This is Tristan de Montebello.
He is a very interesting guy based in Los Angeles, California
and, one day, he decided to challenge his skills on public speaking.
Tristan did not have any experience in the field.
However, he decided to compete in Toastmasters World Championship -
the most famous public speaking competition in the world.
He managed to become public speaking expert within a few months
and, eventually, he made it into the top 10.
How did he achieve all that?
The answer is Scott Young.
One of the most famous self-development bloggers out there
and a person that devoted his life in creating strategies
on how to accelerate the process of learning.
His most recent book, Ultralearning, is considered the autodidact’s dream.
It is a manual that offers concrete and practical advice
on how to learn anything fast.
It draws inspiration from Scott’s own experience
and also from significant figures across history
that managed to transcend the norm
and showcase unprecedented mastery in their field of choice.
I loved the idea of ultralearning
because learning, in itself,
is an activity absolutely elemental to our existence.
Thus, taking learning to the next level isn’t something trivial,
rather it is something that can prove momentous in one’s life.
The prefix meta comes from the Greek word "μετά," which means beyond.
We use meta to signify something related to itself,
i.e. something self-referential.
In our case, meta-learning means learning about learning,
or learning how to learn.
“So again the idea of metalearning is that
if you're going to embark on a learning project
you should first spend a little bit of time learning
how to do the learning project.
That seems a little bit recursive, but it's also obvious
because if you're going to learn a new language
and you've never done this before,
there's many many many ways to do it and many many pitfalls.
And so if you spend a couple hours doing research ahead of time
you're going to get a much more optimized path forward
than if you just, ah this is the first book I saw,
this is the first research I saw.
Oh, this app seems to be popular, let’s download it,
like that approach to learning things, which is what most people do.”
The acquisition of every skill, in the beginning, seems like a strenuous act.
The only way to ameliorate this process
is to understand the mechanics of the skill first.
“Learn how to learn” is the basic motto behind ultralearning
and the core idea that needs to be espoused
before embarking on a learning journey.
In Scott’s words: Metalearning forms the map,
showing you how to get to your destination without getting lost.
When Bill Gates first met Warren Buffett,
their host at dinner, Gates’ mother,
asked everyone around the table to identify
what they believed was the single most important factor
in their success through life.
Gates and Buffett gave the same one-word answer: “Focus.”
There is nothing more powerful than focus in life.
I can personally attest to that
and the aforementioned parable reinforces my point.
Focus isn’t an easy thing and it often constitutes a form of superpower
in a distraction-oriented world.
Every one of us has to face daily numerous obstacles
that impede our ability to stay concentrated in a task.
Obstacles like procrastination, inability to maintain focus,
and even a failure to create the right kind of focus.
But this can be normal.
Especially when we face novelty and challenges
that seem arcane to our environment,
resistance starts to creep in and our ability to focus suffers as a result.
There is no easy way to tackle that conundrum.
We need to just accept it as a standard tenet of the learning process
and quit being too judgmental with ourselves whenever we fail to overcome it.
As Scott states in the book:
Recognize where you are and start small.
If you’re the kind of person who can’t sit still for a minute,
try sitting still for half a minute.
Half a minute soon becomes one minute, then two.
Over time, the frustrations you feel learning a particular subject
may become transmuted into genuine interest.
One of the major issues one has to face
when dealing with a new skill is that of directness.
Directness refers to the ability of the learner
to approach the most crucial aspects of the skill head-on.
Usually, instead of immersing ourselves in the skill itself,
we try to find shortcuts or hacks that can make the skill easier to acquire.
Scott explains that beautifully in the book:
We want to speak a language
but try to learn mostly by playing on fun apps,
rather than conversing with actual people.
We want to work on collaborative, professional programs
but mostly code scripts in isolation.
We want to become great speakers, so we buy a book on communication,
rather than practice presenting.
In all these cases the problem is the same:
directly learning the thing we want feels
too uncomfortable, boring, or frustrating,
so we settle for some book, lecture, or app,
hoping it will eventually make us better at the real thing.
The best way to learn directly is to immerse in projects
relevant to the field from the beginning.
Despite the innate challenging nature of such an endeavor,
the benefits are immense.
Benjamin Franklin was considered by many
the greatest polymath of all time.
He was a politician, an entrepreneur, an inventor, and a great writer.
Especially when it came to writing,
Franklin would constantly try to come up with methods
that would allow him to improve this extremely important skill.
For instance, he would read “The Spectator”
and he would take notes on articles that appeared there.
He would then leave the notes for a few days and come back to them,
trying to reconstruct the original article from memory.
