Scott Young is the author of the new book Ultralearning: Master hard skills, outsmart the competition and accelerate your career.  If you want to accomplish more and stand apart from everyone else, you need to become an ultralearner! Get ready to learn about some of the biggest learning challenges Scott has undertaken and how you can become an Ultralearner too!

Sean DeLaney: Scott, welcome to What Got You There, how are you doing today? 

Scott Young: I’m good, I’m good, great to be here. 

Sean: So excited to have you. So I think we need to get our brains warmed up a little bit, get them going.

Scott: (laughs) Sure. 

Sean: I’m always interested how the guests begin their day. What do you do and get action moving?

Scott: Well, I’m one of these people that I really like to work first thing in the morning, so that’s kind of where I start. Sometimes I have a cup of coffee or a little bite to eat first, but I tend to jump straight into work as soon as possible, because for me I feel those few hours in the morning are where the work gets done. My afternoons I get things done, but it’s usually harder to get the real kind of deep work that you need to do to really think hard about problems.

Sean: So when you say you’re doing your work during that time, what does that actually look like for you? I know you’re involved in a lot of things.

Scott: Well, it really depends on what project I’m working on. Right now, I’m having this podcast with you. And so I’ve been doing a lot of that I’ve been having a lot of conversations about this book recently. When I was writing the book that meant getting to the coffee shop and doing research or doing writing, get out of the house so that I could work on that and then what I’m doing, learning projects are doing the kinds of things that I described in the book, then too. I usually have a pretty full schedule, and I like to try to do the hardest stuff.

I don’t know, I would say my peak hours of productivity are probably around from 8 to 9 till around 11 or noon and then, and then the afternoon and evening I can still get things done but it’s a little bit, a little bit slower.

Sean: So you mentioned having multiple projects you never know exactly which project you’ll be taking on at that time. Do you have any non-negotiables though, no matter what the project you’re currently working on any things that are consistent for you?

Scott: Yeah, so I’m a big proponent of habits, and I think habits are really important to view and look at your life. A bunch of automatic behaviors that then we kinda generally overrate how much we’re actually making decisions, who we do things. It’s usually auto pilot usually based on habits.

And so I’ve done a few different ways of thinking about habits but over the last couple of years, I’ve been drifting towards the “Don’t break the chain philosophy.” I don’t know if you’ve heard of that one, but the basic idea there is that you make a small habit that you should do basically always. That it’s, it’s not something that you… Sometimes you have to have it like, “Okay, I wanna go to the gym and go regularly,” but maybe you can’t always put in an hour work out every single day, so you try to do it as consistently as possible, but you also forgive yourself if you get sick or you go on vacation or or what have you. Whereas the “Don’t break a chain” thing is to try to reduce it to a smaller thing that you never break that you ideally never break and you just try to make the chain longer and longer. 

So I’ve been doing that for about probably the two years I’ve been using that approach to habits and so I have a few things on there from doing push-ups, to flossing, to cleaning, in terms of learning. I also have doing some Chinese practice on there as well, so I probably seven or eight things that are on my daily. I don’t break the chain list. 

Sean: No, I love the idea behind that. “Don’t break the chain.” Have you actually found that implementing one of these little “Don’t break the chain habits” has led to bigger habits and being able to stick to them more? 

Scott: Well, I think that the idea is that you wanna have some kind of placeholder, in with what you’re doing. So the Chinese practice is a good example of that, because I have it right now is 10 minutes and 10 minutes is real, especially we’re talking about listening to 10-minute audio or reading for 10 minutes. Usually not too hard to do even if the day is really busy, stuff gets in the way. You knew 10 minutes right before I go to sleep. It’s not that hard to do.

And so, I find that for those kinds of minimal habits that works really well because you kinda don’t have that, “Well, today is just too busy. I’m not gonna do it today,” excuse because it’s only 10 minutes, but on the other hand, I find that if you keep up engagement, so that it’s something that you are doing at least a little bit, then there’s lots of moments where maybe you’ll do more, maybe you’ll be reading something interesting and you read more, you’ll go a little deeper. And so I don’t wanna say that’s the only approach to things that’s successful but I haven’t found at least successful on goals where you wanna have a low level of continuous activity over a long period of time. So you wanna do just a little bit, but consistently, or if you want to automate the getting started with something every day. So that you’re at least participating in it, every day, even if that’s not like a huge amount of time.

Sean: Got you. Yeah, no, we’ll dive a little bit deeper in this. But something I’m always intrigued about by people such as yourself, who accomplish a lot, and are constantly involved in many different things. So how do you describe it as what you do?

Scott: Oh wow, yeah, that’s tricky, that’s tricky. So, it’s funny, I’ve actually got a funny joke about that ’cause I’ve evolved the “What do you do for a living” kind of response to things. When I first started… Well, first, I was a student, so I just said I was a student and then I was doing this on the side, so I didn’t really need to make that my “What am I doing?”

But then when I was no longer an official student, I used to see I run an online business and this is when I was probably 23 or 24, I was doing this as just starting doing this and I remember being at a bar somewhere and I was talking to some girl, just someone I had met and I told her that I did this for living and she just looks at me. She’s like, “That sounds fake.” That just doesn’t sound like a real thing that you do.

And so it was just kind of like, “Hmm, OK. It’s an interesting piece of feedback to get from that.”

And so, usually these days, I tend to focus on the writing so I usually tell people I’m a writer. And then the follow-up question is like, “What kind of writing you do?” Well, now I’ve written this book, so I can tell people that I’ve written a book, but before I would usually say I have my own website, and I write essays and things like that. 

Sean: Yeah, well… Well, the book is Ultralearning, it’s your newest piece of work and I know you’ve done a lot of interesting and fascinating things leading up the combination of writing this, so I wanna hear a little bit about your origin story. Where did the fascination for you around learning begin? 

Scott: Yeah. So I’ve always been interested in learning. I think even as a kid, I was interested in learning stuff. I think that that interest has gone through different phases. So when I was in university, I was sort of writing and blogging at the same time, so I had a blog while I was in university. And just when your entire life is as a student, everything has to do with learning, then being able to learn effectively, or to get more done with less studying, it just naturally flows out of that because that’s what you’re doing all the time.

And so just the way that there’s lots of books about how to be productive at work, this is kind of the version of that for a student. So I was interested in productivity and these topics in university because it just seemed natural to me to want to be able to get the results that you wanted from school without a lot of stress and studying and all-nighters and these kinds of things. So I gravitated towards that. 

