Mastering Mastery: Unraveling Learning with Scott Young

26:27And that's beneficial. If you've never seen anyone golf before and you try to do it yourself, you're not gonna like automatically recreate a really good golf swing. But once you get past that sort of cognitive phase where you understand it intellectually, I mean, you're developing procedural skill. You're developing this sort of, you know, I don't like the word muscle memory, but that's basically what it is. It's a skill that you're applying unconsciously and sitting more time in the classroom is probably not gonna help with that. Right, like I took five years of French, for instance, but I can't speak a word of French.

26:58And I couldn't speak a word of French the day after my fifth year of French studying, you know, took place. And even computer science, so I was undergrad computer science. I went to grad school for computer science. I was a programmer. But when I was in a real world job setting, I really couldn't program. And so doing is incredibly important as opposed to the classroom, classroom which which makes me question a lot of today's educational methods but one important thing is pattern recognition and so so i play chess and you talk you discuss this in the book that basically chess players when they are trying to recreate a position that they've seen for let's say 60 seconds they recreate it by looking they don't remember where every single piece is on the 64 squares they recognize oh you know i castled my king over here i i my bishops are in these formations whereas whereas someone who's never played is trying to remember what pieces on every 64 squares and fails remarkably yeah and even a even like a world level chess player if he's shown a random position is no better than the amateur so if you see a position if they see a position from a game, it's really not 64 squares.

28:18It's like four or five configurations of pieces. And that's easy to remember as opposed to 64 things you have to remember. Yeah. So this idea that we're talking about here is called the chunking. And it was, you know, so chess is kind of has like a long history in the cognitive science of skill development and studying a lot of these differences. And so a lot of the classic examples are with chess. But the idea is like, how does the grandmaster think? Like, how are they able to manipulate more? And one of the major kind of limitations on performing complicated skills is that we have this thing called working memory.

28:53It's what we're keeping in mind at any particular time. And it's famously very limited. You know, you can't actually keep that many things in your head at once. And so one of the ways that people who are quite good at a skill get around this is that you assemble through experience, through long-term memory patterns that kind of are assemblages of material that you have in the environment so you don't have to keep as many things in mind at once. So I think the really easy example to show this at work is if I just spouted off a random nine sequence of letters, it would be very difficult for you to just remember them, just recall all of them.

29:28But if I said those same nine letters but they were reorganized into acronyms, you know, like FBI, NBA, you know, NBA, that kind of thing, you would remember them easily, because now you only have to remember three things instead of nine things. And that's much more within the capacity of human working memory. And so the idea here is that the grand master is doing something similar, they don't see the board and see, you know, okay, well, the king is here, the pawn is here, pawn is here. You know, they are recognizing the position, but they recognize the meaning of those patterns that like, oh, yeah, well, this was the, you know, know, Berlin defense, but they made this option instead, or, you know, they got into this situation, this is castle on this side.

30:04And so because they have these sort of like the equivalent of acronyms of the information in their head, they can recall a lot more. And so the classic experiment is that you, yeah, you set up the board and you wipe it and you ask them to recreate it. And grandmasters can assemble much more of the board. But if you just scramble the pieces and you put them in a place that like no game would ever result in that, they don't have acronyms for those positions. And so they don't do much better than novices. Right. It's as if you give someone a string of letters and they actually can't reform them into acronyms.

30:35Maybe there are no acronyms with those letters. And so now they're just like anybody else who has to remember a string of 20 letters as opposed to four acronyms. Yeah. And I mean, I think one of the things that is important to keep in mind is that this working memory is central to what we often think about as intelligence. that it's pretty tightly linked to how smart do we think someone is is probably pretty closely related to what is their raw working memory capacity. But in a particular skill domain, because of this chunking effect, you effectively have more working memory capacity when you have more experience.

31:07So that means if you are totally new to a domain, it's kind of like being a lot less smart because you aren't able to deal with as much information. And so this has a very strong impact on what's the right way to learn skills because early on, you know, the situation is just too complicated. You can't keep it in your head. And so you like, you know, make mistakes that for someone who's very seasoned, they can easily keep it in their head. They're going to face totally different problems with learning and improvement. So like, so like, so it seems like quantity in order to get exposure to lots of acronyms, like in the string of letters example, like studying all the acronyms ever and then having the ability to reform a string of random letters into acronyms would be a skill for memorizing string long strings of letters so so you need to be exposed to a lot of situations like like in the poker example annette needs to be exposed to lots of poker hands and then to categorize them into if then so if i'm in this situation then do this yeah and and that somehow involves either like a computer to tell her she's right or wrong or a coach or whatever.

32:19So quantity plus some sort of, somebody who's going to tell you this is a chunk and then being able to have the memory to remember all these chunks. Yeah. I mean, I think that often, like when we're talking about poker, for instance, there's probably some idealized strategy. So you have some strategy that would be, okay well I'm gonna play these hands this way from this position and so you know you can imagine it like yeah if it's poker it's probably going to be some kind of table and maybe you're adjusting it based on the players you're playing against and this kind of thing and the difficulty is that when you're starting out keeping that table in your head and keeping that strategy like fixed in an actual game is basically impossible so that's what the learning is coming in is that you are doing things and comparing it to what you should have been doing and then like trying to build that experience for next time.