By doing this many times,
he would familiarize himself with the concepts
and eventually automate the ways he would internalize them.
Such a method is considered a drill
and drills allow you, through repetition,
to improve on weaknesses in your learning process.
“So drilling is really I think a lot of us have a bad feeling about drills.
We remember you know doing our times tables when we were kids
or memorizing something and it feels like drudgery
it doesn't feel as fun
and often it feels like it's tedious or unnecessary.
And I think the problem is that
if you just give someone a drill
and say OK you're going to do this 100 times
then they often don't know why they're learning it.
And it's often not driven by any kind of need.
It's just that's what's next on the list to learn
is do this drill a hundred times
and the way I like to think of drills is that
if you do drills properly in an ultralearning project
then they actually feel super useful
because what you're doing is that
you're encountering some real learning challenge.
It's too difficult.
And so you're breaking it apart or breaking it down so that
you're working on a simpler aspect
and then going back and trying to reintegrate it
to work back into the original problem.”
Let’s say you are a student and you have to prepare for an exam.
You have three different options apropos how to allocate your time:
Passive review – Go over your notes and the book.
Create a concept map –
Write down the main concepts in a diagram
and see how they are related to each other.
Free recall –
Retrieve the knowledge from the book and remember what was in it.
Passive review and concept mapping are inefficient.
Free recall is the best way to go.
Humans beings can’t know with confidence how well they’ve learned something.
Instead we need to constantly test our knowledge
by evaluating how easy it is to remember it.
“The thing is that free recall is actually a lot more similar
to what you actually have to do on tests
and it's a lot more similar to what you have to do in real life.
Very often is that it's not just merely
“Oh I'm looking at this information, have I seen this before,”
which is what this sort of self-check is when you're reviewing.
But, here's a question, what's the answer?
Or can you activate this knowledge without having it in front of you,
and it’s a much more difficult task,
and it's something that you actually have to actively practice.”
“I told Chris Rock I was going to the Comedy Cellar here in New York.
He said, I'm gonna come down.
I said, Chris yo I'm working on some stuff come down
I wanna know what you think.
We're close and we always give each other opinions on what we're doing
and where we feel this can go or that can go just punch up.
So he comes down.
He's like, oh my God Kev funny. I say, you going up?
He said, yeah I'm gonna try some stuff too. Chris goes up.
Dave pops in later that night. Me and Chris we're talking Chappelle comes in.
We say, you going up? He said yeah.
Me and Chris go downstairs so we can watch Dave.
Keep in mind me and Chris are excited.
We just worked on new material. Chris gave me some good bits.
He went on, I gave him some good bits. Dave went on stage.
It was so good.
I mean Chris just took what we had.We balled it up.
We threw it away.
We threw it in the trash. We threw it.
I said I, I'm so disgusted with where my level of thinking was at the scene
where Dave was I got to go back in the gym. ”
Comedy cellar is a comedy club in New York.
It is designed for a small crowd
and famous comedians go there to test new material.
It is the best way for them to gather feedback
and evaluate whether or not the new material is worth using in bigger shows.
Feedback constitutes a great way
to assess one’s level of competence in any a field.
But feedback can be tricky.
What is good feedback and what isn’t?
Scott has done extensive research on the topic
and his analysis can be very enlightening.
“A lot of feedback isn't actually very helpful.
And if the feedback distracts from your ability to do the task
or, worse, it has a demotivating influence on your performance,
then it can actually be bad.
And so if I tell you for instance:
“Oh you're so great at this, you're so smart”
when you're learning, as a teacher, that actually has a negative effect.
One of the things that they found is praise is not useful for students
because praise, if it doesn't have any information the student can use to improve,
has a demotivating effect.
“Oh I'm doing this really well, OK I'm not going to work so hard now”
and so I thought that was really interesting
because we often know that really harsh and critical feedback,
“You're such an idiot,” you know, no one wants to hear that,
but also the opposite is also not great for feedback either.”
Feedback can oftentimes make us feel harsh and uncomfortable.
Ego usually gets in the way,
as well as the intentions and experience of the person offering feedback.
Extracting the signal from the noise can be challenging,
but it is a challenge we ought to embrace.
“Nigel Richards is a Scrabble legend.
They call him the Tiger Woods of Scrabble.
But clearly only referencing Tiger's abilities on the green.
Because, listen to these numbers.
Richards has won the Thailand Kings Cup eleven times,
the UK open six times, the US National Championship five times,
the English world championship three times,
and his most recent victory was the French World Championship
against an actual French speaking player.
