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

Scott Young is an author, programmer and entrepreneur

whose book Ultralearning was an international success. We hosted

Scott on the Action Catalyst back in 2019. But now he's back

with a new book, Get Better at Anything. Who doesn't want to do

that? Scott, welcome back. And before we dive into the new

book, catch us up on what's been going on in your life since your

last appearance.

Yeah, I mean, I became a father, I have two

kids. Now, I also spent a good chunk of the last five years

working on this new book. So reading hundreds of books,

hundreds of papers to make something new that I thought

would be helpful to people.

So the new book, Get Better at Anything, is a deep

dive into the science of mastery. To start us off, let's

set the table and tell us exactly how you define mastery.

Well, so the thing I bring this up is that you know

why I was so interested in writing this book, is because we

all know the experience of things that you spent a lot of

time doing, and you're just you don't get that much better at

it, or things that you you tried it and you failed at it, you

weren't very good at it. And we also have experiences of like,

Oh, we're just clicked and you just got it, and you got really

good at it. And for me, you know, those highs and lows can

be so extreme like the oh my god, I found a new hobby, a new

sport, I got a new job, I'm being allotted by my peers

versus man, I suck at this. It can be such a big extreme

emotionally, to try to understand what are the

ingredients? What are the reasons why sometimes it works,

and sometimes it doesn't. So the book is not specifically about

like how to become Tiger Woods at your golf game, or how to

become a world concert violinist. It's to be better,

how do we figure out wherever you are, whether you are just at

the beginning? Or whether you are, you know, you've spent

decades doing something? How do we get better? And what are

those ingredients? And I think diving into the stories, the

research the size, the kind of like systems of learning, that

was really fun for me to try to bring that out so that these

principles can be available to people who want to use

Is there anything that it's better to just be okay at

rather than great?

I mean, the truth is, is that most of the things

that we do, we don't really care to get better at it. Like I

know, if I went on YouTube right now and I looked at like videos

on how to tie your shoes, I could find like someone doing

some like crazy, not that I've never heard of before that like

doesn't come on time. But like for me, I don't need to do that,

like I'm fine tying my shoes 99.9999% of the things that you

do in your life, it's okay to do whatever you're doing, how you

do your laundry, how you walk to work, how you do everything. But

the thing is, is is just because that point 00 1% of the things

that we're doing looms so large in our life, you know, the skill

that we do at our job that determines whether or not we get

a promotion, like the hobby, whether or not we enjoy it

really depends on you know, do we feel like we're good at it?

Do we feel like we could get better at it? And so I wrote

this book for that point. 00 1%. So you're absolutely right.

There's tons of things where, you know, I'm not gonna worry

about getting better at this. But what are the things where I

want to get better at this? And you don't know how that's that's

what I wrote the book for.

You mentioned the balance of joy and proficiency, kind of

a chicken and the egg thing. Which do you think leads into

the other?

I mean, you hit the nail on the head, like, I have a

whole chapter where I write about Albert benders theory of

self efficacy. And this was his idea that our motivation to do

things comes not just from like, would this be good for us, but

also, like, am I capable of taking the actions that are

necessary. And if you're not capable, the motivation might be

low, even if the outcome is very valuable. And this plays into

learning in a lot of ways. Because if we don't know that we

can do something, if we don't think that we can achieve

something, then our motivation to pursue it goes down

dramatically. And in some ways this is adaptive, I don't want

to say this is like a bug in our software, there's a million

things you could be doing, it often makes sense to do, the

things that come easier to you, this is just sort of natural

hardwiring, but where it can be dis advantageous, if there's

something you need to do, you can avoid doing it. And you

struggle in the beginning, then getting that motivation off the

ground can be really hard. And similarly, you can have fall

starts where you like, you start out motivated, you're doing

something but then you get stuck in the you get frustrated, and

you give it up halfway. And so I think it's about recognizing

this feedback loop of like being good at something and enjoying

it and understanding that that makes understanding learning so

important to understand that process. Because otherwise you

just get into these situations where like, Well, yeah, I used

to have these hobbies, but then I gave them up because

unconsciously at some point you felt stuck, or at some point,

you felt like you know what, I can't, I can't get better at

this or I can't improve at it. So in some ways, learning how to

learn is also about learning how to, you know, enjoy life about

learning how to enjoy your job, enjoy, your hobbies, things like

that.

You mentioned earlier that while some people have to really

learn a skill for others, it just clicks. How do you account

for that?

