Scott Young is an extraordinary man. He speaks multiple languages, learned the MIT computer science course from scratch in a year, and so much more. Today we'll explore his system for learning new subjects and skills quicker than anyone else, and how you can use it to

get ahead in your studies. One, pre-learning. If you wanted to hike across America, that would require planning. You would need to know what route you were going to take, whether you had enough food, and have contingency plans for if something went wrong. Mastering a new subject is just like a

long hike. We need to know what route we're going to take long before we first set out. This is Young's first step: preparation, or pre-learning. This is where we do some research and sketch out a road map of what we're going to learn,

the order we're going to learn it in, and how we're going to learn it. If you wanted to learn a language, you would both ask what the most vital things to learn are and what the most efficient way of learning them is. For languages, this is almost always how to speak the

language and speaking to people in the language, respectively. For maths or engineering, it's almost always how to solve problems, and solving problems. And on a wider scale, you must know which topics provide prior knowledge for other topics. If you don't know high school algebra, then there's no point learning calculus

just yet. And if you can't string a sentence together in Welsh, then composing Bic poetry is perhaps a little bit ambitious. But there is also a danger here. While pre-learning can make your study project more efficient, it can also lead to procrastination. Planning your

study course and fantasizing about already being a world-renowned expert is a lot more fun than actually sitting down and getting started so set yourself a hard deadline for when your pre-learning will end When this deadline should be set depends on the size of the

project Be Young recommends no more than 10% of your entire project should be taken up by this research phase so use that as a hard and fast line This will ensure the research prepares you for your project without giving you an opportunity to procrastinate on actually

starting For more study tips subscribe to my email list The link is in the description to the learning as I've discussed before the way you learn can make all the difference between being a successful student in a seemingly impossible span of time and wasting years learning learning nothing at all

Be Young has three main principles behind his learning approach focus directedness and drilling and these are the pillars upon which the entire learning project rests I will never stop talking about focus because it will never stop being important The difference between focused learning and unfocused learning is the

difference between having perfect vision and having cataracts Without focused learning everything will take more time everything will be less effective and everything will be less enjoyable In a nutshell focusing comes down to just three things eliminating external distractions like your phone your TV and

your younger brother eliminating internal distractions like stress anxiety and perfectionism and training focus specifically as a skill through meditation consistency and continual reflection and improvement These will all link together to make your focus laser sharp and this will be key to your ultra learning project This is even more

important if you're fitting this project around a job or other studies then you must ensure that your limited time is utilized to its maximum capabilities. Next we look at directedness and confront a disheartening fact about the human brain: we are just not very

good at transferring learning from one situation to another. Very bright statistics students often have no better intuitive probability estimations than those who've never taken a statistics course. And it doesn't matter how much Shakespeare you've read, if you never perform your debut as Hamlet will be a

total disaster. For anything we learn, there is a specific scenario or set of scenarios that we are training for. We might be looking to ace an exam or hold a conversation with a native speaker. We might want to write a truly spectacular research essay or just look clever at

dinner by knowing lots about Napoleon. Whatever situation our learning is directed towards, we need to gear a huge proportion of our study time towards practicing in that exact situation or as close an approximation as we can get. Sure you could prepare for your History

exam by just revising from flashcards, but why do that when writing an essay from memory is going to practice both your historical knowledge and your ability to use it in an exam context? So for whatever you're learning, make sure your study techniques never steer too

far from the context you wish to use your newfound understanding in. If you don't do this, you'll end up wasting a lot of time and you won't get as close to your goals anyway. Anyway, finally, we must talk about drilling. This is where we first identify weaknesses during our

practice Perhaps our vocabulary is letting us down during our conversations in our target language, or our grasp of the fundamentals of Python is so weak it's actively affecting our coding projects. Next, we isolate the weakness and we put specific practice into bringing it up to the same level as the

rest of our studies. Learning something new is, in fact, bringing a variety of different aspects of a subject together towards a particular goal. If there's one aspect you are particularly weak on, it can form a bottleneck where the goal cannot be achieved despite the strengths of the other aspects. This is where more

isolated practice comes into play. You might spend a few hours drilling vocab memorization or revising the fundamentals of your coding language before returning to your direct practice. This process forms a kind of cycle where you begin with direct practice, identify a weakness, spend time correcting it with

specific drilling, and then return to direct practice. Rinse and repeat until you've mastered your desired skill. If you use this combination of focused direct work and focused drilling, you will reach your desired skill level much more quickly. And if you do this for each subtopic of your chosen subject, it will

ensure that your expertise only grows to the next level. I've had the privilege of speaking to a number of people who I consider geniuses. I've met a mathematician who used to be able to tell just by looking at most mathematical statements whether they

would be provable or not, and a musician who could tell just from looking at a bar of sheet music which composer wrote the piece in question. These people were brilliant not just because of their learning, but because they did not even actively need to think about their area

to make brilliant discoveries and bold proclamations, a lot of people demonize intuition as a collection of prejudices and biases, and it can sometimes be that. But it's also the sum total of our knowledge and observations about the world, distilled into a feeling. It is the

ability to cut through the noise and make a strong claim in the face of so much information that no one could consciously process it at all. This is the level that awaits us if we use Scott Young's system. We'll hone our abilities to such an extent that we'll be able to

think effortlessly and originally about our chosen subjects. We will be able to innovate, to develop, and potentially to expand the very boundaries of the field. But this Promised Land lies behind a lot of hard work. But you'll have your best shot at getting there by using Scott

Young's system. Subscribe to my email list and my channel for more on thinking to improve your life.

How to become an expert in ANYTHING FAST (Ultralearning by Scott Young)

How to become an expert in ANYTHING FAST (Ultralearning by Scott Young)

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