And then, around nearing the end of my university experience, I had the opportunity to go on a year-long exchange in France, and so I was, had this opportunity to study abroad, and I was really excited about being able to learn French. I thought it would be really nice to come back and be able to speak another language.

And I went there, and I was kind of struggling with it a little bit, and this was in part because a lot of the things that I’d learned how to do, a lot of the ideas I had about learning, we’re kind of still tied up in this idea of how do you do well in classes? And suddenly, I’m learning a language, not because I wanna do well in classes, but because I wanna be actually able to speak to people and also because the environment that I was in, I didn’t realize it really at the time that just going and traveling somewhere often isn’t enough and especially if you go somewhere for a long time and everyone around you speaks in English all the time, it can actually be quite difficult and frustrating to learn another language.

And so around this time I was kinda complaining about this to a friend from home, and he said, “Well have you heard of Benny Lewis? And I said, “Well no, who’s Benny Lewis? Who’s this guy?” And so Benny Lewis has a website quite modestly, called fluent in three months, and it was about his challenge to try to learn a language as well as he could start aiming for fluency in a three-month period of time. And he now speaks like 10+ languages and he’s devoted his life to it. But this is sort of a project that he was doing, and he was really my first introduction to this world of ultra learning, which I talk about in the book and, and talk about here, which is not about how do you do well in classes, just so you can get a good grade and pass an exam, but how do you learn skills that you really care able to matter for your life and often using unconventional strategies? And so I feel like he was my real first introduction because I spent a lot more than three months in France and I didn’t feel like I was progressing to fluency very quickly. I didn’t feel like I was anywhere close to that. So, just the idea that someone might be challenging himself to do this just sort of struck me as so outlandish and crazy that I knew I had to meet this guy. 

And so he was sort of my first introduction to this world of ultra learning that not this thinking about terms of school, but thinking about really how do you learn outside of the education system? And so this sort of led to some of my own projects but that was sort of really the genesis of the idea for this book was, again, thinking about learning in this unconventional way.

Sean: So once you discover Benny Lewis, and the ability to learn language quickly, is that the first, call it learning challenge you’ve really dive deep on? 

Scott: Well, so it kind of is a little bit of a winding story for me, because I did experience this and I did have the opportunity once I kind of got a better grasp of the method and the approach that he was using, I was able to improve my ability to learn France when I was… (laughs) learn France, learn French when I was staying there, but actually my first project was quite different and it happened after I finished that year-long experience, and after I graduated from university. I decided that I wanted to basically I wanted to reconsider what I had studied in university. So I think this happens to a lot of people. You go to school, you study something for a while and then you think that it’s gonna be one thing and it turns out to be something else. So in my case, I kinda wanted to be an entrepreneur, and I thought, well, what better to study if you wanna run your own business then, business school, right?

And it was only after taking it for a couple of years at realized actually business school is mostly about how can you be a good middle manager in a large corporation. It’s not really about how do you do very well at this, how do you start your own business?

And so because of that, I kind of had this feeling of regret almost, that I chose to study this and so I was graduating and I was thinking about, “Well, what was the thing that I wanted to do instead of this?” And at the time, I was really thinking that I should have studied computer science, because I know that computer science is not the only route to entrepreneurship either, but at least at the time it very much felt like the internet, doing things online, people like Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, these are all people who knew how to make things. They knew how to make things with computer programs, they knew how how technology worked, and that just seemed like a much more relevant skill than understanding HR rules, or organizational charts or all the stuff that I learned in business school.

And so I was thinking about this, but I think a lot of people who studied something, once you’ve been through an undergraduate degree, you’re not super keen on going back to school for another four years, taking out student loans, living in a dorm room, you know… You had that experience. You don’t necessarily wanna repeat it. And so for me, I was trying to decide what I wanted to do about this ’cause I didn’t really wanna go back and get another degree, but I also wanted to know how to do these things. I wanted to be a better programer, I wanted to be able to understand technology and all these sort of ideas that would have been taught in that undergrad.

And so around this time I stumbled upon this class that was taught by MIT, but posted online for free. And so it has this platform called Open Course where… Where they just put tons of their material online for free, so you can just go on there right now and check out tons of actual MIT classes that they take and some of the classes are more material than others but they have basically this is what MIT students are using.

And so I took one of these classes and I was very impressed by it, and there was just sort of this light bulb moment where I thought, “Well, has anyone ever tried to do something like a degree before? Has anyone ever tried to learn what is in an MIT degree, but not going to MIT or not even going to university generally, but just trying to do it on your own?” And so I was also thinking about Benny Lewis in this moment, as my first kind of mentor in this world of multi-learning and I thought, “Well, what if you not only tried to do this degree but you also try to optimize every facet of it, so that you could try to do it as efficiently and effectively as possible?” 

So some examples of that, normally, when you’re sitting through a class or you’re listening to someone talking, you just have to listen to the whole thing, you have to listen to it from start to finish at the regular speed whereas everyone knows if you’re listening to a podcast for instance, you can watch it at 1.5 times the speed or even 2 times the speed, and you can watch it whenever you’re ready. You don’t have to wait for the scheduled class or things like assignments normally, you do the whole assignment you hand it in, you wait a few weeks, maybe you get your results back, you’ve already forgotten what the questions were. Whereas if you have the solution key and the assignment in hand, you could do one question at a time, and quickly get feedback. So it’s sort of evolved from not just being a project about how could you get the education on your own, but also maybe you could do it more efficiently. So this project evolved into what I call the MIT challenge, which was me trying to learn the equivalent of MIT’s 33 classes that would make up their undergraduate curriculum but instead of doing it over four years, I tried to do it in 12 months. 

So I did the first class in October of 2011, and I passed the final exam for the last class in September of 2012. 

Sean: That’s pretty remarkable. There’s a lot of different directions we could go here. First. I’m really curious, though, about taking that leap. It’s one thing to think about the,MIT challenge and say, “Hey, I’d be really interested in learning this,” but what makes you take that initial class and decide to try to do this in a year?

Scott: Well, as I said, I think there’s a lot of little influences that pushed me in this direction. So, as I said, one of them was meeting Benny Lewis. So I think sometimes we just need someone to show us that something’s possible or something is permissible to do something. And so for me, seeing him take on these projects, it also really got me thinking about the time of like, “That’s really cool, I really like that. I’d like to do something like that,” because I haven’t seen anyone do that before.