So there's a couple factors. I mean, obviously I

don't want to deny it. There are people who have maybe some

intrinsic intelligence talent for particular domain. I don't

want to make the claim that like well Tiger Woods just because of

like something his dad did was the reason why he's like on The

Mike Douglas Show at two years old lobbing golf balls. I mean,

that's just that's just incredible, right? And people

tend to fixate on talent, but I kind of don't like talent, not

because, you know, it's inconvenient for my book, but

just because it's sort of a residual concept. It's sort of

just like, well, this is the stuff we can't explain. So

therefore, it's talent, right. And one of the things that we've

learned from psychology is, is the importance of background

knowledge and background experience. So I know there's

this study that I really liked, that was talking about reading

ability, and they were looking at people reading sort of a

description of a baseball game. And what they found is that the

amount that people learn from this context dependent way more

on whether they knew about baseball and whether they were

good readers. So I think what happens is that sometimes you

maybe have a little bit of ability, you have some extra

ability, and you gain some proficiency in a skill. And

maybe the environment also works out so that like, you know,

maybe you're not doing that great at it in the beginning,

but because let's say you're a kid, or because of the

environment you're in, you're not getting punished, you

develop some of this proficiency, then you move to a

different environment. And you're stacked up against people

who either have tons of proficiency, or who've never

taken it before. And depending on where you're putting that

group, you can feel like Oh, I'm actually I have a lot of

aptitude for this. And so you keep going on and you get better

at it. And other people don't, you know, my, my favorite, my

favorite story about this is that a friend is a woman who got

a master's in civil engineering. So this is like, you know, she's

doing like, advanced calculus and this kind of stuff. And she

told me with a straight face, you know what I did this intro

programming class, and I was just, I wasn't smart enough to

do it. And it was like, How could you say that? Well, the

reason she said that is because the other kids in the class were

populated with people who like picked up programming in high

school. So she's going in there with zero, they're going there

with 10. And she just feels like, oh, I can't do this. And

so again, to me, I think like going back to principles, going

back to what are the factors that motivate learning, they

don't transform you as a golfer into Tiger Woods, but they give

you a map, they give you a way to make progress and making

progress, I think, ultimately, is what it's about.

In the book, you list out three main steps in the roadmap

to learning. Could you share those with us?

Yeah, so the book is organized around these three

sections, these three big ideas that influence learning. The

first is See. This is the idea that actually most of what we

know how to do comes from other people. So things that make it

easier to learn from other people will accelerate our

progress. Things that make it harder to learn from other

people will slow our progress. And you can see this across many

domains. Like, you know, the example I used to open the book

is as Tetris proficiency, whereas like, the game was super

popular, and people are obsessed with it. But actually, if you

look at their scores and their rankings, they're not actually

that good. The kids that like 13 year old kids who play Tetris

today, who are like obsessed with the game are much better.

And the reason why, because the internet created the ability to

like, every single technique and strategy is now learnable, and

accessible and instant, you can watch replays of the best

players playing the game. Whereas before, it was just

like, you know, your big brother's friend who could live

you like, oh, yeah, you got to do this or something to get you

to the game. And I mean, Tetris is a bit of a trivial example.

But the principle is universal, this ability to learn from

others. And whether or not it's easy or not, makes a huge

difference. The second is do obviously, to get good at

something requires a lot of practice. But there's a lot of

nuance to this, the kind of practice matters to our brains,

our effort saving machines, we are hardwired to try to avoid

expending effort. And expending effort is often what's required

for learning. And so often, what we get involved with practice is

trying to overcome this natural tendency to not use effort. So

an example I talked about is like Retrieval Practices, a big

idea. This is the idea that we remember things better when we

try to remember them than when we see them right in front of

us. So if you already have encountered some information,

and you try to recall it, that act of effort is going to make

you remember it more, because it's as if the brain saying oh,

well, the paper with the answers in front of me, so I don't

actually need to store this in my head. And so this do

component I also have break this down into four like Maxim's that

are covering some of these ideas. But fine tuning the

practice is super important. And then the last one, of course, is

getting feedback corrections for our actions, not just a teacher

saying do this, write this do this this way. But also just

even just interacting with the situation we're having, like

realistic practice is so important for gaining

proficiency and something that's often missing when we're

starting out learning skills.

Are those three weighted at all? Or is there a resistance

to one over the others? I can see potential resistance to

feedback, for example.

