MI351: Get Better at Anything w/ Scott Young

23:22I'm writing 500 words a day. And it's like, great, write 5 ,000 words a day. And I think about like ultra learning had that kind of flavor that like I'm Tristan De Montebello, who became, he was a finalist for the World Championship of Public Speaking after like seven months of practice is like, well, I want to be a good public speaker, I'm speaking like once a week. He's like, yeah, great. He was speaking twice a day. So it's just like you're just doing so much more than what you would comfortably want to do. And that makes a big difference. And so my anecdote was... It wasn't an interview. It was just a conversation I had with James Clear.

23:54It was before Ultra Learning had come out. So I was getting ready to do my promotion and marketing. And Atomic Habits had come out. It had been out for maybe a little less than a year. And it was clearly a successful book. I didn't realize it was going to be like the most successful self-help book of all time kind of book but but we're having this conversation and I was just saying like you know what did you do for marketing and he was saying well podcasts were pretty important and I was like oh okay and in my head I'm thinking well when you're how many interviews do you do like maybe like maybe 10 like you do 10 interviews and he's like oh well I did 80 interviews that came out launch week and And then in the first six months, I did like 200 to 300 interviews.

24:32And I was like, what? What? And so again, and not to say that that was like the only way you can do things, but it shifted my perspective that was like, no, if I want Ultra Learning to be a success, I can't have this attitude of like, well, I'm going to do five podcasts. I have to be doing this 10x what I'm thinking I need to do. And so, you know, actually, because I reached out to you because I went through all my previous podcast appearances for Ultra Learning. and like these are the people that I wanted to reach out to for get better at anything. They already know who I am. I don't have to like make introductions.

25:04And so I went through that list and I counted how many podcast appearances I did. And so I did not hit James Clear's 306 months. But over the four and a bit years that I was doing after Ultra Learning came out and concentrated in the beginning, I did about 213 appearances. So I did follow up with that rule. And I mean, I don't... My book is not Atomic Habits, but I do think it made a difference in getting out there. And if I had stuck with this like 10s enough, and then the book doesn't sell very well, or like nobody's heard of it, and you're kind of like, oh, book publishing is so hard. I mean, it's not to say that every goal you can easily 10x, but it is to say that that is a strategic option when you're facing this sort of high difficulty is like, okay, well, you just have to like find some way to marshal together these extreme resources, or admit that maybe this goal isn't that important to you and you don't actually want to pursue it.

25:58Because I think there's lots of things when you are considering this 10x rule, you're necessarily making trade-offs. So I'm going to do this and not this other thing. And I think that's also something people have a hard time with. They want to do eight different things. And you can't 10x eight different things. You can only 10x maybe one thing and still actually succeed with it. Yeah. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. Even Einstein had blind spots. That's why modern science is built on the idea of peer review. Investing may be more art than science, but that doesn't make peer feedback any less valuable.

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28:18But it's never too late to get smarter about stock investing from the ground up. At The Investors Podcast Network, we've made a habit of studying the world's best investors, and now I'm distilling those learnings into a simple course for you or for anyone in your life who you might want to share the gift of knowledge with. With my How to Get Started with Stocks course, you can master the principles of excellent lifelong investing with valuable insights for both beginners and pros. The course covers 10 different sections, beginning with the basics of what a stock actually is and how the stock markets work, to strategies to optimize your retirement savings, how to pick great companies for the long term, what to look for in ETFs, and how to monitor your investments, plus so much more.

28:57To begin getting smarter about investing, just visit theinvestorspodcast.com slash get started with stocks. That's theinvestorspodcast.com slash get started with stocks. And for a limited time, you can use code stocks 15 for a 15 % discount at checkout. All right, back to the show. Ultra Learning came out four or five years ago. You now have out Get Better at Anything, which I've got right here. Thanks for the advanced copy, by the way. Really great. 12 maxims for mastery. How is it different than Ultra Learning? And then what kind of audience did you have in mind when you were writing it? in sort of a very broad view that books cover kind of similar concepts because they're both talking about learning the process of improvement, skill development.

29:42But ultra learning was interesting because I kind of used my personal experiences as this sort of starting point of like doing these sort of intense projects and trying to extrapolate from that. The story that really kind of didn't fit the ultra learning sort of paradigm that I'd worked through for that book, but I thought was so interesting that it was like, okay, when I write another book, I'm going to have to use this story, was one I heard from the YouTuber John Green about Tetris. And it was basically a story of how Tetris was this phenomenon. It still is, but it was this phenomenon in the early 90s.

30:14People are obsessed with the game. But if you look at the best scores of the best players, people who, by the way, are playing this like 80, 90 hours a week, like extreme fanatics for playing this game, the scores are not that good. One of the milestones was getting a maximum possible score. So there's six digits in the thing. So that would be 999, 999. And it took 20 years before someone could document themselves doing this. And now you have like 12, 13-year-old kids. The New York Times covered a tournament for Tetris recently. And it was something like 14 different people hit this max out. And there was like over 40 max outs at this particular event.