And then the second thing I think that really sparked my interest, particularly for this challenge was I was looking online for people who had tried to do this specific thing, which is trying to do something like a degree but without going to school without doing that. And I couldn’t find any real examples, I couldn’t see anything where someone had done something similar. And so, how often in life can you be the first person to do something? And so that really excited me, just off the bat, because I thought, “How cool would that be?” And at the time, as well, I was very much thinking that this was definitely gonna be the wave of the future. And so for me, I was thinking, well, it’s just a matter of time before tons of people are doing this so it would be very interesting to be one of the first people to do it. And so I think that was sort of part of the initiation point.

And then I think also part of the initiation point is, again just this sort of excitement of possibility. I think I talk about a lot of stories in the book of people who took on big challenges, not because they thought they were gonna be successful necessarily, but just because how far could you go? What could you do if you really, really worked at trying to do this as effectively as possible, what would the end product be? I think it’s just the case is so many of us don’t take these things seriously or don’t really try to go to that extreme. 

And the funny thing is as I document the book, is that the people who really do take it seriously, often go much, much further than they would have expected. So I have lots of examples in the book but people like Tristan de Montebello who decides he wants to do an ultra learning project around public speaking and sure enough, after seven months he goes from having about zero experience to being a finalist for the World Championship of Public Speaking in such a short period of time.

Sean: Yeah, when you said possibility it really struck a chord with me and I was actually having a conversation this morning with a neuro-scientist Dr. Tara Swart and we were talking about Roger Bannister and the four-minute mile. 

Scott: Oh, right.

Sean: And once he did that, people saw that that was possible. So it’s just really interesting. So, I guess I’m asking more about the mindset that’s required to become an ultra learner, how important and what is that framework that’s required of this?

Scott: So I think a lot of people who maybe are even listening to this right now, it sounds so extreme, it sounds so outside of maybe what their background experiences, and if you were struggling in school, you didn’t enjoy it that much, or maybe you try to do this and it didn’t work very well. It seems a little bit like “Well, this has nothing to do with me,” but I think the idea here is not to try to convert you into, “Okay, well now I’m going to be an ultra learner overnight,” and doing something truly world class and incredible. But just in terms of using these examples as ways of rethinking how you approach things and often what happens is that as you do something and you find the right way to do it and you are successful in it, that gives you the motivation to pursue future projects. 

So my example, for instance, is when I’m struggling with learning French and I hear, “Well, Benny Lewis, my idea was not… Oh, I didn’t know that you could become fluent in three months.” It was like, “Well this is bullshit. There’s no way that a person can do this.” And it was only after meeting him, it was only after seeing what he was doing differently from how I was doing it, and in his case, one of the things that was a major difference is that I was surrounded by a lot of people who are speaking to me in English, whereas he was really creating this sort of immersive environment with tons of practice from the very first day, even when he wasn’t that skilled yet and so this was a real kind of departure from my method. And it turns out, it makes a huge difference. 

And so, flash forward a couple of years later and I’m doing another big ultra learning project after my MIT challenge finished I decided to try to do something similar to what Benny Lewis did. So I went with a friend. So this was a guy who was just my roommate at the time. We just decided to do this project where we traveled to four countries, Spain, Brazil, China and South Korea.

And the method that we use is that when we land in each of these countries, we only spoke the language we were trying to learn we didn’t speak in English to each other or to people we had to meet, so we called it the no English rule and it works really well. And I would say that, especially for Spain, the first country we were at, which is also a European language where we are… Where it’s a little bit easier to learn than let’s say Chinese. We definitely reached a level of conversational fluency, which I think is kind of funny, because if I go back to five or six years before that when I was in France, that would have just seemed utterly impossible for me. So I think the mindset to cultivate is not one of… “Okay, now you have to go do this extreme thing, and you have to be successful at it,” but one of… Just being open-minded about what might be possible if you use the right approach, and if you’re using the right principles of learning.

Sean: Yeah, one of the great things about hosting this podcast is what you just hit on the ability for me, now, to rethink and have new approaches based on what the guests help instill and something you’ve said is ultra learning isn’t easy. It’s hard and frustrating and requires stretching outside the limits of where you feel comfortable. So I’m intrigued now. So you have to understand the possibility, but then also where you feel comfortable and pushing those limits. How important is that getting outside of your comfort zone?

Scott: So I wrote in the framing of the book, of calling it Ultralearning and sort of really emphasizing the difficulty not the difficulty in terms of… I think I wanna be careful with the way I say difficulty, that it’s not difficult because most people can’t do it.

It’s, yes, not everyone’s gonna be able to, let’s say, “Learn an MIT class in a week,” but the method behind ultra learning is something that anyone could do. Rather it’s effort-full and it’s not usually the default approach to learning things and it’s not because you need to be a certain amount of smart, or you need to be a certain amount of kind of person in order to do this rather. Rather the problem is that I think a lot of us have learned the wrong lessons about how to learn things that we’ve picked up unconsciously, a certain way of thinking about learning that it turns out isn’t actually the most effective way that you can learn things. 

So, it’s funny I was just on Twitter today, and I was just tweeting back and forth about this recent study that came out that was showing that active learning, so one of the principals I talk about in my book, which is called retrieval, which is basically this idea that testing yourself or trying to recall things from memory, is much, much more effective if you wanna be able to actually remember things, than just reading something over and over again, which is what essentially most students do when they’re studying all the time. And yet students tend not to like this approach they don’t like to be tested, they don’t like to be challenged, they don’t like to not know the answer to a question, and so they will purposely avoid doing situations where they might feel bad or might feel challenged. However, for the amount of time you spend, the amount of energy you spend, the activities that challenge and test you are much, much more effective for actually being able to acquire skills and being able to get good at things.

So the Ultra earning philosophy or the ethos that I try to describe in the book is recognizing that this tension exists recognizing that sometimes the most effective thing you can do, is going to be a little bit frustrating or uncomfortable at first, but if you can build yourself, the habit of going and pursuing these opportunities, you can actually learn things much more effectively than you’ve realized in the past. And so the example of students is really clear that if you practice retrieval practice, if you practice practice testing, you will master the material, do much better on tests, in less amount of studying time.

But yeah, this isn’t the default path because it is a little bit more strenuous.

Sean: Yeah, I’m thinking about some of the strenuous things and the uncomfortable things I have to push through to learn more, and I’m really intrigued for you personally, what are some of those difficult things you have to overcome in to really dive deep?