A friend of his told the New Zealand Herald
that Richards studied the French Scrabble dictionary for eight weeks
specifically to learn the words and not the language.
I guess some of the language rubbed off on him
because Richards actually won a challenge against his opponent
who, just a reminder, could speak French.”
Nigel Richards obviously possesses a great memory,
but that’s not what made him a scrabble champion.
In one of his interviews, Richards said the following:
“It’s hard work, you have to have dedication to learn,”
elsewhere adding
“I’m not sure there is a secret, it’s just a matter of learning the words.”
It is self-evident that a learning ethos,
combined with a good memory can help you go a long way.
You forget for different reasons, like time,
overwriting old memories with new ones,
or inability to access specific parts of your memory.
However, memory, despite its obscure nature,
can be “maniputlated” through different mechanisms.
Mechanisms like spacing,
proceduralization, overlearning, and mnemonics.
These are all great techniques used by ultralearners.
They can effectively counteract your short- and long-term rates of forgetting
and end up making a huge difference in your memorization.
Richard Feyman was one of the most beautiful minds of the previous century.
What made him such a prolific figure amongst scientists
wasn’t just his intelligence
but also his unparalleled ability to continuously seek knowledge.
“But, if you realize, all the time, what’s kind of wonderful,
is as we expand our experience in the wilder and wilder regions of experience,
every once in a while we have these integrations
in which everything is pulled together in a unification
which turns out to be simpler than it looked before.”
The surface wasn’t of interest to him.
What mattered the most, was how deep he could delve into a problem.
Because if you go deep enough, anything can become interesting.
And through depth you develop intuition.
Intuition occurs when we do things naturally –
when there is no struggle entailed in our thinking process.
When you do and feel things intuitively
you operate on a level beyond comprehension.
It is the level where you know
the outcome of something before you even deal with it.
This is the secret behind most geniuses
and this is probably the first step to any form of mastery.
This is the starry night.
One of my favorite paintings and a piece of art
that, along with others, made Vincent van Gogh
one of the most influential painters across space and time.
Van Gogh was a prodigy of his time.
He started painting at the age of 26,
with no previous experience in any form of art,
and within ten years he managed to ascend to the upper echelons
of the art scene of his era.
The sad thing, however, is that, like many great artists,
Van Gogh was celebrated the most posthumously.
During his life, he was considered weird and crazy by some.
He was extremely introverted and shy and, more often than not,
he would be isolated by his peers.
What kept him going was his unfaltering obsession with drawing.
He would draw for days straight,
changing sceneries and persistently trying to improve his style.
Scott in his book raises a great point with regards to Van Gogh’s evolution:
“How can we explain these discrepancies?
How does someone who starts late,
with no obvious talent and many handicaps,
nonetheless become one of the world’s greatest artists,
with one of the most recognizable and distinctive styles?”
Of course tenacity played a significant role in his development,
but most importantly it was his willingness to constantly experiment
that made him stand out so fast.
“To really master something,
to really reach the levels of creativity and genius
that we associate with the kind of end products of a learning goal,
you really need to experiment
because, eventually, you get onto a path
that no one's been here before. Right?
When you are mastering a skill at that high level,
you are doing something that no one's done before.
So, learning in that sense is not something
you can just ask some expert what's the right way to learn this,
because you are often approaching limits of things
that you know no one has done it exactly that way before
and so you have to sort of develop that approach yourself.”
All of these principles are only starting points.
The art of learning will always be projecting new challenges to one’s life,
but, when you get the fundamentals right,
the substrate becomes more solid
and you become more ready to engross yourself into new ideas and skills.
And as Scott eloquently suggests towards the end of the book:
True mastery comes not just from following the path trodden by others
but also from exploring possibilities they haven’t yet imagined.
Hi guys,
This was my first collaboration
and something I was yearning for long.
Scott is one of the most interesting bloggers of our time
and it was a privilege to get the chance to interview him
about such an important topic like learning.
Learning is synonymous to evolution
whereas lack of learning is synonymous to stagnation.
My advice to all of you is to keep learning,
for it’s one of the things that makes you feel truly alive.
As you can imagine,
today’s giveaway will be Scott’s latest book, Ultralearning.
All you need to do to enter is like, subscribe,
get notifications, follow me on Instagram
and message me on Instagram
confirming that you did all that with a screenshot.
The winner will be announced in a week from now.
Most probably, he or she will be decided randomly,
but you may increase your chances of winning
if you are a little bit more creative in the message you will send me on Instagram.
Anyway, it was a pleasure as always.
See you in the next video.