How To Learn Anything

this book taught me how to learn it's how I learn SQL in order to pass my data science interviews and ultimately get my first data science job it's how I learn how to make videos and start this YouTube channel and this entire business it's how I learned Ai and most recently it is how I pass my driving test after less than 2 hours of study the Knowledge Test not the road test you should definitely study for longer than 2 hours on the road test anyways in this video I'm going to cover the book Ultra learning

by Scott young go through the concepts and talk about how to apply these in your life and how I appli them to my life this is the book that kickstarted my self- Learning Journey and it just changed my life and I hope it will for you as well okay homer I'm ready to learn what's the first lesson this book is structured to cover the nine principles of ultra learning but before we actually get into that let's actually Define Ultra learning Ultra learning is a strategy for acquiring skills and knowledge that is both self-directed and intense

the three keywords here are strategy self-directed and intense that is what describes an ultr learning project for example one of the first Ultra learning projects that Scott young the author did is to complete the entire MIT curriculum for a computer science undergraduate degree in only one year and without actually attending MIT were going to any of the classes by the way this was back in 2011 so there was not yet all of these like free resources and courses that are posted on YouTube and all over the Internet it was a lot harder back then so

his strategy was to list out all the units and all the courses that he had to take and focus on passing their final exams and the projects it's self-directed because he wasn't actually attending the school and he was just like learning everything himself and it is intense he did everything in one year for example for his multivariate Calculus class he literally studied everything in 5 days and then did the exam and I finished single variable calculus I started the course on Monday and I finished writing the final exam Friday afternoon just to be clear Ultra

learning is not confined to a certain topic or just for passing exams it is for learning anything that you want to learn Scott also use ultra learning to improve his art and be able to draw realistic faces in only 30 days Eric Baron I think his name is he used these principles in order to single-handedly learn game design and create a really really popular game called stard do value I've gathered all the necessary strategy and tactics to finally defeat you principle number one is meta learning AKA designing a study plan according to Scott before you

jump into learning you should spend roughly 10% of the Total Learning Time on figuring out what is the best way of learning the thing you want to learn and designing the study plan for example for his MIT challenge it was 12 months in total so around 10% of that is a little bit over 30 days 36 days which he devoted to figuring out what's the best way to learn so actually in a bit I'll show you how to cut down on that time period a lot but first let's cover how to design a study plan

based on the why what how principle why is why do you want to learn something for example I want to learn Japanese because I want to be able to watch anime without [Music] subtitles what is what what are you learning I'm learning the structure of the Japanese language the pronunciation of things and the vocabularies and the how is how do you learn these things doing research Maybe by like watching YouTube videos go on Reddit and maybe looking at different programs and course curriculums the book recommends spending a lot of time doing this designing your study

plan because if you're on the wrong study plan then ultimately you know you're not going to be learning the right things he even goes as far as saying you should conduct expert interviews to check over your study plan but I have good news you can potentially cut down this time by like 80 90% even like 90 5% by using something like this prompt for Chachi BT or whatever your favorite AI model is since AI is trained on the knowledge of the internet and it can also search the internet if you're able to explain properly what

kind of study plan you're looking for it is really good at making that custom study plan for you if you want to be extra sure maybe you can take that study plan and show it to somebody who for example already knows Japanese but yeah I find that for metal learning AI is a tool that can just save you so much time here's also a prompt that I use in order to come up with a study plan to learn JavaScript you can also switch that out for like python or any other language that you want I'm

not going to go into more detail about the prompt itself you can just check it out Link in the description okay now that we have our study plan we can get started studying and also move on to the next principle of ultra learning have you ever had to explain a process to someone like click this click this enter here and then enter here and they're like what and then you have to explain it to them again well I want to introduce you guys to a very Nifty little AI tool called guide guide is a GPD

power tool that can explain the most complex task in seconds using AI generated documentation let me actually show you to to get started on their website just click on install free extension and then make sure that it's pinned on Chrome now here is the admin portal for lonely octopus where we add courses to people's custom study plans so say here I want to add a custom study plan for Tina I would click on guide over here click capture what are you capturing is knowledge and documentation and it's how to add courses to a custom study

plan and then go through the process of adding a course say chat be technical self boot camp introduction to python maybe some pandas and introduction to AI product development so I got to rank these into order that they appear on a study plan and I click save then I go to guide and they app will generate this step-by-step video guide select the course you want to add to your study plan it has visuals it has voice over and it has like these call to action call out buttons as well so we already do have documentation

for things because we are not Savages but it's like in this text form and I can like really long and it takes a really long time to do but now that we know about guide for the coming cohort we're actually going to be using guide to update our documentation cuz it's just so much like easier faster and just clearer you can easily edit the video the visuals the audio the voiceover and the motions and captions and once you're ready and satisfied you can just click on share or embed your guide anywhere for your team to

see the best part is that this browser extension this app is 100% completely free you can check it out over here also linked in description all right now back to the video I want 100% commitment and laser focus right principle number two is focus how to be laser focused in your study sessions the book says that there are three major problems that people have when it comes to focus so problem one and two is covered in a lot of other books already so I will only briefly touch on them but problem three this is the

only book that talks about this one and it's what I think has helped me the most problem one is failing to start AKA procrastination some types the combat does would be like the 5-minute rule in which you try to get yourself to study for 5 minutes and you'll find that the rest of the time would be a lot easier and pomodora studying for a specific period of time and then taking a break for a specific period of Time problem two is failing to sustain Focus like after you get over your procrastination but then you still

cannot focus this is mostly about environment control like getting rid of distracting things like your phone food maybe your friends go away while you're studying and problem of three is failing to recreate the right kind of focus there is a relationship between arousal and task complexity by arousal I mean not that kind of arousal it's kind of like alertness um how alert you are how awake you feel and tax complexity is how difficult and complex the task is for example just having to memorize something will be considered low task complexity while say like building an