Scott: There’s time… So if we’re talking about language, learning one of the classic examples, I’m gonna assume right now that let’s say you don’t speak Polish. And so if we just said right now, “Okay, here we’re gonna have a conversation and Polish alright, and one, two, three Polish.” How would we even start? It would be very difficult. And so, even if I go on Google Translate and type things out, and I try to read them out, it might take 5, 10 minutes for us to under two or three sentences back and forth, and go back through things.

So this is very frustrating and difficult, but it turns out that doing things like this, whether or not you’re starting exactly at scratch, you have a little bit of practice first with just some words and phrases before you start having a conversation. Getting into immersion that getting into having that conversation early on, is super helpful because once you have that basis of, “Okay, we’re actually trying to communicate about something.” Then every word you learn every phrase you learn is because you need that phrase, you need that word and because it fits into what you’re trying to achieve in terms of your communication goals, and this is really important. How we mostly learn languages in school is, well, let’s give a bunch of random phrases in vocabulary. Let’s expect students to memorize them, let’s get them to work out some grammar exercises on a homework assignment and then mostly sit in class while the teacher lectures at us. And the problem is that this is not nearly enough practice and the practice that you are doing is often removed from the actual situations you care about, so you’re not learning the words when you need them or as you need them in real situations, you’re learning them just because they’re on a list or they’re in a book somewhere.

And this extends to so much more the languages, programming is like that. If you go to do programming classes in school very often, they will get you to write out computer programs with a pencil and paper as the final exam.

This never happens in real life. Maybe you have to do a description of an algorithm on a napkin or something, but you’re almost always writing with your actual fingers on the keyboard, you’re looking up syntax when you forget it. So the actual act of programming an actual computer program versus writing one is often quite different and so there are many situations like this where if you can take the right approach if you can use the right principles to learn something… Well, you can get more effective results. The challenge is just that this is often a little bit scary and difficult at first, so you have to know that, okay, yes, I am doing the right approach, and I just need to push through it and I am actually gonna be learning more even though it doesn’t often feel that way intuitively.

Sean: You mentioned when taking on the task of learning a new language, you learn those first words and the new words can kinda compound on top of that and the learning compiles on top of each other. How important is that early knowledge base?

Scott: So, early knowledge base is important. And I think particularly for something like a language I just joked about, Polish, but if neither of us people is just very difficult to say anything in the beginning. And you often essentially are just typing things into let’s say Google Translate, and reading them out.

So you do need to have an early knowledge base, and I do find that for a skill, like a language, for instance I highly recommend doing a month of Pimsleur. Pimsleur is a little bit more expensive, but it is much, much better than Duolingo and I recommend it just doing one month, just to get a little bit of that foundation. So you know, maybe a couple two, three dozen phrases. You really have them down and you can use them as kind of your foundation to start expanding and building outward.

But I don’t think that’s the main problem for people. I think most people who spent some time studying the language, are very rarely in the situation where… Okay, I’ve done zero practice. Now let’s start a conversation. The problem is usually… Oh, they’ve spent a couple of months or maybe they studied it in high school, or they’ve done this or that, and so they have learned some things, and they do have a little bit of a foundation. The problem is that they’re not practicing or the problem is that they haven’t maintained it, or the problem is that they haven’t gotten used to the situation where they have to recall it from memory, they’re just used to looking at it in their Spanish book or their little textbook that they brought with them. And so all of these ingredients, if you can get the ingredients right for learning, then you really can learn more effectively than most people are used to.

Sean: You mentioned the ingredients and some of the problems and one of those problems I see often and I’m guilty of this myself, is the self-talk, and I hear this a lot with people when they first go to a party. “Oh, I’m terrible at remembering names.” And I wanna know what the negative impacts of self-talk or I guess what the positives could be as well. 

Scott: So self-talk is important. I think one of the things that we do is we work hard to preserve a self-image. So more than just the words that you say to yourself, you have a certain sense of yourself as being competent as being successful as being good at things.

And I think especially as we get older, this sense of our own competence, gets continually reinforced. So we spend more time with the things that we’re good at, we avoid the things that we’re not good at and this isn’t necessarily a bad process, but it can create this identity where you have to be good at things. You have to look like you’re good at things at all times, or you feel really bad. And the downside of this, is it very often to learn new things. You have to be bad at them to start.

And so I think where we often have these challenges that people will say things like… “Oh, I’m no good at learning languages,” or “Oh, I suck at math,” or these… And it’s not so much that these beliefs are the problem, the problem is that they’re using this as a shield to avoid engaging in that. 

So if you say to yourself, “I’m no good at languages,” this is sort of a way of saving face and avoiding having to try to learn something and maybe find it difficult. Or you did try to learn something and you found it difficult, and so now you sworn off that activity, you’re not gonna continue with it and so I don’t want to suggest to people that they have to work on their weaknesses, It’s okay to work on things that you’re already good at.

The world is full of way too many things to learn, so you do have to make choices about what you’re gonna learn in what you’re not gonna learn, but I think it is important to pay attention to these kinds of ideas that you have about yourself. Because I think for many of us we have this, it’s almost like a straight jacket version of our identity that we could only be this one thing. We’re only good at this one thing.

And sometimes that can really get in the way of us living the life that we wanna live. So how many of us… You studied something in school. Turns out that they’re one really great opportunities for it. You’re really invest in this track record. And now you’re saying to yourself, “Oh, maybe I should have learned programming or I should have learned accounting, or I should have learned something else and… But now, I’m too late to start, I can’t switch out, I can’t go back to the bottom.” And so we get into these narrow corners that we can’t think our way out of because we don’t really know how to learn and we don’t embrace the idea that we can always change, we can always grow and improve it as individuals. 

Sean: Yeah, you talk about embracing the failure and it and it makes me think about a lot of the entrepreneurs that have been on this show and it seems like their ability to take on new challenges, not being afraid of failure, it’s pretty prevalent. And so, do you see that amongst a lot of the best ultra learners?

Scott: So, I think failure is important. I think one of the things is just being comfortable with being bad at things. So it’s not even so much that it comes as failure, it just comes as it’s okay that I’m terrible at this.

And I think it’s the more that you can feel comfortable with being terrible about something, the easier learning becomes. So the classic example of we’re talking about learning a new language, when you start learning a new language, you are terrible at it and you’re terrible in comparison to English or to whatever language that you speak as a native language. In that language, you’re good. I can have this conversation very effortlessly with you and use all sorts of big words and articulate concepts, and things like this. But as I said, if we had to start over in Polish right now, this conversation, it would grind immediately to a halt.