So it gets it depends on the feedback we're

talking about too. Because in some ways, like if you are

skiing down a mountain, the most important feedback is the one

coming from the hill through your feet. Like if you didn't

have that you couldn't learn to ski. So I take feedback in this

kind of broader sense than just like, you know, the teacher's

red pen. But but the thing I would say the thing I would say

about that is that these three ingredients it's like if you're

making a cake you need like flour, sugar and like an egg or

something. If you're missing one is not going to taste good. And

so I think part of the problem is recognizing when one of these

elements is deficient, and it's going to really depend on your

situation, you know, we were talking about Tetris, this sort

of being able to see other players was the major

breakthrough, players playing the game, they got tons of

practice, when you play the game, you know, whether you win

or lose, you get quick, immediate feedback, that wasn't

the problem. The problem was that techniques which were

rather subtle, which were not obvious and took a while to

develop, someone could develop it, but then it would stay with

that person, it wouldn't get transmitted. And this is true in

many domains that we struggled to learn because the best

practices, the way to do it are stuck inside the heads of

experts, and we have difficulty getting it out. But for other

skills is not like that. Like if you want to learn, I don't know,

if you want to learn basic math or something like that. There

are like 1000s of books. And like every single thing, giving

you how to do it, the difficulty is often getting practice

getting feedback, figuring out well, what are the concepts that

I have that are mistaken, getting the right level of

practice, that's the difficulty. So in my mind, you know, I kind

of present the book, not so much of a, it's more like, you know,

if you had a recipe, you're like, Oh, this is what's

missing, or this is what is happening, and it's going to

vary from person to person. But laying out all the ingredients

is very important. I was really grateful to be able to tie in

Joseph Henrich. He's a Harvard anthropologist and economist,

his work on cultural evolution. And he makes the argument kind

of somewhat provocatively that like, there is some experimental

evidence that shows that some of the great apes, you know, like

chimps and orangutangs, when you compare them to small children,

and admittedly, we're not talking about adults, partly

because just all adults are in cultured and socialized, it's

impossible to remove that. But when you're dealing with very

young children, they actually do better than those children at

some kinds of raw problem solving tasks. I mean, one of my

favorite demonstrations, as he showed this video, it's a chimp

doing some kind of memory task, there's the numbers, one to 10

on a grid, and they like blink on and then they disappear

immediately. And it's like, incredible, the chimp knows to

like, go like one in order of all these 10. And it just goes

like, click, click, click, click, click, click, and it gets

it right, like it's practiced. But at the same time, I mean,

this is a chimp, this is not even a person, and he's doing it

so well. And he uses these examples to sort of challenge

the idea that like, what it is that makes humans so great is

that we're just so much smarter than every other animal. And he

argues, that's not what it is. It's that we are really good

social learners. Chimps, despite their problems on the ability

are really bad at learning from other people. And so I just I

love this because it's, it's so ironic, we all we like to say

monkey see monkey do. But it's not, it's because the monkeys

can't see and do is because they can't do that, that that really,

it makes a massive Gulf in our proficiency. If we didn't have

all our accumulated culture, if we didn't have this imitative

ability to like, learn from the examples of other people. I

mean, people are really inept, like he gives us stories and

just like, you know, explorers getting lost in unfamiliar

lands, and just doing things that to the native inhabitants,

it just seems so stupid because of this. And so I think, you

know, this is a real human strength, and how we're able to

tweak that makes a big difference.

And these principles don't just apply to hard skills, you

say they work in the artistic realm as well. And were even on

display in the Renaissance.