30:51So over the span of an afternoon or something, you have dozens of people reaching this score, which took 20 years for the first people are obsessed with the game. And so there's this real stark contrast in how good people are at this game that's quite old. And what's the difference? And so the explanation that John Green gave, which I agree with, is that, well, the difference is that in the old days, it was very hard to learn techniques and skills and strategies from other people. Maybe your brother's friend or something like that knew a Tetris technique and you could learn it from them. But I mean, otherwise, you have all these players, but they're essentially disconnected.

31:26And so you have people that are, even though they're obsessed with the game, they're not using the best techniques that even were known at the time, that were even like things that people knew, some people knew in the 90s, just not everyone knew them. And now if you're 12 or 13, you go online, you watch the best players, they show you, this is how you play the game, this is what you do, this is a strategy, this is how you practice. And so the quality of play for the same amount of effort has gone up dramatically. And so this story to me wasn't really a story about any particular player. It wasn't about like, this guy is the ultra learner for Tetris.

31:59Rather, it was, here is the same skill, the same fundamental subject matter, but the environment changes and the ability to learn from other people changes. And all of a sudden, you're getting not just improvement in an individual skill, but like the field as a whole. And so that kind of started this real thinking about what are the fundamental ingredients for learning? So not just do a few extreme people do under extreme circumstances, but really like, what does everyone have to do if they want to learn? What is the basic building blocks for getting better at things? And so this book was trying to be an exploration of that.

32:31And we were talking about the bibliography and stuff. I ended up doing a lot of reading for this book. So I'm hoping that people can get an appreciation for how I've tried to cover and synthesize a really, really vast field, a really vast literature of research on learning to try to extract some very important concepts that I think... I wish I had these concepts when I was starting my projects because you would... I would have avoided making some mistakes early on. Yeah. Like you said, the footnotes are dense. There's a ton of research that's gone into it. There's 12 maxims, right? And you break it down into three segments of it's see, do, and then feedback.

33:09I was curious just in your own life, if you want to go into the maxims a little bit, but which one do you find most difficult for people or for you individually? Well, I mean, the maxims are kind of like a pointer to a sort of fundamental idea. One of them that I talk about, like creativity begins with copying, is sort of an attack in my mind on like a dominant perception that like originality and imitation are two different things. Like you can either be a copyist or you can be an original. And everyone wants to be an original. And so you shouldn't like pay too much attention to what other people are doing.

33:44And this denies how most people actually acquire creative skills, which is through extensive study of other examples and what's possible and what works and what doesn't work. And then once they've built that foundation, their originality is usually changing some small part. Whether or not they're hard or difficult, I mean, I think it depends on the skill. There's certain things that like, I have a thing where I'm talking about fear and that anxiety that you have approaching skills. I mean, that's probably one of the most emotionally difficult things that we face in learning is that if you have some internal trepidation about practicing a skill, I mean, it can be overwhelming.

34:21It can be like paralyzing. You're talking about speaking another language, like speaking a language you don't speak very well to a stranger who may judge you for it can be very worrisome. But so I think that's why, you know, when we're faced with that problem, it's important to understand the principle that I talk about this exposure principle, which is that your own feelings of fear are very much this kind of unconscious hardwiring that's based on these expectations of things. And if you get exposure to the environment and nothing really bad happens, the fear will go away, it will go away over time.

34:53And so that's something that you know, you need to plan for when you're going through with these sorts of experiments. And so to me, it's not even so much that the maxims are easy or difficult or hard to forget, but they're just like, they're key to unlocking sort of this problem. So whether it's fear or whether it's creativity or something else. Well, you're talking about copying masters. There's an investor that we really like at TIP, Monish Pabrai is his name. And he really stresses the importance of what he calls cloning. And he cloned Warren Buffett. So when he got into investing, he read everything he could about Buffett and literally copied how his partnership agreement was set up and how he invested and everything like that.

35:35Let's get into that a little bit about your thoughts on how you could apply some of the maxims and the principles of learning and mastery to investing. What would you say to somebody who's young, wants to get really good at investing? What are some of your thoughts on how they could approach that and structure a learning program to do that? I mean, I think you hit a good point, which is that the starting point for learning a skill like investing is going to be getting to the best practices, getting to the like, I am at sort of wherever the best investors are in their thinking about this. I am at that level.

36:13And the truth is, is that most people are not. And a lot of people are, you know, okay, I'm dabbling a little bit and you're following, you know, some YouTube guy who's saying you should invest in something and it's not a particularly sound strategy. And so I think that would be my starting point. If I were to get into investing seriously, it would be, what is the best understanding? What is the best practice that I can learn from other people? Don't trial and error this. And that's especially true for something like investing. I have a whole chapter talking about how people are bad at learning in environments of uncertainty, especially something like investing where the rules governing it are quite complicated.

