foreign how to choose what to learn, right? For example, you decided to learn Spanish, Chinese, Korean, Portuguese, Macedonian 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.

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 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. 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 sort of achieving those skills.

And so I think that that can be an issue.

And I think that there are lots of materials you can use, but if you really think about it in terms of the materials serve this purpose, 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 as a result.

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?

" And so I think the more 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'd 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 going to 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 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.

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