Ultralearning - Scott H Young - #092

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hello, friends. welcome back to Modern Wisdom. My guest today is scott H Young, and we are talking about his new book, Ultralearning. This is a man who completed the MIT Computer Science Degree, which should take four years in one year. This means completing a module which should take around about a term in just over a week, every week for an entire year, and then passing the exams at the end of it. The forward for this book is by James Clear, author of Atomic Habits and previous Modern Wisdom guest. And the top subtitle above it is by Cal Newport. So scott is swimming in some very big dick waters at the moment. And I absolutely love the book. I love the discussion with him. It's really interesting to hear some of these fantastic examples from people like Benny Lewis, who's the Irish language polyglot, some guys who beat Jeopardy, some people who managed to become the best public speakers in a huge organization in the space of a couple of months. And the strategies and tactics we go through today should help you improve your skill acquisition and hopefully perhaps undertake an Ultralearning project of your own. I'd love to hear if there's a project that you've got going on at the moment, which you're gonna try and apply some of these skills to. If there is, get at me at ChrisWillX on all social media. But for now, please welcome scott H Young.
I'm joined by none other than scott H Young. scott, welcome to the show.

**Scott H Young** (1:46)
Oh, it's great to be here, great to be talking to you.

**Chris Williamson** (1:49)
I'm really excited to go through what we are discussing today, which is... Ultralearning. None other than, oh.

**Scott H Young** (1:57)
We both have copies.

**Chris Williamson** (1:58)
We both have copies. Have you read it? Have you read it? It's really good. So for the listeners at home who don't know who you are, would you be able to give us a little bit of a background to you, please?

**Scott H Young** (2:08)
Sure. So I've been writing about learning and psychology and self-improvement from my website for over a decade now. And for a big chunk of that, I spent my time focusing on learning. And how do you learn things, particularly outside of school, including the kinds of skills schools don't teach. And part of this book was just me sort of documenting a little bit of my journey and all the really interesting people I've met who have taken on really interesting, challenging self-education projects and in the process really discovering how applicable this is to people who, you know, they don't want to do something really crazy. They just want to get a better job or they want to learn a language for their next trip or they just want to be good at something that's going to make them feel confident and enjoy their lives.

**Chris Williamson** (2:51)
You did something, speaking of crazy things, you did something pretty crazy a few years ago, didn't you?

**Scott H Young** (2:58)
Well, which thing are you talking about?

**Chris Williamson** (3:00)
The MIT. We'll start with the MIT thing.

**Scott H Young** (3:03)
All right, sure. This was more than a few years ago now, actually. Eight years ago, I believe, I did the MIT Challenge. This was a project that I did after I graduated from university. I'll give a little bit of a backstory just to make it so you can understand why I would try to do something like this.
I went to university and I had studied business, and I had gone into that thinking, well, I want to own my own business, I want to be an entrepreneur, therefore, I should study business. I only learned after a number of years in school that what business school mostly is about is how do you be a good middle manager in a large company. It's not really telling you how to start a business. It's like, here's how you can be VP of whatever in blah, blah, blah corp. I graduated with this idea that, oh, I shouldn't have picked this. I should have majored in something else. Now, I did enjoy my time at university, but it was something of a, I don't really want to go back and do more studying and do more of that experience. And so, the big thing that I had been considering as an alternative when I was going into school was computer science, because computer science, you learn how to program, you learn how to make things. Like, the whole world is run on technology now. So even if you're not a coder, you still kind of need to understand computer science a little bit to sort of succeed, and particularly as an entrepreneur online, which is where I was wanting to head with my career. And so I was thinking, well, should I go back to school? Should I go back for another four years? And that didn't seem very appealing. And around that time, I stumbled upon some classes put on by MIT. So they have a bunch of their classes where they record the whole lectures, they put all the materials, throw it up online, anyone can access it, you can access it right now. It's MIT, so I think it's ocw.mit.edu, but if you just Google MIT OpenCourseWare, you'll find hundreds of classes. And so when I found one of these classes, I took it and I was like, you know what, this is better than most of the classes I took in school, like the ones that I paid money for. So I took one of these classes and I thought, this is great, and I did a little tinkering. I was like, you know what, maybe you couldn't just take a class, maybe you could take all the classes that you would need for a degree. So this sort of piqued my curiosity because I was looking around, it didn't seem like anyone had tried to do this before. I don't know, maybe there's someone who did it and it has escaped my attention, but I couldn't find anyone who had tried to do this before. I thought, why has no one tried to do this before? So I dug through and I spent about six months researching and putting it together. Obviously, doing it this way where you're just doing it online, self-study with courses, a bit different than being an actual MIT student. But with a few, I would say not too big alterations, you can learn pretty much close to the whole curriculum that an MIT student would do. So this got me excited. And as I was going through it, I realized that once you get outside of the school, once you stop having due dates for assignments, you have to go to this lecture hall for your exam, you have to show up to this on time. I could watch videos and you could watch them faster, speed through the parts where they're rambling, slow down, re-watch parts that are confusing to you, that you could actually do it even faster than when I was in university. So this led to this idea, okay, well, what if I tried something a little bit more ambitious, a little bit more challenging for myself? And so I set this goal, this MIT challenge to do this project over one year rather than the sort of typical four. I mean, I didn't take the summer off, but still like over 12 months. And so that was sort of the first little project I did. And that kind of led me to doing some other projects and led me to meeting a lot of people who have done cool projects. And that's sort of how I got to this book, Ultralearning, because I think it has a lot of implications for other people.