36:50And so, you know, I can't tell you how many people like pat themselves on the back for like, oh, I'm such a great investor because they made something that happened to win out. But I mean, if you analyzed it a little bit, you'd be like, well, yeah, but I mean, you took a huge risk. And, you know, that's, yeah, that maybe wasn't a great investment. It's sort of like, oh, you know, I bought all this Apple stock. And so I'm like, I'm such a great investor because Apple happened to go up or something. And so I think that's one of the things that you would want to do is really start from this kind best practice theoretical approach because the learning from just learning by doing through iterations is going to be a lot harder in investing than it would be in skiing or archery or something where you are getting quite accurate, consistent feedback in a consistent environment.

37:36So I think for investing, I would definitely lean heavily on that. Seeing from other people, learning, understanding the concepts, understanding the theory, understanding what are the mental models I need to think about this, especially because unless you're running thousands of simulations of possible portfolios, you're going to make decisions. Sometimes they're going to be lucky and sometimes they're not going to be lucky. And you have to be able to disentangle that from like, was that actually a good decision or was I just lucky in this case? Right. Points that you made, I think it was in feedback, is how difficult it can be to actually learn from experts because they're at the point of, what do they call it?

38:13It's like unconscious competence, right? So they're at the point where maybe just take for granted what they're able to do. Talk a little bit about the feedback of seeking out experts that are way down further down the road than you. What are some of your thoughts on getting feedback and learning from experts? I mean, if we're talking about investing, one of the things that investing has going forward is it is at least a somewhat bookish discipline. It is a field where people have articulated their thoughts and strategies and ideas, a credible amount of them. Now, of course, there's opaque hedge funds where they're using proprietary strategies and this kind of thing.

38:50So I don't want to say that it's all... You just go to the shelf of the bookstore. But I mean, it is a skill where you could learn a lot about the fundamentals of doing it just by going to the bookstore and being like, what's value investing? Or what's the difference between a stock and a bond? These are all things that you can easily learn. And the idea of learning from experts and from teaching is that once you have mastered a skill, a very common tendency in skills is for parts of those skills to get automated. This can be because you're skipping over mental steps. So you just go from the starting point to the answer.

39:22In other cases, it can be because you do know why you're doing something, but it's obvious to you. So when you are explaining it to someone else, you don't go through the process of breaking it down. And so I think that could also be something, especially for if you do... I'll go back to this investing example. But if you invest in a particular market or something, there's probably a lot of things that you know which a novice investor would find difficult, which you maybe wouldn't even think to tell them. You're focused on strategies and getting alpha and this kind of thing. But even things like, how do you set up a brokerage account?

39:57Or how do you execute a trade? Or what is the bid-ask spread? These kinds of things, you'd be like, well, duh, that obviously means this. But that's because you do it so much, you wouldn't even consider to say it to someone. So I think as a beginner in a field, as someone who is starting out, being able to talk to experts, being able to walk through like, okay, well, what would you do exactly? And get them to go step by step and pause them and like, why did you do that? Or why did you do this? It's often very helpful to elucidate those kind of obvious steps or the things that they're skipping over in their understanding of things.

40:30There was one question here that I wanted to ask you about. You talk about professional poker players. And there was a young woman that you wrote about. Talk a little bit about why poker players make better predictions than psychiatrists. I thought that my wife is a therapist. I found this interesting. Yeah. Well, this isn't just me trying to crap on a psychiatrist. It's based on the fact that poker players operate in an environment of uncertainty. So you make bets and a really good poker player is maybe winning 55 % of the time versus 45 % of the time. So it's, you know, even the best poker players, they lose a lot of hands.

41:06And so you have to learn from this environment where it's complicated, it's difficult to say, and it's difficult to say from just like the outcomes you experience whether or not you're making good decisions. Now, that's something similar to making judgments in a lot of professional fields. So one of the areas that's been studied quite a bit is this issue of clinical judgment. So there was a psychologist, Paul Meal, he's passed away now, but he, decades ago, So he published this book comparing what he called clinical and statistical or actuarial predictions. And so the idea is that like, okay, so say you're a psychiatrist and you're sitting on a parole board and you have some criminal who wants to get parole and you're deciding whether or not they're going to reoffend and you're going to release them out to the public.

41:49Now, I think the understanding by many psychiatrists at the time is that you have an incredible keen insight into the minds of these people. And so you would be able to do better than a real stupid method to try to figure out whether or not this person is going to reoffend. And what they found is that in this particular instance, just doing a simple tally of pros and cons for this person, like did they commit a violent crime or their age or these kind of things, whether or not those things go for or against the person, and you do this tally method, that tally method made better predictions than the psychiatrist.

42:22Like the psychiatrist, you know, despite their years of experience and theories and whatnot, were not that good at making judgments. And so, Miel kind of posed, this is like a puzzle. Like, you know, well, what are the situations where clinical judgment, this sort of intuitive expertise built out from years of hands-on experience, when would those people make better decisions under uncertainty than an algorithm or like a spreadsheet or a simple model? And what he found was that there aren't actually that many situations that like the models, simple models tend to outperform the clinical judgment.

