would anyone do that?

01:33:49

Again, my situation versus his probably where I just can't figure out how and why I would

01:33:56

want to go so hard on some stuff that really doesn't matter to me.

01:34:01

That's the thing.

01:34:02

I don't see a direct path forward to applying ultra learning on any specific skill for me

01:34:09

at the present.

01:34:11

But I do think that some of the stuff that he talks about is valuable.

01:34:15

I do think you kind of have to spit out the sticks.

01:34:18

You have to recognize that he's trying to condense a ton of principles into a simple

01:34:25

system.

01:34:27

To be honest, I don't think it really works.

01:34:29

I think that for the, like he's trying to be brief and that works against him sometimes.

01:34:37

I have no doubt that he is a brilliant guy.

01:34:39

He's got to be if he's hanging out with James Clear and Kell Newport.

01:34:44

Kind of when I saw this recommended and I saw that James Clear had written the introduction,

01:34:50

I'm like, oh, this book's going to be awesome.

01:34:53

I kind of feel after reading this that my opinion, James Clear, has kind of taken a

01:34:57

hit from this book.

01:35:00

That's quite a statement.

01:35:01

Yeah.

01:35:02

Well, like I said, there's a lot of stuff in here, like dual lingo thing specifically,

01:35:06

where it's like, oh, you don't really know what you're talking about here.

01:35:09

Maybe you ultra learned dual lingo and it then wasn't effective.

01:35:13

You don't really understand it and which is why you're saying these things that aren't

01:35:17

necessarily true.

01:35:18

And again, totally opinionated.

01:35:20

I could be wrong.

01:35:21

I recognize that, but this is what people sign up to here, right?

01:35:27

These are the opinions.

01:35:29

So having read this, I don't know what to do with this.

01:35:35

Like I'm not going to try and teach ultra learning to my kids or really encourage it.

01:35:43

I think in anybody else that I come in contact with, I don't have an ultra learning project

01:35:49

that I want to work on right now.

01:35:51

I'm happy to pick away at my Spanish and develop positive habits.

01:35:57

I don't know.

01:36:00

I do think that the stories at the beginning of the chapters are good.

01:36:05

I think that he is a decent writer.

01:36:08

And I will say that it's not really my cup of tea, how he wrote it.

01:36:14

It felt very formulaic.

01:36:17

Almost every single chapter is story, principal tactics.

01:36:22

And some of the connections I thought were a bit of a stretch.

01:36:26

Some of the tactics I felt were just grabbing the stuff that was fairly easy.

01:36:33

And not, I don't know, like a lot of the tactics I read them, I jotted them down and

01:36:37

I really didn't think they were all that valuable.

01:36:40

Which is not what I expected from this book.

01:36:42

I really kind of thought this was going to blow me away, but did not have that effect.

01:36:47

I do think there's some good stuff in here.

01:36:49

I'm not going to necessarily recommend this to anybody, but I'm going to put it at a 3.0.

01:36:55

It's a good book.

01:36:56

It's not one that I'm looking to reread at any point in the foreseeable future.

01:37:02

Okay.

01:37:03

Well, I'm going to contradict you on this to some degree in that I think, so for example,

01:37:10

I've read Scott Young's blog for a while.

01:37:14

So this is not my first interaction with him.

01:37:19

And he has some intense blog articles that he puts out.

01:37:25

They are very long whenever he does these.

01:37:28

He just put out one on the complete guide to self-control.

01:37:32

Like he's very good at deep diving things.

01:37:35

It's kind of what he does.

01:37:37

And I think this is another case of that where he deep dives the deep diving process, which

01:37:43

is where this comes from.

01:37:44

Like he's basically explaining his own learning process.

01:37:48

He's never learning.

01:37:49

Yeah, totally.

01:37:51

And I think that this is a system, like I've got a couple of things right now that I could

01:37:57

see applying this to.

01:38:00

One is in the process of building a business around a web application.

01:38:05

Like what is that process?

01:38:07

I could see deep diving that right now because I've got us pieces of software that I'm about

01:38:12

ready to launch in the next few weeks.