And, so that immediate feeling of… Oh wow, I’m not as good at this as I was at something else. It can be kind of a painful feeling. And so I don’t think it is actually a failure unless you construe it as such, is that… Well, I’m not good at this. Therefore, I’m a failure. I think if you have the idea well, I’m not good at this yet but this is the learning process and it’s okay that I’m bad at it. I think the more comfortable you can get with being bad at things, the more things that you will learn in life and the more breadth of skill and kind of ironically, the more you feel comfortable being bad at things, the better you get at things. So there’s a little bit of a perverse incentive there. 

Sean: Yeah, no, you did a much better job articulating I think what I was trying to get out there, so thank you for that. 

Scott: Yeah. 

Sean: You did mention about balancing those strengths versus weaknesses. And do you have kind of a road map in your head in what you should be putting more time to whether it be a strength or a weakness. 

Scott: Right. So I have two thoughts on this. So, first my thought is that I tend to learn things because of interest in curiosity and I think that’s a very powerful force and so I don’t like to just reduce everything to some kind of analysis that alright, there’s a 80% probability. We’re not trying to be Spock, here. We all have things that we wanna learn, we all have things that… Wouldn’t that be cool? … Wouldn’t that be cool if you could do X, right? How how many of us have these feelings but we suppress them because we’re afraid of… Maybe it’ll be too much work. Maybe I’ll try and I’ll fail, maybe it’ll be too difficult. Or maybe you just have had a string of bad experiences learning something in the past, and then that makes you hesitant to try new things. 

So my starting point with all these things is just to ask people, “what are the things that excite you that you just… It would be really cool if I could do X.” But if we were talking about where do I think you should invest time? And because I know one of the big self-improvement topics is whether you should work on improvements in your strengths, or improve your weaknesses. And I actually have a kind of nuanced picture about that, because I don’t really buy into the idea that we should always work on strengths versus weaknesses. But I do think there’s an argument to be made for strengths. 

So the way I would basically rationalize it, is that if it is possible to completely avoid some aspect in your life, and it turns out to be a weakness I think it’s okay not to do it.

So for instance, if you’re not good at playing the violin, and you don’t really have any particular interest… So the first thing I said, “You’re not excited about playing the violin,” and you’re not very good at it, I think it’s okay not to learn to play the violin that’s gonna be probably something that’s gonna only have a marginal impact on your professional life. On the other hand, if you are bad at social skills, there’s not really a sense that you can totally avoid social skills in your life.

It’s not really the sense that you can just sort of say, “Well, but I’m this and I don’t have to work on that.” That weakness is always going to interfere with your ability to do whatever other job you do.

And this is true of not only social skills, but your ability to write effectively, your ability to communicate your ideas, ability to manage your emotions, even within a particular field. The classy example I gave is that Albert Einstein for instance, is renowned for being super smart, but what a lot of people don’t realize is that he was much more an intuitive physicist than he was a mathematician, that he struggled more with math than he did with coming up with these sort of intuitive theories.

And so when it came to general relativity, he actually developed stomach problems because the math was so difficult. He worked on it for a number of years and it was very hard. Now, in that instance if Einstein had said, “Well, I’m good at this daydreaming and having thought experiments, but I’m not good at the math so I won’t get good at the math, I’ll just work on the thought experiments.” That would have totally failed. He wouldn’t have been a successful physicist. Because to do physics, you have to do the math. And so in some sense, I think as well, when we think about our weaknesses, I think that’s the real question to ask. Is this something that I can safely ignore, because it’s not gonna impact my life, but if it is part of my life, if it is something that’s gonna impact my life, and things like health, social skills, and all these other things do really impact your life and they are really unavoidable, then I think it does make sense to ask yourself well, how could I get better at them? Maybe I’m not gonna be the best networker in the world, but maybe I will be good enough at meeting people. That it won’t hinder my performance at my job, or it won’t prevent me from doing the things I really wanna do in life.

Sean: You mentioned some of these big life skills for you personally, which one of them have you been able to focus on, do things provided the most value for yourself?

Scott: Oh, lots, lots, I think, so I could just list some of them off. I think personal productivity and sort of personal self-efficacy has been a huge thing that I think is super important, and I think the problem is that we often characterize people who are, let’s say, very self-motivated or they seem to be… Oh, this person just a machine. They’re so organized and productive.

I think we often construe that as a kind of character trait or as a personality thing, or it’s even sometimes just kind of like, oh, they have a lot of willpower. It’s some kind of resource that they tap it’s like some spiritual energy or something. And I don’t think about it as, all at all like that. I think about it as being a skill, that it is just the same way that someone who rides a bicycle well has acquired certain skills that someone who can’t ride a bicycle doesn’t have, I think someone who is very effective at creating their own projects that motivating themselves and sticking to things or creating these are all skills that require practice. And so I think once you adopt that mindset, then you really see… Oh, why have I never finished any of the projects I’ve started over the last 10 years?

That’s a deficit in skill in my mind that you are lacking certain skills of how do you organize the project, how do you stay motivated to it, what are the little rules and habits you have for yourself to keep you on track and keep you from getting derailed?

These are all very important things and I think they’re often under-appreciated, by people who, again, like in it just to some sort of… There’s this raw energy that this person has that allows them to complete things like that.

Sean: A few minutes ago, you mentioned interest in curiosity and the importance of that. So one thing I’m wondering about is the new shiny object and people who start trying to learn one thing and then automatically jump to the next, can you just dive deeper on this?

Scott: So I think there’s nothing wrong with dabbling. Let me just put that forth right off the bat, that if you aren’t sure whether you wanna commit to something is totally fine to like, oh, let’s just play around with this for a little bit.

I think that’s totally fine and realize that you’re doing that when you do it. So realize that you are just trying it out and don’t try to have big expectations that you will 100% be successful with it. So I’ll give an example. I’m going on a trip to Tokyo, Japan, and in probably about two weeks, and I thought about… It’ll be fine, maybe I’ll learn a little bit of Japanese, I have no intention on necessarily sticking with learning Japanese after that trips done, I think well, it’ll be fun and if I really like it, maybe I might do a project to learn Japanese in the future, but that’s my mindset about it, is that it’s just to try out and have fun. And I think if people tried out and had fun with more things, they would learn more things, right? I think if you just said… Oh, I’ve never done kite surfing… let’s do that for an afternoon or something and take a lesson or I’ve never done this before, let’s try that. I think that’s great, but on the other hand, I think it’s important to realize that to really get good at something, even to a level of intermediacy often does require serious work. It’s not something that just happens by chance. You don’t become fluent in Chinese or a master programmer or an excellent public speaker just because you thought well, let’s just play around for two weeks or 10 days or something like that.