42:52And when they're the same, a model can be done by a spreadsheet. It can be done by like, you know, someone with just a little bit of data entry training. It doesn't require a PhD holding expert to make this decision. And so the sort of conclusion from this and Meal's data is just, I think, one example in a wider literature of like so-called failures of expertise. I mean, Daniel Kahneman, he was very skeptical of like the supposed expertise of a lot of experts because he's like, well, if you just measure their performance, they don't do that well. And I mean, definitely, if you're in investing, you must be humbled by that because you know that most actively managed funds do not outperform indexes.

43:30And there's a lot of people who are in investing that have a lot of confidence. There's a lot of egos. I've met hedge fund managers. There's a lot of people who think they're the smartest person who's ever lived and is just sort of like, well, not all of you can be because if you just measure it out on the averages, you guys aren't doing so good. So what this sort of conclusion was, why is it the case that poker players, until very recently, were so good that you couldn't even write computer programs that could reliably beat poker players? Now, of course, you can with supercomputers and machine learning and stuff.

44:01But it definitely wasn't the case that I could just do something in Excel and beat sophisticated poker players. Whereas psychiatrists were not doing this. They're not that successful in it. And Daniel Kahneman, one of these people I mentioned, he did this sort of collaborative paper with another psychologist, Gary Klein, who is sort of on the opposite spectrum. He's very pro-intuitive expertise. And he studied people who like firefighters and chess players and stuff who do seem to make really good snap intuitive judgments. And their sort of mutual conclusion reviewing the research was that experts do tend to develop genuine expertise when they are in an environment where there are valid cues to learn from the environment and there's good feedback on that.

44:45And so the problem is that psychiatrists, hiring managers, a lot of these people who have to make these judgments, the issue is that there's hundreds of pieces of data. They're only weekly predictive. Each piece of data doesn't tell you that much. And it's hard for people to aggregate all those things together. And that's what models do really well. So I think if you're in a field where that's the situation, you want to rely on models. First of all, you don't want to just go based on your gut, whether you want to buy a stock, you want to have some kind of analysis of the fundamentals, you want to have some kind of benchmark of like, this is how to make good investing decisions, irrespective of my intuition.

45:23So you want to use the models. And then second, you want to be enhancing the feedback you get, like how many hiring managers pat themselves on the back for that great candidate they found, but they are completely ignorant of all the people they turned down who turned out to be great at some other job. And so I think that in some cases, a complete lack of curiosity as to how we're performing in these fields contributes to the lack of genuine expertise. Because if you have lots and lots of interviews with people, you do lots of therapy sessions, you get a lot of confidence, you get a lot of fluency in those skills.

45:54But because you're not getting a lot of well-calibrated feedback, you're just becoming more confident. You're not necessarily becoming more competent. And so I think that's something definitely to think about when you're trying to master skills in uncertain domains, and certainly investing is one of them.

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47:04Bonus points if you show your support for our work by clicking follow. If something piques your interest, just start listening. No hard feelings. I'll be waiting for you back here. Just like everybody else, there was a time when I was a beginner investor. And I have to say, investing is particularly filled with jargon that can just make it so difficult for new investors to understand what is going on. But it's never too late to get smarter about stock investing from the ground up. At The Investor's Podcast Network, we've made a habit of studying the world's best investors. And now I'm distilling those learnings into a simple course for you or for anyone in your life who you might want to share the gift of knowledge with.

47:39With my How to Get Started with Stocks course, you can master the principles of excellent lifelong investing with valuable insights for both beginners and pros. The course covers 10 different sections, beginning with the basics of what a stock actually is and how the stock markets work, to strategies to optimize your retirement savings, how to pick great companies for the long term, what to look for in ETFs, and how to monitor your investments, plus so much more. To begin getting smarter about investing, just visit theinvestorspodcast.com slash get started with stocks. That's theinvestorspodcast.com slash get started with stocks.

48:15And for a limited time, you can use code STOCKS15 for a 15 % discount at checkout. Not to be cliche, but building a market-beating portfolio really doesn't have to be a mystery, at least with the right tools. If you've listened to our podcast for a while, then you know we spend a lot of time learning from savvy investors. So why not use the same tools we do? With TIP Finance, you can. Screening for great companies, calculating intrinsic value, keeping up with legendary investors' portfolios, and more are all not just possible, but easy to do. TIP Finance was created by investors or investors. It's quite literally the tools we wanted to use ourselves when researching investments in a simple-to-use interface.

48:59You can get started by creating an account for free. Who knows? Maybe TIP Finance will help you find your next 100 to 1 investment. Between the screener and Legend Investment Portfolios to reference, I've gotten a ton of ideas from TIP Finance. What are you waiting for? Take the next step in your investment journey today with the right tools at your fingertips. Grab your device and type into your browser, theinvestorspodcast.com slash tip-finance to get started. That's theinvestorspodcast.com slash tip-finance. All right, back to the show. I want to get into a little bit more about feedback. You've got this point that improvement is not a straight line.