01:38:15

It's very specialized, so it won't be available for most people.

01:38:18

But like that thing I could see applying this to, I could see applying it to the photography.

01:38:24

Like I've got a handful of these that I could see doing this with.

01:38:27

I just don't know how it fits into my scheduling because I'm already saying yes to too many

01:38:31

things and need to say no more often.

01:38:34

And I feel like saying yes to this is just adding.

01:38:39

It's putting too much on me right now.

01:38:42

So as much as I would love to say, yeah, I'm going to go do an ultra learning project

01:38:45

because I think that there is a lot of potential in this process.

01:38:51

I don't think I would follow it to the letter.

01:38:53

Most of the times whenever I see something like this, like, okay, I get your beginning

01:38:57

point, you know, do the planning process and then get going and then get your plan and

01:39:02

then try to follow it.

01:39:04

And the rest of these pieces are just like little tidbits to be aware of as you go through

01:39:08

it.

01:39:09

Like I'm not going to follow it to the letter, but the principle behind it behind all the

01:39:14

principles is one that I could see jumping on board with.

01:39:17

There's a couple of points in here like the intuition piece.

01:39:19

I'm just like, I just don't follow you.

01:39:22

Like I just don't understand you.

01:39:24

Like that happened a couple times, which is weird because the vast majority of the book

01:39:28

I found myself thinking like, he's a pretty good writer.

01:39:31

Like I genuinely enjoy reading this.

01:39:33

I kept looking forward to picking it up.

01:39:36

I don't think that this is one I would recommend to very many people because I think it's too

01:39:40

intense for most people.

01:39:43

The number of people I know that would be interested in doing something like this is

01:39:47

quite small.

01:39:49

So to just put a blanket, you should read this statement out there.

01:39:53

I don't think I would do that without knowing you or knowing your situation.

01:39:57

Like I need to know more about why you're interested in this book before I would say

01:40:01

you should read it.

01:40:02

So all of that said, I have some qualms.

01:40:04

I have some things I really like about it.

01:40:07

So I'm going to put it at a 4.0.

01:40:09

All that to say, I did enjoy and I'm glad to have read it.

01:40:12

I just don't think I would reread it.

01:40:14

I'm like you in that sense.

01:40:15

All right.

01:40:16

There we go.

01:40:17

I should say that I think I agree with you that in the right situation, this book could

01:40:23

be very, very beneficial.

01:40:27

And if you have a project that you know is kind of like a tipping point for you personally

01:40:33

or professionally, it may be worth looking at this prior to embarking on that thing.

01:40:40

I totally understand and admittedly recognize that I'm not the person this is really written

01:40:47

for sure.

01:40:48

No, that's fair.

01:40:50

Now with all that said, let's put ultra learning on the shelf.

01:40:55

Next time we talk, Mike, we're going to cover super better by Jane McGonigal, a revolutionary

01:41:01

approach to getting stronger, happier, braver and more resilient.

01:41:06

Jane McGonigal is the sister to drawing a blank on her name right now, Kelly McGonigal.

01:41:12

There we go.

01:41:13

And we did a book by her.

01:41:14

It was the second book we ever did.

01:41:16

Willpower Instinct.

01:41:17

Yep.

01:41:18

And I'm looking forward to going through this one.

01:41:19

The main reason I picked it is because of fighting Lyme disease.

01:41:22

I want to know her process because one, it's a long book and two, it's about the process

01:41:27

of gamifying like the healing and strength process.

01:41:31

So I'm very curious.

01:41:33

I know she's a big gamer.

01:41:35

So this will be an interesting book for sure.

01:41:37

On the topic of gaming, I have to share that I have a new game that I'm obsessed with.

01:41:43

My whole family is obsessed with and that is the untitled goose game.

01:41:48

See, like this is like making the rounds like everywhere.

01:41:52

I really thought you were going to say like Mario Brothers or something or Tetris like

01:41:56

something old.

01:41:57

No, this is amazing.

01:41:58

It's number one on the best seller's charts right now for the Switch.

01:42:01

Of course.

01:42:02

And the whole idea is that you're this goose who just gets into all this mischief.

