#88: Scott Young

The Nathan Seaward Show

This week on the show, Scott Young joins me to talk about his book “Ultralearning.” He also talked about what ultralearning is and also shared his thoughts on learning languages and career development.

I also shared our preparation for our Peru trip.

Scott and I discuss:

• Scott's obsession for the last 10 years and how learning French inspired him to write his book "Ultralearning"
• How his encounter with Benny Lewis introduced him to Ultralearning - an aggressive strategy for learning hard things and learning it on your own
• Different philosophy when it comes to learning
• Learning in a non-speaking environment vs learning in another country
• Breaking down learning into principles
• The difference in learning languages in European and Asian countries
• Ultralearning is a strategy for self-directed learning that is also aggressive
• To learn something is to be bad at it (at least in the beginning)
• Their year-long project of not speaking their native language
• How one can maximize time spent reading as opposed to the number of books finished
• One reason you don't learn some skills is because there's a kind of will power you need to get over
• On having emotional reaction to things like learning
• If you want to learning anything, you can learn it if you approach it the right way
• Things that would qualify as ultralearning are things that people do all the time
• Debugging your own learning process and studying your successes and failures can help you improve how you can get better at things
• The capacity to think in terms of abstract visual spaces is related to visual working memory
• How his experience at MIT was transformative for him
• How Ultralearning can help someone going into business
• One of the strategies in the book is the idea of directness

More about Scott

Scott H. Young is a writer who undertakes interesting self-education projects, such as attempting to learn MIT’s four-year computer science curriculum in twelve months and learning four languages in one year. Scott's most recent book, Ultralearning, explores the art of mastering hard skills to accelerate your career and life. He lives in Vancouver, Canada.