49:41You don't go from, as you start learning, it's not a straight line up and to the right, as you're getting feedback on whatever domain you're mastering, let's say you're trying to learn golf and you're getting feedback, how do you overcome and deal with negative feedback? With a teacher, there can be... I remember learning piano as a kid and I had this brutally harsh piano teacher that just gave me negative feedback and it was completely demotivating. How do you deal with some of that? A negative feedback is hard. And I think that's something that... it's very... One answer that I could give is just sort of like, well, you guys got to be stoic about it and not worry about negative feedback.

50:20And that certainly, I think, is a factor. I mean, you think about stand-up comedians and any really successful stand-up comedian will talk about how thick their skin is of going on the stage and getting booed off. And you're like, yeah, sometimes you have a bad set. And I think in life, we don't always get to choose our environment. So having that grit and persistence is good. But since this is not just us talking about, well, this is just the way things are, but how can we make them better? I think negative feedback definitely has risks because of these motivational consequences you talk about.

50:51So I mean, I had another conversation with someone who was talking about... He was getting feedback in a creative field, like writing, and how this person will send out their essay or whatever to friends and family and be like, do you have any feedback? And of course, everyone just says nice things about it because no one wants to be that one friend that's like, ah, And so she was sort of asking, how do I get good feedback? And the two things I said is, first of all, are you sure you want good feedback? Because a lot of times when we say, I want feedback, it's because we're too timid to say, I want encouragement.

51:24And it's totally fine to say, I'm not going to take people's advice. I just want someone to say, you did a good job. I mean, that's a little bit pathetic sometimes to just ask for that. But I mean, it's important to realize that that's what we're doing unconsciously. And that's how everyone who hears what we're saying interprets what we're doing. And so there's this tacit communication of like, I'm not going to give negative feedback. And so sometimes, because I talk about feedback a lot, readers will write to me and say like, oh, do you have feedback on what I'm doing? And I just kind of feel like, is that what you really want?

51:56It's for me to be like, no, this isn't good. You're like, no, of course not. You don't know me. That's going to be very hurtful. And you're going to just sort of like nurse this resentment of like, oh, Scott told me 10 years ago that I'm not very good. And now I'm like, I'll show him. And it's like, well, you know, why did you ask for feedback then? So I think the right way to do it is you want to try to shift the conversation so that you're not having these value judgments at all. So like, as I told this person, like the right way to get good feedback on your work is not to ask like, what do you think?

52:28Or can I have feedback? Is to say, you know, if you were working on this, what would you improve? Or how would you improve it? And then all of a sudden, them giving you kind of like what are actually like, well, this isn't very good, or this could be better is helpful. It changes the tone. And so I do think when you're working with students, you want to try to be as constructive as possible and try as much as possible to avoid direct criticism. I think the only place that I would be really like, okay, this is where criticism maybe is successful is someone who has a lot of motivation, but is maybe way too overconfident and needs to be humbled a little bit.

53:05Vast majority of people, that's not their problem. Vast majority of people, they don't have enough motivation. They have some uncertainty, this kind of thing. They don't need to be like, oh yeah, you're no good. You should just drop out. Or maybe, yeah, again, in some, the Simon Cowles of the world where they're just like, you shouldn't be practicing this skill at all. And so I need to be harsh at you to just discourage you out of it. But for most people, that's what I would suggest is that when you're looking for feedback, when you're trying to get people to give you advice, give you this kind of thing, is to shift the conversation away from evaluative judgments, shift it away from what do you think about what I'm doing, give me a score, give me a letter grade, to what would you improve?

53:46And then that way, even if you are the best in the world, there's something you could improve. And even if you are nowhere near the minimum standard you need to reach for this to be publishable or successful or whatever, that person can still say something. And so I think it takes some of the bite out of negative feedback. How important is the role of community and you call it a brain trust in your learning and developing mastery in a subject? I guess maybe it depends on the topic, but some things like writing is very solitary, yet working in a group... I just want to hear your thoughts on building community and having a brain trust, whatever the domain is, to increase your mastery.

54:26Oh, it's huge. It's huge. And I feel like that was a repeated motif in my writing and learning is that truly, truly isolated independent learning is only possible in fairly narrow circumstances. Now, this isn't to say, oh, well, every single studying session has to be some kind of group powwow kind of thing. It's not like that. It's just that when you are learning and you're completely isolated from other people, you could be the smartest person in the world and it's very hard to figure out everything on your own. And it's very hard to assemble all the ideas, all the things that are important.

55:01And so especially for a skill like investing, I think about poker players are kind of like this, that because it's hard to learn from direct feedback, because it's hard to learn just by the brute reality of interacting with the investing market, because of this uncertainty, the complexity of it, the fact that you can make a lot of money and just be lucky and all these kind of factors. It's so important to have a group of people around you that are smart, that have different strategies, different ways of looking at things, because that helps you aggregate information. That helps you aggregate ideas and perspectives.