33:15So definitely repetition and exposure to lots of information is going to be helpful. It's going to be necessary for a lot of skills that have a lot of individual building blocks. But again, if you don't have that strategy, if you don't have the right thing you're comparing it to, you can get lots and lots of experience and just not learn anything or not make that much progress. Another interesting thing is the difference between variability and consistency. So like when we learn math in school, let's say in high school, you start off with, okay, now we're going to learn this type of equation. And then our test at the end is only about that type of equation.

33:51Then we learn how to solve another type of equation. Then the test at the end is only about that. And then we have the final and the final might even be organized chronologically. Like, okay, it starts off with the early equations. Then the next part is the second equation. and the argument you make, backed up by research, is that it's important to not test in order, but to almost randomize, like you've learned a bunch of things, now let's randomize the questions when you're tested so that your brain has to get used to also identifying what type of situation am I in, as opposed to making it easy to figure out what type of situation I'm in.

34:29Yeah, so this is an idea called contextual interference and the basic way you can summarize it is there's like knowing how to do something, So like knowing how to solve an algebra problem. And then there's knowing when you need to access and use that knowledge. And so the thing is, is that obviously it's easier to learn how to do something if you do it under very regular constrained conditions where like I tell you exactly what you need to do. But that is the easiest possible situation for when do I use this knowledge? When do I use it? And so, you know, in schools, because often the applications are a little bit more distant, there is tend to be a prioritization of like actually learning the procedure, but there can often be a deficit in applying the procedure.

35:13So, you know, we were talking about this, like you do unit one and you do unit one questions. Well, already your brain is like, well, it's got to be something from unit one. So if I, you know, I learned five things, it's got to be one of those five things that, and then that's how I, you know, I pattern match to what's variables are there and then I apply it. Whereas, you know, if you think of yourself in the overall context of the classroom, Well, there may be 10 units, so maybe there's 50 things that you were supposed to know how to do. But if you really think about it, you know, once you're outside of the classroom and then you're in real life and someone throws you a quantitative problem that like maybe that knowledge that you used in the class could apply, what's the chances that you retrieve it?

35:46Well, probably pretty low because you're not just thinking about that particular class. You're thinking about all the math that you maybe learned and then also the possibility that the right answer is not something you've learned before. And so this variable practice, this mixing things up is about making that process of retrieving the right knowledge at the right time easier. And that's really important for flexible skills, for being able to apply skills broadly, to invent things, to improvise. Yeah, I'll give you an example in chess. So there's a category of problems. To get better at chess, often people have to solve problems because you can't always be playing games.

36:22so there might be a problem that says uh white to move and win in two moves yeah and so you know you're in a situation where white can win in two moves so you're basically just looking for like the most crazy extreme moves to solve this problem and you know it's going to win whereas if you're in a real game you don't know if white's winning or black's winning maybe it's black to win in two moves and you're trying to win in two moves for white you just don't know so there's lots of different types of problems like that. And so I think it's a new thing in chess, people realizing that variability is important.

36:54So, oh, maybe it's white to move and win here. And maybe in this next problem, you have to figure out who's winning and then what, maybe you have to defend. Maybe it's white to move and defend against black moving. But that variability is sort of a fairly new thing in chess learning. I'm trying to think like for language learning, it might be a similar thing. Like, Oh, instead of maybe one week in class, this is, this is phrases you use, you use in a restaurant. And here's another one phrases you use, you know, in a job interview, but in a test, you should mix it up. Like if someone says this, say this, and it's, you should mix it up whether depending on the, and you have to figure out the situation also.

37:32Yeah. I mean, I think you definitely want to expand the range of situations. You apply it to match where you think you're actually going to use the skill. Because I think one of the main difficulties we have with learning things is that you can put knowledge in your head, but in order for it to be useful, you have to get it out at the right time. And so we have, you know, we have huge amounts of knowledge that we learned in school, that we've learned from books, learned these kind of things, that if I give you a very specific prompt, like something that really focuses in on that piece of knowledge, you might even remember it.

38:03You might be like, oh, yeah, I sort of remember that book, or I sort of remember that idea that I learned from school. But if I don't give you that highly specific cue, it's just not going to occur to you in a situation. And so the real difficulty is that a lot of the problem situations that we face, you know, they don't have little strings attached with a tag saying like this is the knowledge you need to solve this problem. They don't say like, oh, unit 1.1, use the formula that you learned in class. And so when you don't have that tag attached to it, the retrieval problem becomes really important.

38:32And so I think this is sort of something that's often missing from a lot of school services. You talked about struggling learning French. And I mean, some of that is just that like you're in the French context where you, you know, you're learning some grammar pattern and it's saying, okay, like practice the subjunctive. But I mean, a big part of it is like, when do I use the subjunctive? Like when is the situation when I'm having this conversation that I have to use the subjunctive? And if you don't know that, then it doesn't matter that you've memorized that. Well, this is the correct way to conjugate it.

38:58You know what I mean? That's that sort of a secondary thing. So especially with school-based knowledge, I think this kind of variable practice, retrieval practice applying in diverse contexts is often lacking.