You do it through a serious effort, that’s dedicated over time.

And like we talked about earlier in the episode, a lot of the things that result in effective learning aren’t the default. That they do feel more frustrating more difficult and you can develop a kind of appetite for those things, so it is possible to do those things when you dabble but at the same time, I think for many skills, it is the kind of thing that you have to admit to yourself, okay, if I do really wanna get good at this, I’m gonna have to commit to it. And so for those things what I try to do is I try to create an actual project, so I, I decide, okay, what’s the scope, how long… How much time am I gonna devote? Am I gonna be spending a month on this, am I spending three months on this? Spending a year? And then I try to figure out, okay, how much time am I gonna spend? Is it something that I wanna spend 80 hours a week or is it something that I’m gonna spend 10 minutes a day? Each of those things are different types of projects and then you organize, what will be the most effective way to learn it? So I talk about how to create these kinds of projects in my book, and I think the right attitude to have is dabble around, play around with things, but when you really wanna learn something, when getting good at something is important to you, walk through the process I outline in this book, because I think it’s worked really well for me for setting up those projects. And then when you have a project just have the one project at a time, don’t try to have eight or nine different things going concurrently.

Sean: Yeah, it’s a value piece of information that last part about just trying to focus on the one. Another thing I try to do in my businesses and I’m wondering how this relates to learning is, I try to generate more feedback loops to understand new ways that we could be going with the business. So in terms of learning what’s the value and feedback loops or do you think they’re more detrimental?

Scott: Feedback is very important. So I would say that it’s very difficult to learn without any feedback. I think it’s important to distinguish that feedback does not necessarily mean another person, telling you what you’re doing right and wrong. That is a type of feedback, and it is a very useful kind but it is totally possible to get feedback even on something where no one else is even looking at it. 

So to give an example, if you are a painting a painting, you are getting moment to moment feedback about how your brushstrokes are improving or detracting from the painting.

Now, there may be some elements of that that you can’t see just on your own, that if you had an expert come in and said, “Oh, this is the mistake you’re making. Don’t do this,” that would be helpful, but I think it’s important to recognize that if you are in the practice of doing things and actually exploring something by doing it, not just reading a book, let’s say, or listening to a podcast for instance, when you’re actually doing things, feedback tends to come out and tends to happen.

There are situations where feedback however, can backfire and so I talk about a lot of the ways that you wanna process feedback so that you don’t over-react to it, so that you don’t, someone gives you a piece of negative feedback and you shut down and you say, Okay, well, screw this. I’m not good at this, I’m not gonna do this anymore. And this is surprisingly common. And so, again, I keep using language learning as an example, but I’ve talked to people who said… Oh, I went to Paris, and I tried to order in French, and the guy was like, “Oh your English is…  Your French is terrible. I’m gonna speak to you in English.” And then, they felt so dispirited that they didn’t practice any more French. And I feel really bad for these people because it is unfortunate, when those things happened, but at the same time if you’re getting tons of feedback, you’re getting feedback all the time so that’s not just your only interaction you’ve had many interactions, then you’d probably learn that well, actually most of the time people aren’t rude to you, and yeah, that happens occasionally, but usually it’s the person trying to help, they’re not actually trying to be rude to you, they’re just realizing, oh, you don’t speak French very well. And I do speak English, and I’m gonna try to help you, even though you were trying to practice. 

And so I think that in some cases, where feedback can backfire is when we’re so afraid to get feedback, we’re so afraid of someone criticizing us or saying something mean about our progress or just looking stupid that we don’t actually practice or we get that feedback and we shut down. And so again I talk about in my book, lots of ways that you can overcome this, but I think one of the things that you develop as a sort of an intuition about things, is which feedback to listen to and which things to be like, okay, yeah, I’m gonna put that aside. I’m not gonna listen to that right now.

Sean: Yeah, no, I’m really appreciative of the amount of clarity you just brought to that, so thanks for that.

You mentioned books and reading. And that’s one thing I spend an absorbent amount of time on. So, I’m wondering just what are your thoughts in terms of retaining more of what you actually read?

Scott: Yeah, okay, so this is a huge question because the truth is, we don’t retain very much of what we read and I think this is, in some cases, it’s not the end of the world because I think what you’re doing when you read lots and lots of books. Is not necessarily you wanna have a perfect recall of everything said in the book you wanna kind of absorb the general ideas and sometimes if you read a lot of things maybe you’re not explicitly recalling the information but if you read 15 different books on habits, that would influence your thinking about your own behavior in a somewhat unconscious way towards habits even if I said, “Okay what was the principle of X from Chapter Three of this book?” Maybe you don’t remember.

And so I think it’s okay to read books, casually. I think it’s okay to read books without an explicit plan for recall but at the same time I think it’s important to realize that you actually won’t remember most of the details of the book, you may not even remember some of the big ideas of the book after you read it, and that’s not you having a bad memory. That’s just how human beings work.

And so there’s a few strategies you can use to improve the value that you extract from the books you read.

Some of them are very easy and don’t take very much time, although they do require a little bit of mental effort so they’re not usually a default strategy, and then some of them require more work, but they will really get the value to the book. So the first thing I wanna suggest is what it’s called free recall practice.

So free recall practice is basically after you finish your reading session just close the book and it really only has to take about a minute, maybe 30 seconds, just close your eyes and try to remember everything that you read. Try to remember what was talked, about what was the main idea, what was the point that the author was making, and if they suggested any tips or piece of advice or things you might wanna use later what were those? See how many you can recall and doing this kind of free recall is very instructive for two reasons: one, it’s actually really difficult, even right after you’ve read something to recall most of what was discussed.

So for the people listening, this podcast right now, I highly recommend just  pausing the podcast and what did we talk about? What did we talk about over the last 40 minutes or so, and it’s really hard to remember a lot of these things, you know. Oh yeah, they were talking about this. And then I was on my commute and then I got on that intersection. I wasn’t really listening for a while. And it’s hard to actually recall things. So that’s part of the reason it’s just to clue you into how little you actually remember about things, which is helpful because if you really did wanna remember it, it’s like, “Oh I didn’t remember that. Let’s go back to that page and look over that again.”