55:36And so one of the things that came up in this research of people learning under uncertainty is that often groups are much smarter than individuals because, again, if the problem of the skill is that there are 100 possible cues, and each of them only makes a little difference in what you should be predicting, people are bad at that. So if you can get a group of people where they're naturally going to have a differing overlap of which cues they're paying attention to, you're going to average in on something that's a little closer to like a machine learning model would get to than you would if you're just, you know, you're looking at it yourself and you hyper fixate on that one thing that worked in the past and you ignore all the 99 other things.

56:16And that's going to lead you to make overconfident and underperforming judgments. I spoke to my dad and I told him that we were going to have this interview and he's a golfer. And you gave some examples about golfers, Tiger Woods for one, and then several others that change their swings in the process of trying to develop mastery. In some cases, it works out. In other cases, it ruins their career. Go into that a little bit. I want to hear your thoughts on... Yeah. So you write these stories and I think sometimes when you do the research for a story, it doesn't very neatly support the point that you thought you were going to make in the beginning, but sometimes you almost like it more because of that.

56:59So this Tiger Woods story, I'm not like a... I'm very amateur golfer. I'm not good at all. I know a bit about golf, but I'm not a golf fan or golf spectator or this kind of thing. And so obviously, I knew about Tiger Woods and this story about him being very deliberate about changing his swing came up. And I just thought this was this sort of perfect example of this more general concept, which comes up a lot in learning where you have to kind of climb down the mountain to reach a new peak, like where you have to sort of make a decision which is going to make things worse or harder for you for a period of time, but will open up new opportunities.

57:38What was very interesting to me is that Tiger had... He's done this a couple of times where he's changed his swing. But in particular, there was one time where he was working with his coach. And this was his coach. He had a coach when he was a teenager in university. And then when he became professional, he switched to a different way of doing his swing. And it did proceed like a quite successful period in his career. And so it was very interesting to read the kind of sports journalist commentary on this decision. and how this is not a decision without controversy. A lot of commenters are like, Tiger Woods was an idiot for doing this.

58:14He shouldn't have done this. So I tried to kind of highlight that tension because this was not a riskless decision for him to make. It wasn't just like, well, if I want to be the best, I have to do this. Because there were so many people that thought the same thing and then they screwed up their golf game and they just had to retire. So I think... But I ended up liking the story more because I think it highlighted the correct sort of mindset, which is that, yes, especially for motor skills, changing how you do things is not easy. And it's not like it's not a surefire win, especially at that level.

58:47But then also recognizing this kind of like, when you learn things, you get kind of locked into ways of doing things. And in order to, you know, like, science is like that, too. You know, if you get really locked into doing things before quantum mechanics, and then a new generation, they are the ones who make all the discoveries because there's a new way of doing physics that takes hold. So I think this tension in our lives of sticking with what worked versus sort of doing that work of rebuilding and learning a new skill, that risk involved, I think it underpins many of our decisions that we're making about our lives and our careers.

59:21At the end of the book, you've got this conclusion about three questions to ask to improve at any pursuit. One of them, you talked about the importance of what is comparable to a pianist practicing scales? What do you do every day? Whatever the domain is, it's similar or comparable to a pianist practicing their scales, which is boring and repetitive. Yeah, this was the economist, Tyler Cowen, and he made this kind of point offhand. And it really stuck with me because for a lot of domains, practice is fairly well understood and performance is fairly well understood. So a chess player who's like a grandmaster doing intensive chess study of past games and preparing their opening and this kind of stuff is something that we expect of the field.

1:00:05An athlete who is working on some minute aspect of their performance repetitively, something understood. A musician, this kind of thing. But once we get outside of these fairly well understood skills, you don't see that as much. You don't see as much like the doctor who is doing this kind of practice or the author who's writing books this way. And so I think there's a real opportunity for a lot of us in our professional lives, in the skills that don't always get this attention, to rethink about it, to think about it in a new way, to think about what is the process of growth? What is the process of improvement?

1:00:41And how should I be tweaking what I'm doing to get better at the things that I care about? And so, I mean, the entire book is kind of a summary of some of these opportunities and obstacles, like just understand what the process is of getting better. Why does it work sometimes? Why does it not work? But I think the starting point is obviously just having that motivation to get better and the kind of curiosity to figure out how that would work. I want to switch gears a little bit. You're good friends and collaborators with Cal Newport, and you've done some online classes that I found interesting as I was researching you for this interview.

1:01:17There's one called Life of Focus, I believe, and one that's called Top Performer. I'm very interested for my own self to learn more about them. So can you tell me a little bit about those courses? Top Performer was the first course that I did with Cal. This one, it's actually been out for... We started on the very first iterations of this course about 10 years ago. So it's a bit of an older course that we worked on. But the idea of the course stemmed from Cal Newport's book, So Good They Can't Ignore You, which... So Good They Can't Ignore You kind of made this argument that what matters to have a career you love is not following your passion, but building rare and valuable skills, which led to a very natural follow-up question of, how do you build rare and valuable skills?