39:24So there's two skills in this sense. One is the skill of learning a lot of in this situation, do this, which is the problem with not having variables. Then there's the skill of identifying, well, what situation am I in? So then I can apply that rule. And that's difficult. That's not typically taught in school. So really, let's take it all the way back. Let's say you wanted to learn golf or how to play the piano. What would you personally start doing? Yeah, so I think for piano, I mean, I haven't spent a lot of time doing the detailed research in piano, so I think I probably would have more sophisticated opinions if I narrowed in on that particular topic.

40:06But if I were just like, okay, I want to learn the piano now, I think one of the first things I would do is focus on, well, what is the sort of like basic method? So like, how should I have my hands over the keys? Where should I be pressing with which fingers? I would look at like what are common like beginner crutches that you want to avoid because I know from talking to piano teachers. Yeah, so what would you actually do from a meta sense? How would you start organizing the learning? What would you need in your arsenal? What would you need in your toolbox to say, I'm going to start learning piano a month from now, so here's the things I have to gather and put into place so I can start learning?

40:40Yeah, I mean the first thing I do whenever I'm tackling any new skill is I would look at like, okay, skim through some curricula that people have for teaching piano. So get the top five books on learning piano. Skim through them. What do they actually get you to practice? What do they get you to do? Why do they get you to focus on doing X first before Y? I'd find a few piano tutors. I would talk to them about like, what are the mistakes that beginners make that they get stuck with? Because piano is a motor skill. It's like highly overlearned. And so if there's like a, well, you're gonna wanna do this because it's more comfortable, but it's gonna screw you up later.

41:13That's good to know because, you know, it's a little bit like if you're learning to touch type, it's a lot easier to hunt and peck with two fingers in the beginning, but that's a really bad habit to get into. it's going to really impede your ability to type at like higher words per minute. And so similarly with piano, if it would be like, okay, this is the sort of home row for the keys. This is where you want to, you hit this with this finger, hit this with that finger, you know, practice doing it this way. I would get those steps. And then I would just build up a curriculum of like starting with simpler either songs or like drills and then just sort of building up until I can get more and more fluency.

41:44And I think as you get better as well, you can start to like branch out and be like, well, I want to be a jazz pianist or I want to play classical music or I want to play like, you know, little pop ditties that I've, you know, downloaded the sheet music for. And so I think that kind of a way of like figuring out what the curriculum is, how do people structure the skill? How do people who've taught it for many years, like what are the bad habits to avoid? That would be the grounding. And then you would be, you know, creating a practice sequence for yourself and hopefully having some coaching to like tell you, you know, what you're doing wrong.

42:12And then let's go take it a step further. What if you also wanted to be creative? So creativity seems to be like, a positive symptom of yeah piano music whatever creativity is a symptom of knowing a lot yeah so if you know a lot about it's hard to be creative it's hard to be a creative writer kurt vonnegut even said uh like don't experiment with grammar until you know the rules of grammar so and what he's really saying is don't be a creative genius with writing your first novel like write right first yeah and get good and then you can start experimenting and you refer to this like you want creativity is a way of expanding the problem space but first you have to know the problem space yeah so i i do think that like for a skill like piano there's a bit of tension because there's the sort of largely procedural um you know you could say almost like even like a muscular skill a motor skill of hitting the keys and i think that's probably different from the creative skill of original composition so like you could be someone who's just literally writing notes on the page.

43:16They can't play the piano at all. And that would be a different kind of intellectual skill than playing the piano. So I have a feeling that the creative skill probably depends on knowing a lot of music. So you would know tons and tons of different music, you know, okay, well, this is like, you'd have 18 different versions of the sheet music for like a sad song or a happy song in your head. You'd have, oh, this is a, you know, a technique for doing this, a technique for doing that. You would have this huge library so that when you put things, you're not like you're not plagiarizing but you are kind of like building off of these abstract patterns of like these are the things that are possible with the music and you know you could have that skill i think in theory without being able to play an instrument at all um i i think it's often intertwined with playing an instrument because when you can play the instrument you can hear it you can get like you get that self-feedback but i think you know nowadays where you have so much um like digital recording where you can actually just like take that sheet music put into a computer and like get the computer to play it um it's not obvious to me that the like the you know the motor skill of playing the instrument is necessary for creativity although i'm sure i'll hear from some musicians that can maybe point to me for a reason why that's not true but no i mean there's look there there are composers who are creative without knowing the instruments they're they were composing for so like maybe i'm wrong about this but i'm just going to use as an example Beethoven probably couldn't play every single instrument in a symphony, but he could write symphonies because he knew music theory.

44:43So like there's the motor skills, but then there's a theory of why two notes sound good together. Why C, E, G is a major C chord. And oh, when you go, I don't know, E flat, now it's a minor chord. And so it feels a little sadder. So someone would have to teach you music theory. Like you have an example in here of a jazz musician. Jazz is known for improvising the notes. And a guy who had just learned the motor skills, basically, he couldn't really do it as well until he learned kind of music theory as well. Yeah, I mean, jazz is kind of an interesting one because like the history of jazz is it's sort of learned more informally.

