Foreign. How to choose what to learn? Right, for example, you decide to learn Spanish, Chinese, Korean, Portuguese, Macedonian. That made sense because that was your wife's native language, right? So that makes sense. How do you choose which language you're going to learn, for example? Or like, there are many, many skills that you can

learn, but you chose like CS, for example, for the MIT project. This is a really good question. I think it's hard to come up with a totally analytical answer of like, you know, you write something and you give things points, and the thing with the highest points you choose. I

don't do anything like that. So I think there's a few rules that I use. One is that, um, I really like to see how I feel about a project before I engage into it. And the feeling to me that I like to look for in a project is that it should

feel something that feels significant, that feels like, ooh, like there's some weight to that. So you know, you mentioned learning an instrument, and part of the reason I haven't done a project like that yet is because I haven't had that feeling about it yet. And I know that

that feeling is important because if you engage something where you don't have that feeling about it, that's when you get these lackluster efforts and you're like, ah, you're just dragging it out and you don't actually do that well, and then you feel bad after. So that's the first

thing I would talk about. The second thing I would talk about is the need to pick one project and to do this with one idea, because very many people, they they only have this sort of vague collage of different things they'd like to learn, and that's fine, but I just don't think

it's enough to really get the motivation to learn things so I think um you know not that I'm particularly special in any way but I think what one of the things this sort of ultra learning approach that I'm trying to do a little bit differently is that the projects that

people undertake when they undertake self-education just very spontaneously tend to be kind of vague I just started reading books and then I read a lot of books because I really liked it whereas the ultra learning idea there's much more deliberateness in defining what the

project is and this is what I'm trying to do and so part of the problem is that people have this grass is greener feeling they start getting in one project and they're like oh no no but all these other things I want to do and

so the the rule that I've learned for myself is that there will always be time in the future to do those other things you're interested in but now is the time for you to do this one thing and I think that doing one thing really well so you

feel really satisfied with how you did that project is much much better than doing six things where you weren't really satisfied with it and I think it's it's also just again getting that uh tight scope too because if you just make it like I'm only learning this

forever then you get that real graphic but if it's like it's for three months or it's for two months or it's two weeks or whatever it's a lot easier to just be like okay I'll do that after in terms of where to start my my general point for

where to start is to focus on what you'd like to be able to do, um, with the knowledge. And I think this is a useful framing device because sometimes we just think about learning as just sort of acquiring facts or ideas in our head, and that can be okay. I'm not

really against that. I'm not against reading books just for reading books. If you just want to learn about, you know, some piece of history, that's fine. But I think that for a lot of it, we kind of implicitly want to do something, but we don't get really explicit about how we

want to use it. So we say, "Okay, I want to learn English." But it just stays in our head as like this vague learning English goal, uh, and we don't think about, "Well, no, what I want to really be able to do is, you know, use it in my job professionally, or what I

really want to be able to do is travel to America, or what I really want to be able to do is like understand English television without subtitles, or what have you." And because we don't get kind of clear on what are the actual situations that I care about this skill

we do a lot of practice that is like about learning the language, but it's not really aimed at, at sort of achieving those skills. And so I think that that can be an issue. And, and I think that there's lots of materials you can do, but

if you really think about it in terms of the materials serve this purpose, um, then you can very, that that helps become the barometer of how you evaluate it. So that would be one thing I would say is just switch from thinking about learning things in terms of a subject or

a topic and to learn things of like what would I like to be able to do uh as a result uh the second question you talked about was motivation and willpower and that's also a really big topic one of the things that I think helps a lot is

to just really crisply define what it is you're working on what what is the essence of the task to kind of visualize it in your head because I think part of the problem is that people have really vague goals so they they sort of like well I want to learn more

about like programming and then they start doing something and it's kind of hard and they're like ah you know is this really what I want to be doing do I really want to keep doing this and so I think the more you you tightly define I'm doing this and then when you

encounter difficulties you're like yeah but this is what I wanted to do you're more likely to push through it so it's maybe easier to understand through a story so I I can speak for myself that you know both before and after the MIT challenge I would be like doing some

kind of class or learning something and I'll be doing it kind of casually and there would be some difficulty like I you know I want to learn this programming thing and then I start doing it like ah this is hard or my program doesn't compile or I can't figure out

this this thing what was different is that when I would encounter those difficulties when I was doing that MIT challenge project is that I had kind of tightly constrained what I was doing so much that whenever there was even if it seemed like almost an impossible

difficulty it was like well I just have to figure it out this is what I'm doing and so I think it was the same when we were doing the language learning experiment when we go places and it was like well you know I have no idea I don't feel

comfortable speaking or I'm not good or uh it was just kind of like well this is what we're doing so I'm gonna just try my best and so I think part of the problem is that when you vaguely define the goal you give yourself too much

wiggle room to get out of the hard stuff whereas if you define it very concretely it kind of locks you in a certain amount and you expect it going into it that okay there's going to be these difficulties there's going to be these

frustrations and I'm just going to get through them and I think that helps as well anything that you want to say to your Korean fans you can still [Laughter] really no pressure wow oh my God you're good so that will be my Korean for right now

wow pretty pretty bad but um I I really have so much respect for the many Korean people I met who I know are very dedicated students very hard workers I've I we were joking about this that you know in America I have to like convince people that learning is

something to be interested in whereas in Korea you know often you have the opposite problem that it's so important that people are like totally stressed out and and so I I have the utmost respect for for people in Korea for how hard working and how smart and how seriously

they take learning so for me this is just a chance to share some of that passion. The other thing I would like to say is don't constrain yourself so much by what you've done in the past, and don't constrain yourself so much by what

you've succeeded and failed at before. I think these were very, um, useful for me as tools to just push myself to try things that I might not have done otherwise. Foreign. Thank you.

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