1:01:56And we were both drawn to the work of Anders Ericsson, the late psychologist of expertise. I talk about him a lot in my own writing. I got a chance to chat with him on the phone once. He's a very smart guy and he's contributed a lot to our understanding of world-class performance. And the idea here is how do you figure out which skills are important for your career? And then how do you actually go about doing again, this kind of practice that is so rare in professional fields to get good at them, to reach a level performance where you want to succeed. And so we've had lots of people, whether they're in academia or they're programmers or they're entrepreneurs or authors or what have you go through that process of like, okay, what is the skill I need to get good at?

1:02:40And then how do I get good at it? And so that was that course. And we've had, I don't know, we've had several thousand students go through it by now. And the other course, Life of Focus, is built on some of Cal's more recent work, also a little bit of my work with Ultra Learning, which was this idea that we live in a world with constant distractions. You are at the office and it's an open office environment. The cubicle is gone. You have people talking to you, interrupting you all the time. You have constant emails arriving at your inbox. There's social media. There's your phone. It has become a lot harder to concentrate for long periods of time.

1:03:14And Cal, I think, argues persuasively that the ability to concentrate for long periods of time and the opportunity to concentrate for long periods of time, is pretty central to many types of work. So clearly, you can see this in the example of a programmer. I mean, the programmer's value is writing code. It's not so much in keeping up with emails. If you can ship code and working features of the product, you are a good programmer. If you spend all day getting back and forth with the emails, maybe you're not making actually that much progress doing your job. If you're an academic, writing papers, publishing things, important scientific results, that's important.

1:03:51Having back and forth emails with the administration at the university, maybe that's not going to be what actually lands you a good career. And so Life of Focus builds on this idea of how do you cultivate focus? How do you cultivate a space to have that opportunity to that work in your personal life and in your professional life? And we've had a lot of students go through it. It's a very popular course. It's definitely our most popular course now, just because we really realized running this course with so many people that there's a huge demand for this, that we've almost accidentally poisoned our environment and made it very hard for this kind of skill to develop.

1:04:31And so you really need to now be deliberate and painstaking in crafting that environment. It's not going to just happen automatically. Do you have some thoughts on just productivity hacks? I mean, I truly think that the ability to focus is a superpower. And I see it like in, I don't mean to rail, I've got stepchildren that are younger, like they just don't have the ability to concentrate. And I worry about that. Well, it's interesting to think about concentration as a skill. My kind of like, and this is a little bit pedantic, but the way I think about it is that the problems of focus are actually kind of motivational problems.

1:05:06The issue is that it's a little bit like if you have a gambling addiction in some ways. A gambling addiction is not like not being a gambling addict is a skill. It's more just that when you have played a lot of slots and you get this visceral reward from pulling that one-armed bandit every once in a while, it hardwires this behavioral tendency to seek that out. When you go to the casino, you can't help yourself, but you lose a lot of money. And so similarly, I think we've kind of hardwired ourselves in a certain way to be checking our phones all the time, to be on social media. Because every once in a while, there's something that's good, even though most of the time, maybe there isn't.

1:05:44Every once in a while, there's something like, oh, I'm really glad I saw that or that's really good. We've hardwired ourselves to have our email inboxes open and we're just checking email continuously throughout the day. Because every once in a while, there is either a reward of like, okay, I'm glad I responded to that right away. That was an emergency. or there's a punishment of like, oh, I missed this because it came two hours ago and I'm getting a tsk tsk from my boss about it. And so I think this environment reinforces this kind of highly distracted behavior. So it is hard to sit down and read a book for 45 minutes straight because in the back of your head, your brain's always going, I could be on TikTok.

1:06:22I could be on TikTok. I could be on TikTok. And so I think the right way to think about it is maybe to like, Not to overwork the metaphor too much. I think the word addiction maybe gets bandied around too casually. But to understand that it's a similar principle that if you were trying to wean yourself off of gambling or alcohol or cigarettes or something, you'd have to go through a similar approach where you are changing your environment, changing the rules of your environment, your relationship to the environment, so that at the beginning, it's hard and it requires a little bit of effort and white knuckling.

1:06:54But eventually, you don't check your phone because... Calendly Report talks about this phone foyer method where you leave your phone at the entrance of your house when you come in. And you can use it when you want to, but you have to go over there to use it. You can't just have it with you. I mean, that changes the cost benefit of like, should I check my phone? Because if it's with me, I'll check it. But if I have to walk two meters, maybe I won't, right? And so similarly, if you have these deep work hours that you set up in your working life, you communicate that with other people, you get their buy-in because that's very important that people often miss.