45:26Like, you know, it kind of comes out of this culture of like black music in the United States. And so it's learned a lot more informally at like jam sessions and this kind of stuff. And so the lore of the music is much more based in like these individual communities is playing with individual people as opposed to like a lot of classical music, which has been, you know, written about and analyzed and, you know, dissected in books quite a bit. and so I thought that was very interesting about this example that like people who spend a lot of time in the community and you've been playing and you've been rehearsing you've been working with people you develop that kind of library so you know one of the examples I think it was maybe Carmen Lundy I quote in the book she talks about how like you know the beginning she could recognize jazz licks and then she was like oh this is bebop licks and then it's like oh this is a Sonny Rollins lick or this is a Charlie Parker lick like you've gotten to this specific thing where you know, this little phrasing is associated with a particular performer, which I mean, you know, for me, who's not like very much outside the jazz world, I'm listening to it and like, yeah, that's jazz.

46:25You know, I don't have that level of nuance and sophistication. And so there's something almost literary about it, like the way that, you know, if you're a really great writer, you know, so much writing that you can't help but have illusions in your work just because that knowledge is going to be with you in your writing. But you know, writing is an interesting domain too, because you could read, let's say you read a thousand books, a thousand novels. Let's talk about fiction in general. So a thousand novels and let's say you write a bunch of novels so you can tell a pretty good, you know what a pretty good story looks like and you could tell a pretty good story.

46:58But then it also is useful to like meta-learn what a story is. So reading Joseph Campbell's The Hero's Journey, oh, here's this very popular theory that seems to work about what the structure of a story is. like, you know, the hero has a call to action. He rejects it. He has problems. He has allies. He reaches a point where it seems like all hope is lost. And then, boom, he solves it and returns to tell the tale. So it seems like there are these rules, too, on top of the domain, which are very helpful. So like, for instance, with piano or jazz, you could learn the instrument and the motor skills and be very good and can repeat songs that you hear in your head and you can have perfect pitch.

47:39but then knowing how to turn a major chord into a minor chord, like knowing these basics of music theory, can then help you improvise and be creative. But you have to know this theory on top of the skills. Yeah, I mean, I think of the theory, like in the way you're talking about it, is being part of the skills that like, it's not generally the case that just looking at finished products of work. So like looking at a finished painting, you just do that endlessly. It's not going to make you a good painter because being a good painter requires the sort of problem solving steps that go into producing that.

48:13So like, what was the problem they were struggling with? How did they solve that problem? And sometimes it's, you know, very superficial or basic, like, well, if you want to draw a leaf, do it like this. And that's, you know, there's not that much theory behind it. But I mean, in most work, most cognitive or intellectual domains, the way you solve the problem is through some kind of abstraction. So if you're dealing with, you know, okay, how do I make a good painting composition? Well, you have some ideas of color theory. You have some ideas about like, well, I'm putting this here, so I have to have something smaller here.

48:42I'm doing this here, so it has to be over here. Otherwise, it's going to look unbalanced. And these are kind of more abstract ideas you develop. So I think music theory, especially because it has such mathematical roots, there's a lot of development in terms of ideas for like, well, why does this thing sound good and this thing doesn't sound good? Or why does this thing sound like it gives you a certain feeling and this thing doesn't? And so people have done a lot of work to try to figure out what are the moves you can make in this abstract space that ultimately boils down to a certain set of notes or a certain set of movements that you're making with an instrument.

49:17So like with chess and in these experiments that they've done about chunking, they basically say a grandmaster who's like a top chess player has about 100 ,000 chunks in their memory. Like they recognize separately 100 ,000 different types of chess positions. And a master level player has about 10 ,000 chunks. And of course, an amateur or beginner has zero or close to zero. And my problem is, particularly as I'm older, so I'm 56. And my problem is I'll forget. I'll see a chunk over and over. And the coach will say, in this situation, you do this. In this situation, you do this. and we'll go over the same type of chunk over and over again, but then I'll forget.

50:05And I'm wondering if there's something higher level. So this causes players, maybe in any domain, to have a plateau. Like I can't seem to learn more because my memory is like full. Or at least I only remember the things I learned when I was younger and not the things I've learned recently. So I'm wondering if there's something even higher, like just a rules-based approach where if, and I just like spell it out, if this kind of configuration exists, do this in general. So then I don't have to remember all the chunks. I just have to remember these rules. I wonder, like, what domains would you say are rule-based?

50:41Yeah, so, well, I think there's a lot of stuff to potentially, like, pull on there in what you brought up. But one of the things I would say is that, you know, a distinction that I didn't end up writing about it in the book, but is a very important distinction from cognitive science is they separate declarative memory from procedural memory. Declarative memory is all the things that you think about when you actually think about memory, which is the stuff you can explicitly remember. So, you know, names, faces, memories from your childhood, those are all declarative memory. And then procedural memory is skill memory.

51:11It is kind of what you're talking about, this sort of if-then rule-based system. So there is some evidence that these are like two different memory systems, and they sort of work according to different rules. And procedural memory tends to be something that when you acquire it, it's often more durable. So, you know, that's why they say it's like learning to ride a bicycle and not like learning trigonometry because trigonometry is for most of us a largely declarative skill. We've, you know, you remember the, you know, um, so-kato or whatever you remember from high school, but maybe you like, unless you've done it so many times in your work, it's not just something you do through kind of like almost muscle memory.