Part of the problem with with talking about the

scientific research is that a lot of the cognitive psychology

is really grounded in like math and this kind of stuff. So like

a lot of the original research is done with this. And it's just

like, I can't do another chapter. This has math. And so

this was a little bit my own kind of dovetailing because you

see a lot of the same themes in different subjects. And so one

of the themes in mathematics research was this kind of

tension between showing people how to do it and letting them

solve the problems themselves. And I found John swelters work

to be really instructive here is that he's kind of created this

edifice of research called Cognitive Load Theory, which

tries to explain when it's more beneficial to solve a problem

yourself. And when it's more beneficial to see a

demonstration. And he kind of proposes somewhat counter

intuitively, that it is possible to solve problems without

learning how to solve them, it's probably possible to do

something to solve the problem and not infer like, well, this

is the procedure for solving problems of this type. And in

his theory, there is that part of the issue is that when you're

solving a problem, it's very mentally demanding. And that

mental bandwidth is devoted to solving the problem and not

recognizing what the pattern is for solving it. And there is

something analogous here in artistic training because during

the Renaissance, you know, Leonardo da Vinci bought a

jellybean guys, yo, Titian, all these, like great painters

worked under an apprenticeship system. And this wasn't like

some kind of design that like, Oh, this is the right way to

teach. It was just because this was an artisanal class of people

who were like they weren't seen as artists, they're seen as

like, laborers, right? And Leonardo was actually one of the

first people to sort of change this perception. But the idea

was that you'd go to this studio, and they'd get you like,

Okay, we're going to show you how to paint leaves and then

you're going to paint leaves and you're going to work on that

work on it. Now you're gonna paint this face, you're gonna

work on this and the This idea of this like progression from

simple elements, copying someone and then working on it. And then

as you get better and better, you're like developing your own

ability, and you're developing these sort of more sophisticated

creative talents. This very much mirrors a lot of John's father's

work with mathematics and learning. And I also think is

very interesting that in a similar way, in artistic

movements have kind of, you know, the pendulum swings back

and forth. But for a long time, there was a swing away from

this, there was this idea of like, you know, teaching kids

how to draw perspective, teaching them these basic

principles, getting them to go through drills, getting them to

work with like black and white before color, all these ideas

that were really foundational, not only to their Renaissance,

but the whole Academy system that produced just like

fantastic artists, was kind of seen as like this is dated, we

want people to be creative, and use their creativity, and just

get them to use ideas. And in some ways that really kind of

stunted a lot of artists development, you have experts,

you have people who had a lot of proficiency that managed to

persevere nonetheless, but I thought that was very

fascinating that these, these principles that you know, are in

such wildly different domains still apply. And the other thing

too, which creates a tension, and I just had a conversation

with someone else about this. But as you get better in a

skill, the problem solved becomes more important, because

you are able to kind of decompose the skill into

different chunks in your mind, so that he can do it with less

bandwidth. So just to use an example, like think about the

first time you drove a car, like how much you had to think about

all the little things you had to do. And now I mean, you can

listen to a podcast, maybe you're listening to this one

right now about driving a car, and you've just missed your turn

off or whatever, because it's so obvious to you. And this

tendency for skills to be extremely effortful to go to

almost automatic is universal across skills. But what it means

is that what works best for learning is also going to change

depending on where you're at, in the beginning, seeing examples

are important because solving the problem is so taxing that

you might not realize, oh, all the problems are solved this

way. You know, because you're just kind of like, you know,

fidgeting with things to try to figure them out. And so that's

why the examples and instructions are so beneficial

at that stage. But as you get later on, and you know those

things, and you have them kind of in the back of your head,

then the practice the problem solving works on the other end,

like we were talking about, about this retrieval, like if

you have the pattern in memory, and you can recall it, it

strengthens that memory more and adapts into more of that

situation. And so this tension often comes up because when you

have someone teaching a class, when you have someone telling

you well, what's the right way to learn something, they're

usually an expert, they're usually on that end where like

they benefit more from experimentation, from practice,

from problem solving from like, increasing the difficulty. And

that's not necessarily what's beneficial at the early stage.

So I find this sort of framework, his way of thinking

about it very valuable, because it's not just about what's the

right learning technique, but it's like, when does that

technique matter? When is it helpful for you.

So what's something that you personally have learned

lately that you've applied these steps to yourself?

Part of the reason my interest in this subject is

because I just have such a like a laundry list of things that I

want to learn. So very selfishly, I'm like, trying to

learn it so that I can understand how those work. So I

mean, something that I've been doing recently is painting, I

really like painting, particularly I've been doing

like watercolor painting, which if you're not involved in this

kind of sphere, you don't know anything about it. One of the

real challenges of it is that unlike oil painting, where you

can kind of paint over, so if you make a mistake, you can

paint over it. watercolors, like is transparent. So once you put

something down, and it dries, you're kind of stuck with it.

And so it does create challenges, because you're a

little more technically constrained, like with oil

paint, you can kind of almost do anything you want, if you just

like are painstaking, whereas watercolor, you know, it's

drying time and this kind of thing. And so these principles

that I've been sort of looking at have definitely played a

factor because it's been looking at like, Well, why am I getting

stuck here? Like when I'm having difficulties and it's like,

well, is the issue that I need more instruction? Or is the

issue that you know, I'm trying to do practice but the practice

is too complicated and I need to make it simpler and I don't know

I just, to me a lot of these research and all these things

have been feeding back into my own practice. Maybe even when I

get a chance to finish the promotion for this book, I might

even do a project specifically about that about applying these

techniques to this this hobby of mine I mean the thing that you

realize when you're doing research on this topic is like

oh my god, this is such a big topic. There's so many things

you could talk about like to call it down to a book, like I

had, I have I think the bibliography has like 500

references like to like get it down to like okay, this is

manageable. This is understandable for person like

that was the real challenge of this book was not like how do I

fill another chapter but like, what do I cut and so so this

book, I hope people will find it valuable I hope they'll enjoy

the journey through stories that I just to me I had to write them

because I done so fascinating when I first encountered them

and really just you know, even if they just enjoy the ride,

maybe it'll give them some tips for how they can improve the

skill they care about. So I mean, the book is available

Amazon audible wherever you get your books and they can also

come check out my website. It's got hm.com If they want to read

some more essays are find out more about the understanding the

art and science of learning.

Scott thanks for joining us today.

Thank you so much, it's been great being here, thanks.