1:07:31And it's like, okay, but 10 till 12 is my deep work hours. And unless the building's on fire, don't interrupt me. I mean, if you can consistently do that, if you can track it, if you can be more deliberate about it, you'll get more two-hour uninterrupted sessions, which is super important if you're trying to work on a difficult problem, if you're trying to write an essay, if you're trying to do something that requires extended concentration. And so I think it's not even so much about productivity hacks, because I think sometimes the mistake is viewing a tool or viewing a trick or a technique like, well, the key is using this kind of to-do list software.

1:08:07And as I said, it's a little bit like, I don't know, you could tell someone who's trying to give up cigarettes like, oh, well, the trick is like a nicotine patch or something. But you have to think about it more in the context of you've established this behavioral rhythm that you're going to smoke all the time. And then how do you change your environment? How do you change the behavioral patterns that you've set up around it so that that's not an overwhelming urge or an overwhelming impulse? And so Life of Focus, we have that over a three-month period of time working with students to try to change that.

1:08:37And I think that's very important because, again, I could give you a list of tips, but unless you integrate it into your life over an extended period of time and troubleshoot these little difficulties, I mean, it's probably not going to make that much different. You're going to still be on your phone all the time. You're still going to be checking email every five minutes. I'm a total book nerd. So I wanted to just hear about a few, maybe a few books you're reading right now that have been impactful, things that you might recommend to our listeners. For me, I always find it challenging to list books because first of all, the books I like to read that I really like to read are often books that most people don't like to read.

1:09:12I have this ongoing joke with one of my friends that I really like this. I think it was called Entangled Life, but it's a book about fungus. And he also makes fun of me like, you read a book about fungus? It was actually a really good popular science book. So I recommend it. I think it's called Entangled Life or something like that. I'm familiar with it. It was an interesting book, I got to say. But I mean, I really like oddball books like that. And I also like a lot of academic books. I mean, when I was doing the research for Get Better or Anything, probably one of my favorite books I read was this book by the psychologist.

1:09:42Stanley Rockman called Fear and Courage. And he is one of the expert psychologists on fear. And he talks about the research that we've uncovered on anxiety, but also in the context with the backdrop of people who have faced genuinely just terrifying things and people who have had the courage to overcome it. So I really like that book. Very recently, I mean, my friend Cal Newport published the book Slow Productivity. I thought that was a very good meditation on, again, And it's sort of a bomb compared to the frenetic, fast-paced, feeling like you have to do everything all the time kind of culture that we live in.

1:10:21I don't know. I'm sure I could list a couple dozen. I have some lists actually on my website if people are interested. I published pretty recently a list of 10 books just on learning that I like. So you can check. There's quite a few reading lists on my website that have brief reviews of some of these books. Well, Scott, this has been a lot of fun. And this book is, I've really enjoyed it. I mean, it can be applied to anything. I really think anybody can gain value from it. Was there anything that we didn't touch on that you wanted to discuss before we wrap up? Oh, man. No, I think we covered quite a bit.

1:10:54And I mean, there's a lot of other stuff that we didn't talk about in the book. I mean, I think we touched on like one or two of the 12 maxims. So there's a lot of things that we could be talking for days here if we wanted to. But I highly recommend anyone who's interested in it, they can check it out. Amazon, Audible, wherever you get your books, the book is Get Better at Anything. And also check out my website, scotthyoung.com. I have a free newsletter. There's lots of free essays and content surrounding these ideas of learning, mastery, productivity, self-improvement. And then also, because we talked about it, yeah, the course Life of Focus, you can find it through my website.

1:11:31And you can join the waiting list for when we have new sessions if you're interested in going on a three-month journey with us to refocus your life. I may be interested. I need it. So many distractions. And the book comes out, what, May 7th? So this is... May 7th. Yeah. So I'm hoping that maybe if this is coming out after May 7th, the book is already out. We don't have to worry about it. But we are actually recording this slightly before it's out. Yeah. So I think it comes out May 12th. So yeah. Okay, perfect. Yeah. And then you are... Are you active on social media at all? Like Twitter and that kind of stuff?

1:12:05Can people reach out to you there? I have accounts so people can follow me there. I used to use social media more, but now I mostly use them just as like a conduit for like the content that I'm creating. So if you like following Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, if those are your preferred channels, by all means, follow me and you'll get updates when I have like new essays, new content, that kind of thing. but yeah, I've definitely made the personal decision in my life to be more focused on, you know, reading these dense academic books so I can compile them into something useful to you rather than just staying on top of current tweets.

1:12:38So, that's been a decision I made in my intellectual life and hopefully it'll be for the benefit of the readers who read these books. I love it. I'd like to emulate it. The book is called Get Better at Anything. I wish you the best of luck with it. I hope it does really well and yeah, just thanks for your time today. We really appreciate it. This has been fun. Yeah, thank you. Thank you so much for having me. It was great chatting. Okay, folks, that's all I had for today's episode. I hope you enjoyed the show and I'll see you back here real soon.

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