51:48Um, and, but the idea here is that often when you're learning skills, they start out declarative. You start out with some kind of explicit representation of it, some kind of deliberate memory that you're retrieving, and then it switches into a more procedural skill. So you develop procedures for doing it automatically in particular situations. And so a lot of our intuition may be this procedural memory taking over. So this procedural memory, is that like pattern recognition? Well, I think pattern recognition is in declarative memory too, because the chunks would probably be, in most theories, they're declarative memory.

52:20So it's something that you see NHL, and that's just a meaningful pattern to you. You see NHL, so it's in that explicit memory. Whereas the procedural memory is a little bit more like, when I see NHL, I'm like, I don't know, better with chess is like, when I see that the king is in this position, I do this, right? So it's more like a if-then kind of pattern, like this conditional, actional kind of pattern for things. And so that's probably important for things like, if you're solving a math problem, it's like, well, when this is the math problem, this is the form, you do this. and then that's stored in that kind of memory, whereas the ability to explain why you do the problem that way is in declarative memory.

53:01So they kind of form different rules. I think they work in slightly different ways. See, I think my problem is, so a grandmaster will look at a chess position and say, oh, I see these chunks, whereas I'm worried I can no longer remember, do the pattern recognition as well as when I was younger. So I have to explicitly say to myself, oh, if I have two bishops and they don't, I have to blow open the position somehow. Whereas a grandmaster will sort of recognize, okay, I'm in this type of position with two bishops. He might not even verbalize it and just will know what to do. Whereas I'm starting to think I can't do the pattern recognition anymore.

53:46And I have to kind of explicitly almost write down what the patterns are, what the chunks are, or what groups of chunks look like, and then come up with a set of rules. Yeah, it's interesting. I think like there's definitely changes to cognition with aging and with like some things being maybe easier when you're younger. I've heard like all sorts of different theories. I don't know whether there's like a really strong consensus on it. But I know some theories are kind of make the claim that procedural learning tends to be a bit easier when you're younger, at least for some sorts of skills. That's an argument that's often made with language learning that, you know, because kids are very good procedural learners for a lot of the linguistic skills, they are able to, you know, acquire like fluency maybe a little bit faster than adults who, you know, can think about the rules, think about the grammar, but maybe are a little bit less, have less quick access to it.

54:37But I don't really know about situations like chess. I haven't really seen any like age-related studies or show like chess expertise based on, you know, age of acquisition and, you know, differential skills there. But I think – So define procedural learning again. Yeah. So, okay, yeah. So, again, this declarative procedural distinction is, you know, sort of widely held in all psychology. Declarative is all the things that you have like consciously accessible. So it's a memory system that's largely associative. It's something that like you think of one thing that reminds you of something else. and it's sort of all linked together like that.

55:10And it's things that, you know, you can articulate. So I know the letter A or this kind of thing. Procedural memory, and, you know, there's different versions of it as well, but one of the major theories of procedural learning is that it's you're learning like if-then patterns. So you're learning sort of like this is the situation, then I do this action. And so it's a little bit more kind of like the motor learning. It's a little bit more something where you are, you see some situation and then you take the particular action with that step. And so in this sort of viewpoint, the problem with declarative learning, a lot of the issue is retrieval access.

55:42Like how do you access the memory that you need for that particular situation? Whereas a lot of procedural learning is, again, like tuning that sort of if-then condition pattern so that, you know, it's very strongly ingrained as a habit that in this particular situation you take the right action. And so a lot of practicing is training this procedural learning, whereas, you know, reading examples, studying, seeing more things is maybe more declarative. and like what's the difference between so like let's say i want to be a great novelist yeah so i could read a thousand novels or i could also learn this is what the hero's journey looks like so boom here's star wars yeah and like are those two different types of learning yeah so i mean that's another distinction which would be between uh like implicit learning and explicit learning so implicit learning is like i see a lot of examples and then i infer or i generalize some kind of idea about the examples.

56:34And then explicit learning is like, I tell you exactly what the examples all mean and what they all have in common. And so I think that for a lot of domains, explicit learning is definitely best. Like it's probably better to, you know, be told exactly how to do certain things. But the reason that it's hard is that often the explicit rules are kind of complicated and contradictory. So learning by lots of examples and sort of inferring this kind of complex pattern. I mean, this is what all the, you know, large language models and neural nets and deep learning, that's what they're doing, right? Is they're inferring like a really complicated rule from just seeing a lot of examples and getting feedback on it.

57:09Now, I think, again, for the particular skill and how you're learning it, I think it really does depend. But I mean, if I were trying to know what is good writing, I would probably want to know the rules, but I would understand that those rules are like a really gross oversimplification of what makes good writing. And so I'd want lots of examples to like compliment that. So I think for a creative skill, I don't think there's any way around going through all the examples, but I think it's still helpful for someone to be able to point out, oh, this is the thing that a lot of these things have in common.