The second thing that this does is it even just the act of doing free recall, which I talk about extensively in the book, just doing this act allows you to remember things better.

So, that minute you spend after you doing the review may actually be more beneficial than the let’s say 10 minutes you spend reading for your long-term ability to remember, just because practicing recalling something will be able to make it easier for you to remember in the future.

The sort of second tip I would have, and so, so free recall is a pretty easy thing you can practice after you finish a book you might wanna spend even 5, 10 minutes, just trying to… On a piece of paper, summarize the main points of the book, and then you can just slide that paper into the book and you can pull it out later and read it again, if you ever wanna reminder. But the other thing that I find helpful and this is particularly useful if you really want to apply a book, so you go out a book and you’re like… I really wanna be able to do the thing they’re talking about in the book. So maybe that book is ultra learning, maybe it’s another self-improvement book, or business book that you’re reading.

And what I really recommend for that is that before you read the book, write down what your intentions are of how you wanna use the book and this is very helpful because it automatically starts those thinking processes, so that when you’re listening to something you’re automatically trying to tie it back to situations you might be able to use it, which increases the chance that you will actually use it. So to use my book as an example, if you were reading Ultralearning it would be really helpful to say, “You know what, I’d really like to do this or I’d like to get better at this, or this is the thing that I’m hoping this book will help me with my life,” and you write that intention out so when you’re reading it, you can start looking for things that might fit with that picture.

The second thing that you can do is after you’re done, the book or after you’ve reached some sort of milestone in the book where you learned enough, you can start to make a little project to try to integrate it into your daily habits or into your daily life. And these don’t have to be huge things that can be small things. So even like this podcast right now, you might say you’re not gonna make a habit of every time I do a reading thing, session, when I close the book, I’m gonna spend 20 seconds just trying to do some free recall. It’s pretty simple, it’s not very big, but it is something that you could improve your effectiveness.

Maybe after you read this book you’ll wanna do a whole ultra learning project, you’ll wanna do something that is… I wanna get really good at a skill and really dive deep.

Or maybe you’ll just wanna make a few tweaks to what you’re doing right now, but I think if you go in with that intention, before you read the book and then you also go in with a plan after you’ve read the book, then you’ll really get the meat out of the book in a way that you probably won’t when you just read it casually. 

Sean: You mention setting out that plan. So, I’m really intrigued now as you’re setting out to write the book, Ultralearning, what did that plan look like for you? And then what was your actual process day-to-day like to accomplish this?

Scott: Oh yeah, so this book was challenging for me for a couple of reasons. And I think one of the big reasons is that this topic has been basically my life for the last 10 years, and so that puts a lot of pressure on trying to write a good book because for some authors maybe it’s just a topic that they’ve developed a curiosity, and maybe they spend a couple of years and then they start writing, and there’s a lot of authors, they churn out a book every year or two, and so, okay, now a new topic, and now on to the new thing, and for me, this was the thing that I have kind of obsessed my life over over the last 10 years, so I knew that I wanted to write something that I thought would do that justice and not just put something out because I wouldn’t be able to get a chance to write this book again. So that definitely made it feel a little bit more daunting to begin.

But the other reason that was challenging for me is that I’m not an academic expert, I’m someone who I spent my life doing projects and learning things and working with other students and so I have some hands-on experience but that’s not the same as being a scientist, it’s not the same as having a Harvard PhD in cognitive science, and understanding the nuances of a lot of the research. And I knew when I was writing this book that I wanted it to talk about research, I wanted to talk about signs of learning in an intelligent way, and not just so that I could have an interesting study to talk about so that if I brought up some topic, I felt at least reasonably confident that this wasn’t wildly off-base. What people who spend their whole lives researching that particular sub-topic think about it.

And so that itself was a challenge and so I had to organize it around. Okay, well, what are the areas of research I’m gonna do, but then how do I proceed on that research? And so for each chapter, I’m spending about a month and reading thousands of pages of different books and textbooks and journal articles and things like that to try to synthesize it so that I can present a chapter that I think does justice to all of that research.

Sean: What do you think was the most interesting piece of literature you came across during your research?

Scott: Oh yeah, so much stuff. Some of it surprised me. So the… The research on feedback, I went into feedback thinking more feedback is always good and it was very interesting to see how much research there is that doesn’t say that, that there are many situations where feedback can be detrimental. And so that really sort of pivoted me to thinking not to dissuade people against getting feedback ’cause it does generally seem to be the case that feedback helps, but just being more selective about what feedback you pay attention to and how you process the feedback because that’s seems to be a very important moderator of how useful feedback is.

Another thing which I had, I was aware of before writing the book, but really blew me away with how deep the research is the research on transfer. So I even read a very excellent book on transfer and it’s just study after study after study after study after study basically showing that we don’t apply what we learn to new context very well and that this particularly applies to what we learn in classrooms and that many, many, many attempts have been found to try to get students to learn quite general skills from classrooms and that they almost always fail utterly.

And so it’s challenging in this case because I think our intuitions about what we want from learning are even to have quite general skills that apply to a million different things, and the fact that that doesn’t seem to be the case is not only an indictment perhaps of our paradigm that we have for education, but I think it’s also really revealing in how the brain actually really works, and so one of the metaphors that I find very interesting is that a lot of people will talk about the brain like it’s a muscle. So you get good at learning things, it’s just sort of like, okay well, you have a muscle you lift weights in the gym with your bicep and then you go out and your biceps are stronger if you’re lifting things in real life. Now, maybe there’s gonna be some slight differences there, but people generally accept that that’s true. If you lift a lot of weights, you should be stronger in real life.

Whereas what we find is that learning and especially adaptations to the brain tend to be a lot more specific and so people who have general skills, it’s usually the case that they have them because they’ve learned so many specific things that they’re able to build abstractions on top of those specific things that do generalize, but then when you teach people things for the first time that they tend to use them in fairly narrow ways that get stuck to the situations they learn them in and that’s often very difficult because when you’re talking about a book that does wanna talk about big principles or you… Or you’re talking about a classroom that does wanna talk about abstract ideas, it’s often the case that people don’t apply the concepts in the ways that you would like. 

And so I think there’s two main lessons for that. One of them is just to be aware of this and the other is just to realize that a lot of real learning that actually makes you better as a person, is done through doing things and actually doing things in a way that is substantially similar to the thing that you want to get good at rather than doing some kind of toy activity or makeship problem.

Sean: Yeah, I mentioned I’m a big fan of reading. So what was that book that really dives deep on transfer? 