01:42:06

It's hilarious.

01:42:07

I play it in my kids just like sitting in laugh at the stuff you have to do.

01:42:11

Yep.

01:42:12

It's amazing.

01:42:13

It's a good game for the URL.

01:42:14

Goose dog game.

01:42:15

All right.

01:42:16

Well, one after that is Principles by Ray Dalio.

01:42:20

So thanks to all the bookworm members who have voted for that one.

01:42:24

This has been on my radar for a long time.

01:42:26

Joe, I know you read this a while back as a get book.

01:42:28

Yep.

01:42:29

I read it a while back.

01:42:30

So I have it.

01:42:31

I'm looking at it right now.

01:42:32

So that'll be a good one.

01:42:33

That'll be a good one to talk about.

01:42:34

I recognize this is a big one, but it's a big one that I want to read unlike Sapiens,

01:42:39

which I just keep putting off.

01:42:40

I think it's funny that you.

01:42:42

We're going to read it at some point.

01:42:43

At some point, we will.

01:42:44

I think it's hilarious that you're putting off a long book because it's a long book with

01:42:49

a long book.

01:42:50

Like that.

01:42:51

Well, this is so weird.

01:42:52

Exactly what's going on here at this point.

01:42:54

That's putting off the long book because there's a better long book.

01:42:59

Oh, okay.

01:43:00

I am going to let.

01:43:01

Okay.

01:43:02

So mark this.

01:43:03

If you rate Sapiens higher than principles, you are wrong in saying it's a better book.

01:43:09

It's true.

01:43:10

It's true.

01:43:11

I'm wrong.

01:43:12

I'm wrong.

01:43:13

I'm not afraid to admit my failure is anymore.

01:43:15

All right.

01:43:16

Fair enough.

01:43:17

What do you got for a gap book, Mike?

01:43:18

I don't really have a gap book, but I will put here because we started to go through

01:43:23

this with some of the guys at my church, Extreme Ownership by Jack O'Willink and Life

01:43:28

Babyn.

01:43:29

So I'm reading it again, basically.

01:43:31

Nice.

01:43:32

And yeah, don't have any other.

01:43:34

Don't have time in the next couple of weeks to really tackle another book.

01:43:37

Sure.

01:43:38

So I'll put that one there.

01:43:39

Makes sense.

01:43:40

But between here and super better, I'm reading Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell.

01:43:46

I found this for $2 at a local thrift store and I had opinions about Malcolm Gladwell

01:43:53

before and I'm sure I'm either going to reinforce those or deny them.

01:43:58

I don't know.

01:43:59

We'll find out, but it'll be an interesting read regardless.

01:44:03

All right.

01:44:04

I want to say thank you to all of the Bookworm Premium Club members.

01:44:08

If you want to become a Premium Club member, you can get a couple bonuses.

01:44:12

You can get access to the Mind Node files, the Gap episode, audios that Jozen put together.

01:44:19

You can attend the live Bookworm recordings and join us in the chat.

01:44:23

Thank you to everybody who is already a Bookworm Premium Club member and willing to pitch in

01:44:27

a couple bucks a month to make this thing go.

01:44:30

We really appreciate that.

01:44:31

And if you are interested in becoming a Premium member, you can do so by going to club.bookworm.com

01:44:37

.fm/membership.

01:44:40

And in Overcast, which is where the vast majority of people listen to podcast scenes, you just

01:44:47

have to tap on the little button on the bottom and it'll take you right there.

01:44:50

So thanks to our Bookworm Premium Club members for supporting the show.

01:44:56

Thanks to Marco for making it easy.

01:44:57

I also absolutely love the wallpaper that members get.

01:45:02

You made this thing and I love it.

01:45:03

I use it all the time.

01:45:05

Well done, sir.

01:45:06

Thank you.

01:45:07

So like I mentioned early on, I've been doing a bunch of stuff on Instagram.

01:45:10

So if you're going to do anything today, follow us on Instagram, Bookworm.fm on Instagram.

01:45:16

Keep it simple.

01:45:17

That said, pick up super better.

01:45:19

We'll go through that one next time and figure out how to game our health.