57:36It's called the hero's journey. And then you can see that because you are armed with this concept. You can see that, whereas it might take you thousands of examples before you would just figure that out on your own and be able to apply it to your work. Right. So it's like learning versus meta-learning. So I'm going to either – so I could learn the traditional way, which is the 10 ,000 hours, and I'm going to read 1 ,000 books. I'm going to write 1 ,000 books. I'm going to get some feedback on them. And I'm going to be, at the end of that, I'm going to be a pretty good writer. Or, and or, I'm also going to read about great writers and how they describe, how they write.

58:15And so here's Joseph Campbell with the hero's story. Here's, you know, maybe Kurt Vonnegut. And he's got some books on writing. Here's Ray Bradbury. He's got his books on writing. And Stephen King has a book on writing. I'm going to read those and kind of meta-learn what writers say about writing. Yeah, I mean, I think if I were starting out on a skill, I would start with the explicit instructions for most of them because it's going to be much faster than going through countless examples. But I think you'd also recognize that there's going to be probably a limitation of that. You can probably get from like zero to like a decent beginner or novice level for a lot of creative skills just by following, you know, explicit advice.

58:52You just read a style guide, like don't do these things and then you don't do it. But then you get a little further and you realize, oh, actually, you know, adverbs aren't always the devil or something like that. And then you start mixing it up and you're like, okay, I like what this person is doing and why does it work? And you're going through it and you're building that library of patterns. So I think, you know, the chess player understanding rules of chess, like, you know, you want to maintain control of the center. And, you know, you don't want to be like the first pieces you send out aren't usually the rooks.

59:22And like these kinds of rules of thumb and heuristics that you learn explicitly are very important. But they're also probably not going to get you to grandmaster level just because by the time you're at the grandmaster level, the actual rules that you were playing, if you were making it explicit, would be so complicated that, you know, I think the intuition approach is probably. Yeah, or there'd just be like this huge set of, you know, if then or do this in this situation or that in that situation. So it's going to be too complicated. But I mean, as a starting point, you definitely, if there's any low-hanging fruit of like, this helps in this situation, definitely go for it, right?

59:58You know, a great story is you have the story of Octavia Butler, who's a science fiction writer. Yeah. Great, great writer. I once went to hear her speak and just really smart about the art of writing. But I was struck in your story about her, how hard it was for her at first, the writing. And how did she get better? I mean, yeah, Octavia Butler was someone who there's like a few people you do in the research where like you really resonate with them. And despite her life story being so different from mine, I just had so much deep empathy for her journey because basically she was someone who from a little girl wanted to be a science fiction writer.

1:00:36and just like her entire environment is like not conducive for that goal happening but she does it anyways and just like grinds it out and sticks to it and so the thing that I kind of got from that is that especially in something like science fiction writing where it's not merely about mastering the craft of writing but also understanding the kind of the ecosystem in which the writer works and publishes and all these sort of details is that having access to a community having access to these influences that can kind of get you up to best practices, get you close to that ballpark, like kind of all the little like rules of thumb, all the things that we were talking about, like you get those, that is going to, you know, get you so much closer than just trying to figure them out on your own.

1:01:18And so, you know, she spends like years and years just in frustration because she's cut off from that or she's not realizing that that's what she needs. And, and it's, you know, making it very difficult for her to make a living writing. and then eventually though, what do you think, what do you think was the tipping point for her? Yeah, well, the tipping point was definitely her going to the Clarion, uh, science fiction writers workshop. So she had done a few workshops, uh, in LA, uh, where she was, um, exposed to some people who are science fiction writers and one of them, I think it was Harlan Ellison.

1:01:51He, uh, he tells her like, you should go to, go to Pennsylvania and go to this Clarion, um, science fiction writing workshop. And she's like, you know, not sure about this. She's like barely ever left her home, but she gets on a Greyhound bus. She goes there and she spends a while in this environment where she's in a big classroom with a bunch of people who are also writing science fiction. And they're like, okay, do a new short story for tomorrow. And then, you know, she's forced to write in this like pace that she's not used to. And then she shows there and then everyone sort of discusses the work and dissects it.

1:02:20And I think this workshop environment, I think is very good for writers, especially in like difficult fields, literary fields, because even if, even if you just extract the role of the teacher, which is obviously very important. They had like, you know, professional science fiction writers who are running these classes, just being in an environment where you're with a lot of people who do know some things, but maybe not everything quickly allows you to kind of acquire that knowledge about, you know, this is how I'm going to market my writing. This is how I'm going to improve my writing. This is what, you know, isn't working about my writing.

1:02:51And, and so, you know, the interesting thing is this kind of process of seeing what other people are doing and getting feedback, even though you would think that would like, you know, that imitative process is going to pull you away from your original vision. It's actually, that's when her creativity really leapt off the page. Like her early work was very derivative because she doesn't know what she's doing. So she's very much like copying kind of the bad stylistic side effects of like pulp science fiction writers rather than expressing herself the way she needs to. It's very interesting, like this concept of particularly with like writing, developing your own voice and but i think copying those earlier styles and like she even refers to it if somebody has trouble with beginning novels she tells her students just take your favorite novels and just write out the beginnings of those novels just so you see what a great beginning is like and you and you you it's it's like you almost build the muscle memory because she says write them out yourself like word for word you build the muscle memory almost of what a good beginning is like and And I like that approach.