Scott: So it’s by Robert Haskell and I wanna say that the title is Transfer of Cognitive Skill but I might be mixing up the title, but if you just type transfer and Robert Haskell it’s sort of an older text book, but it just covers basically all the research that shows how difficult transfer is. 

Sean: Fantastic… Are there any other books that you really enjoy or recommend?

Scott: Books that I really enjoyed and recommended so that that was a good one, because it was very comprehensive and I got a lot of value out of that particular book. I did read a lot of papers so it’s not a book, but I would look at the literature review by Jeffrey Karpicke, and I forget his co-author on the testing effect and retrieval and he has a big thing summarizing which is basically what I discussed already. All of the research he had this is sort of a gateway to all the research that’s been done on how testing yourself and trying to practice recall is much more effective than review, but also all the different little ways that this effect manifests itself. And I covered a number of those in the book and that was a big sort of jumping off point for that chapter in the book.

Another good meta-analysis is Angelo DeNisi and Avraham Kluger’s… I think it’s 1991 meta-analysis on feedback intervention. And so if you just do Kluger’s feedback meta-analysis, you’ll get that one.

And that was also very interesting because again it moderated my opinion because they did this big analysis and found that in almost 40% of the studies that they found feedback actually had a negative effect on performance. So it’s certainly not the case that feedback is always beneficial. And so they sort of outline not only their theories about why it might influence each other, but also links to other research about you know how sometimes if you get feedback while you’re performing a task, it can distract your attention from performance and lower your performance. There’s also some situations where, like I said if you give someone a particularly piece of negative feedback, it can reduce their motivation to learn well, but also sort of ironically, I didn’t expect this, but even praise if you tell someone… Oh, you’re so good, you’re so smart.

That actually also has a negative effect on learning despite the fact that teachers and students love it.

It turns out there’s actually quite a bit of research showing that this is also bad just because as soon as you think that you’re doing something really well, you tend to put less effort in.

Sean: Yeah, I’m sure the listeners are already saying, “Oh my gosh, they’re so much here that’s really making me think differently,” and that’s what I’ve really enjoyed about the book. I’m intrigued though. There was one person you could just spend some extra time with and maybe even spend a week with them, and learn about their learning process. Who would that be?

Scott: Well, if we’re going into a hypothetical territory that I’m gonna pick someone who is currently deceased, but I would pick Richard Feynman. And so Richard Feynman has been my basically intellectual hero and my standard of what kind of thinker I wanna be, although I will never reach his height but he was not only a Nobel prize-winning physicist but he was a real iconoclast, he was very against the sort of rote learning, and learning things without really understanding them and he had a real kind of curious streak where he would just… I’m just gonna go learn the bongo drums or just learn lock-picking or just learn Japanese or just… Oh, let’s just try to do my own art exhibit for no reason. 

And so he had a certain fearlessness to him and confidence and just a sense of exploration that I think even for me, I find that it’s hard to fully reach that level, and I think that we would all do so much better if we could go further. So a conversation with him is probably not gonna be possible and less time travel gets invented. However, I highly recommend also, his autobiography Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman, which is one of my favorite biographies. And so, think if you like these topics, and you’ll enjoy learning from that as well. 

Sean: Yeah, no, that was a book I absolutely loved. And we actually covered the Feynman technique on a solo episode on this podcast, so you can go back.

Scott: Oh perfect. 

Sean: Yeah, yeah, I’m a big fan of him as well. Last one. So besides Feynman, who do you think is just the most impressive learner, you’ve studied?

Scott: Hmm, impressive learner. I’ve met a lot of people that I think are quite impressive in learning, and that they’ve done things that are quite incredible. I’ve spent a lot of my book discussing a lot of these people, I think the people that impressed me the most are often the people who have built up enough depth that they can just transition between different topics and do it fairly well. So I think where I’m more impressed of is someone who there’s obviously the specialists, that person who spent their lives researching a particular subject, but I’m almost more impressed by the person who can just take a topic that they’re not an expert in and they can talk about it really intelligently after a short period of time. 

So I don’t know whether it’s to compliment him on his learning ability, but I really enjoy reading Slate Star Codex that’s a blog and I really enjoy reading, just because everyone’s in a while he’ll just do some kind of deep dive into some random topic, and I’m always blown away by how insightful he is, even though he doesn’t maybe have the background for it.

Sean: And what was that? Slate Star… 

Scott: Slate Star Codex, Scott Alexander. I know it’s a weird name for a blog, but very, very interesting guy. I do actually, I even benefited from some of his research. I went into my book.

Sean: Gotcha, fantastic. So there’s three people who have come up on this podcast, so much. And mostly because I really enjoy their work. Cal Newport, James Clear, and Derek Sivers and all three wrote great praise for your books so I know a lot of the listeners are big fan of them. They also were a fan of your work. So that made listeners interested in that. 

Scott: Yeah! 

Sean: That must be exciting for you to get that praise by them. 

Scott: Yeah, well, these have been friends of mine for years. Cal Newport we’ve been friends for over a decade and James Clear, I got to know him before Atomic Habits and I’ve been a big admirer of his approach to writing and Derek Sivers as well. And so, it’s nice but I think it’s also… I’m happy that they liked the book because you try to do good work and they’re definitely doing great work.

Sean: Yeah, no, it’s a testament to the book you put out. So thank you for putting that out there. I’m sure the listeners are dying to know more where they can stay connected with you. Obviously, we’ll have links to you and obviously where they can pick up the book but where do you want them going?

Scott: Sure, so if you wanna check my website out it’s scotthyoung.com, that’s s-c-o-t-t-h-y-o-u-n-g.com and I have over 1,000 articles there on all sorts of topics that you might be interested in motivation, self-improvement, learning productivity, all these kinds of ideas like philosophy and then obviously the book Ultralearning, which you can get in Amazon, you can get it at Barnes & Noble, wherever you get your books.

There’s also an audible version where I’m narrating it, so it’s read by me and if you’re not tired of listening to my voice by now you can also listen to the book and get it in your car or in your commute or something like that. 

Sean: Yeah, and then when the listeners check out your website, make sure you guys subscribe to the newsletter ’cause got puts out a ton of great content to look at all the time, so I appreciate that. 

Scott: Thank you. But yeah, if you join the newsletter, we have a free chapter of the book too, so you can also get that and read a little bit of it ahead of time.

Sean: Fantastic, well Scott Young I can’t thank you enough for joining us on What Got You There.

Scott: Oh, thank you.