1:03:55I think also in that workshop, what was really good for her was the forced deadlines. Write a story by tomorrow. So she can't do it at her pace. It builds an understanding that whether you have writer's block or not, whether you're motivated or not, you have to produce a story by tomorrow. So like you're forced to build these raw skills that normally you might've had the bad habit of waiting for inspiration before you would use that skill. Now you have to use that skill, whether you have inspiration or not. I mean, I think you can see this across many different like professional streams of work that like the people who enter an elite often go through this kind of almost like pressure cooker training environment.

1:04:34And sometimes that's just a like a kind of almost occupational hazing to like prevent people from entering the field. But it does have a little bit of a cognitive science rationale in that when you're in this kind of intensive environment where you're getting a lot of practice, a lot of quick feedback, and you're often, you know, working on varied cases, you're working on varied situations, you can compress what would have been a much longer period of training if you were doing it sort of outside that environment. So, I mean, the amount of people who are like successful nonfiction authors that had a career in journalism is just because, you know, writing, you know, magazine pieces or things for these publications, it like it has really high editorial standards there's really high sense of like rigor for like quoting sources and getting your facts right and so you're basically going to be working under this environment that's going to force you to a fairly high level of skill um you know and the downside is is that there's a lot of pressure working in those environments and they can often be difficult to access but i think if you understand why they work that way you know i think for octavia butler going to that workshop was really what turned her career around why do you think many successful actors so so some successful actors took acting classes studied acting and so on but many many many actors that are famous that we know about that we see on shows every day really were started with improv and never took an acting class but took improv classes yeah so like why do you think that's the case that's interesting i don't know i think uh i don't think i know enough about acting in theater to say with any like strong level of certainty but i do think that for a lot of um skills that are kind of like the communication skills adjacent um a lot of what the skill is is a kind of emotional self-regulation and so i think like in an improv context where you are kind of thrown into situations that you need to um adapt to emotionally like you know okay and i I need to be frightened now.

1:06:34I need to do this now. That trains a certain kind of ability there that maybe you don't normally encounter and don't normally get training in your everyday life. But it's not so much a method. It's not so much like, you know, well, this is the right way to act. And then you're following like some eight step sequence. It's more just you have enough emotional self-regulation so that, you know, when you know you need to act a certain way, you can just turn it on or you can just manage yourself. Whereas, you know, most people in most situations are not forced to do that level of emotional self-regulation you know i'm having this interview now all i have to do is like be pleasant and you know i'm not gonna have to like cry at one part and be really excited at another like i don't have that ability and i don't need to use you can cry if you want all right all right all right yeah like but you know maybe improv though you get the quantity because like let's say i'm studying acting it's like okay here's a monologue memorize it come back and we're all gonna do it and but an improv that's so that's an acting class improv class doesn't have the memory part you're given a scene yeah and now you have to just start off being the character in that scene so you have to quickly go from character to character very quickly as opposed to just setting one type of character per class an improv class you're probably doing many characters yeah that's and you're also isolating the character part and not the memory part there's no memorization well i think you hit the nail on the head there that like for a lot of skills that have, you know, several components, one of the things that like slows you down is if like one of those four or five components is the bottleneck, but you spend, you have to do all other four every single time you do it, it's going to slow down the amount of reps you could do.

1:08:16It's going to slow down how you're going to work on it. So, you know, uh, like I think about like painting or something, painting, you usually do a drawing first and then you do a painting. And if you're doing something like, you know, a portrait or something, the drawing might take you a huge amount of time. So if what you're trying to get better at is like mixing the right colors or doing this kind of thing, you know, spending 80 hours on the drawing, that's actually like not helping you on that other skill, but it's going to slow you down. So I do think, um, you know, in that context, that kind of thinking of improv is like a drill for like the emotional self-regulation or being able to like quickly change states or characters or voices, uh, and not having to worry about like having memorized the speech.

1:08:50Yeah, that might be an advantage why why do you think um for some skills it's better to be younger for some skills it's better to be older so i was talking to arthur brooks about this who writes a lot about he wrote a book from strength to strength about skills we have as when we're young like like mathematicians and physicists peak at 25 historians peak at the age of 69 so why do you think some skills are easier when you're older like like being a historian i think the physics historian contrast is pretty easily explicable in terms of for physics, you need to have like a high working memory capacity.

1:09:28You need to be able to like juggle a lot of ideas in your head at once. And that probably, that fluid intelligence probably degrades faster. So it's something you probably peek at maybe in your early twenties. So you count the PhD training, this kind of thing, you know, you're probably at that kind of like sweet spot of you've acquired the knowledge of your discipline and you also have, you know, the sort of raw horsepower in your brain at that young age that you can make this novel contribution. Whereas historians, I don't think that's the major bottleneck. The major bottleneck is just knowing a lot of history.

1:09:59And so when you're in your late 60s or something, you've just maybe, you know, if you've been a historian the whole time, you just read a lot more books. And so you can just easily cite off a lot more scholarly things than that. Whereas when you're 30, you just haven't had enough lifetime experience to be able to do that. So I do think that's probably a transition that you maybe want to do in your life is that like, you know, focus on those sort of high intellect requiring, you know, solving like completely original problems, creative kind of domains when you're younger. And then as you're older, like work toward things that build off of experience, build off of having a larger knowledge base.

1:10:34I think that's probably a transition that, you know, if you were, you know, thinking about yourself as like a cognitive investor, that's where I would invest my money in the beginning in those growth stocks of like, you know, physics and math and stuff. And then later on, I would be focusing on like the long tail of, well, I've read 100 books on this, so I know my stuff. What if I'm 80 years old and I really want to be a mathematician? Yeah. And I just haven't studied math at all. I mean, I don't think the decline is as precipitous as sometimes people make it out to be. Like I sometimes have conversations with people who's like, I'm 60, can I still learn?

1:11:06And I remember doing sort of a research deep dive into like aging and learning. And the trend line for a lot of cognitive abilities, I mean, there is decline, but it's pretty flat for most people until later in life. And then there's more variability. And I think it's just related to the fact that some people get Alzheimer's or become senile and some people don't. So if you're in that you didn't happen to you category, maybe you're not quite as sharp as you were when you're 21, but it's not like you're just a completely different person when you're older. So I think you probably can learn those things.

1:11:40It probably would just take you a little bit longer than it would have when you were 20. I think maybe the bigger obstacle we have at that point is that, you know, when you're young, you're constantly learning new things. You constantly have this mindset of like, I'm going to invest in this skill. It's going to pay dividends for the rest of my life. And so when you're older, especially if you've spent a whole career where you were just focusing on the thing that you were already good at, focusing on the profession that you'd already mastered, I think it just can be kind of humbling to go back to like that, you know, mindset of being a student.

1:12:08And I think that kind of, that emotional difference is often bigger than any like cognitive difficulty. Yeah. And also when you're younger, you can focus. You could spend much more time doing something. You could say to yourself, okay, if this takes me a couple of years, that's fine. When you're older, you're not necessarily going to want to spend eight years learning how to be a good writer. Whereas I probably did spend eight years learning how to be a good writer. Like before I got anything published i wrote i wrote 3 000 words a day every day wow for at least eight years before my first thing ever was published and then i'd go to the library and whatever i was reading i would also read the literary criticism of what i was reading and just to learn like okay why was why was this book by hemingway considered good is it because of the what i'm thinking or what did these other critics think and and on and on and uh but i could afford to do that then now i wouldn't be able to afford to do that.

1:13:03And so that there's that too. Yeah. But I mean, I think you're right. Like I'm, I'm thinking about a lot of people talk about language learning. And one of the things that I thought was really interesting from the research on language learning is that people generally have this impression, like kids are the fastest learners of languages. And there do seem to be some truth to that. Like if you look at, you know, what is the eventual level of attainment, if you immigrate to a country when you're like four, you're probably going to reach a near native level of the local language. But if you immigrate when you're 40, you probably won't.

1:13:34You'll probably have a noticeable accent. You'll make mistakes even after you've been there for the same amount of time as the four-year-old. But when you do like studies that are sort of like looking at, okay, you were taking kids, we're taking teenagers, we're taking adults, and we're putting them through a language class. The kids don't usually come out on top. Actually, the adolescents and adults usually learn in this sort of restricted range. They learn faster, which makes sense when you think about like a four-year-old's brain isn't fully developed they can't sit in class and pay attention the adult can like study and use flashcards and do all those sorts of things and so I think sometimes we get mixed up when we're thinking about like well how was it so easy for me to learn x when I was a kid and you neglect that well you didn't have any other responsibilities or pressures on your time and you just spent like 10 times as much time doing it so that's why you got so good at it whereas now you're finding it hard to like justify a couple hours a week doing X.

1:14:24And so you're wondering why the returns are lower. So sometimes you can just explain things that way. You know, no matter what, it's always interesting studying the learning process and how to learn faster and so on, because as, as almost everybody knows that learning curve, particularly when it's moving, when you're learning something you're excited about and you're learning really fast, it just feels good. It gets you into that flow state. It's kind of like a component of well-being and happiness. And your book really, again, it's these, the book is Get Better at Anything, 12 Maxims for Mastery, really understanding these maxims and the stories you tell, ranging from Tetris to flying an airplane to everything in between.

1:15:10It's really important to learn how to learn. And I think these books you write are great. I really enjoyed this one. A lot of great storytelling in it. So Get Better at Anything by Scott H. Young. Why do you have the H? Are there too many Scott Youngs out there? Well, yeah, there actually are. You know, Neil Young's dad was called Scott Young. He's a sports journalist. And for a while, like the ghost of his biography was like haunting my thing. Like he occasionally would be like, Scott Young is a deceased sports writer on the thing. So yeah, Scott H. Young is for that reason. Also my website is scotthyoung.com because 20 years ago when I was buying the domain, they didn't have scottyoung.com.

1:15:45They had scotthyoung.com and the rest is history. Well, excellent, Scott. Thanks again. I think this is your third time on the podcast. Thanks once again for joining us. It's one of my favorite topics in the world. So come on back anytime you've got something to talk about with learning or for whatever reason you want to come back. So thanks again, Scott. I really appreciate it. Oh, thank you so much for having me. It's great chatting with you.

1:16:19You