entire application would be considered high task complexity the greater the arousal the more narrow your focus is and the more suitable that is for more simple task like memorizing something or practicing something repetitive like throwing a start or a layup while for more complex task like doing math writing an essay you want your arousal to be lower so your focus is wider because complex tasks require to use different parts of your brain okay so how does this relate to creating the right kind of focus well you can modify your arousal based on the task that

you have to do for example like you know today that you're going to be memorizing flashcards you know that's a simple task so is better to have a higher level of arousal and you can increase your level of arousal by essentially increasing your stimulation both external stimulation like you can go somewhere where there's background music there's background noise like a coffee shop or internal stimulation um by doing something like drinking coffee or working out isn't that really cool like if you understand that relationship between arousal and task complexity you're able to modify your environment your

external and your internal environment to create like Optimal amounts of focus depending on what it is that you want to accomplish ballseye the principle of directness means learning the task as close as possible to the situation where context that you're going to use it in when I Was preparing for my data science interviews I realized that a lot of the interviews were going to be in SQL the problem was I didn't know any SQL so I had to learn everything real quick uh before taking the interview which was in 11 days this is when the

principle of directness saved my ass because in order to prepare for it there are a lot of things I could do I could try reading through a SQL textbook I could take like an online course about SQL I could watch YouTube videos about SQL but the most direct way of practicing for a SQL data science interview was by practicing SQL interview questions and specifically SQL interview CS from that company which was meta so I went on glass door and filtered meta data science interviews and I literally picked out every single interview question that people have

done then I reverse engineered these questions to figure out exactly what it is that I need to learn and I did that for those 11 days practicing those questions in that interview style and it paid off because when I went into that interview two of the questions were almost exactly the same as questions I had already done some other examples of directness say you want to be conversationally fluent in French the best way of learning is literally to go find some French people and try talking to them the the oppose just be YouTuber if you

want to learn to code the best way is to find a project and code the entire project yourself but you may be thinking at this point like isn't that a chicken or egg problem like how are you supposed to converse with someone in French if you don't know any french how are you supposed to code a project if you don't know how to code well that is where the next principle comes in you are the weakest link the principle of drill the principle of drilling is about attacking your weakest point so what you want to

do is first apply the principle of directness and go do the task that you want to accomplish and while you're doing it especially in the very beginning you realize that you don't know like pretty much everything right for example if you were me and in the unfortunate situation where you had an interview in 11 days and you just saw your first metad data science interview question in sequ I don't even know what that means so I started making notes like okay I got to like figure out what's the actual structure of a SQL query what

does the from mean what does select mean like this conditional part oh you're able to use something called wear which is you're able to filter certain parts of the table so yeah I kept on doing that writing out what I didn't understand going and learning that thing and then coming back and doing more of the questions and every time I ran into something that I didn't understand I would go learn that part specifically window functions for example I ran into window functions in one of the questions and I didn't really understand how it worked so

then I just really focused on window functions and did a bunch of questions related to the window functions until I figured out how to use it a very common drooling tactic for musicians or for athletes is something called time sharing I think my handwriting is so bad I you can tell I can't read I will put this on I think it's time time slicing time slicing oh my God yes so time slicing this is when you take a task and you isolate and practice the most difficult part of it say as part of a song

that you're rehearsing you will just keep practicing the part that is the most difficult or say you're a basketball player and you're focusing specifically on layups layouts you get what I mean this combination of directness and then Drilling and then just over and over again until you master a craft this is such a powerful combination of techniques I can testify that it is a game Cher okay next principle Pop Quiz everybody the principle of retrieval is about testing yourself to learn Scott says that the best way to learn something is to actually test yourself on

it this may sound very counterintuitive until you understand the phrase neurons that wire together fire together you see anything that you're learning from a neuroscience perspective is simply encoding something into the neurons of your brain your brain cells specifically it's about certain networks of neurons that depict the information that you're trying to learn now the better you get us something the stronger the network of connections of your neurons is going to be for that specific task like the better you are are coding the stronger your coding networks of brain cells are going to be so

what does that have to do with testing well testing yourself forcing your brain to activate and reactivate that network of neuronal connections associated with the task is the single best way in order to strengthen that Network when you're learning to code you could just like watch some tutorials of like other people code or just like I don't know like do some games about coding but that wouldn't really like activate that neuronal Network that much so you don't really like deepen your understanding of it that much but if you do something like force yourself to write

an entire application you're testing your own understanding by forcing that neuronal network of coding stuff by reactivating and keep activating so by the time you're done building that application that skill of coding is so deeply encoded into your brain cells like literally into your brain cells some other retrieval tactics that the book talks about includes flash cards which is really good for vocabulary free recall which is just saying the thing that you learn but in your own words and self-generate ated challenges or the question book method where you rephrase the thing that you're trying to

learn as a question for example when I was studying for the driving test I would ask myself what does it mean when there's a flashing green light by the way if you know the answer to that put it in the comments for some reason a lot of people don't know the answer to that very concerning I thought maybe you can give me your feedback feedback feedback feedback feedback feedback I'm sure that you already know that everybody's told you you should always get feedback but did you know that there's actually three types of feedback the first

type of feedback is called outcome feedback for example there's this very famous comedian called Chris Brock he would go to like these smaller shows like usually he has like big soldout shows right but he would go to like these smaller kind of like standup places and tell some of his new jokes in order to gauge the audience's reaction like do they laugh or do they not laugh that's how he knows that it's a good joke or it's not a good joke this is outcome feedback where you only know if the joke is funny or not

funny when I first released a video I can tell that it's a good video or a bad video based upon how many people want to click on the video and watch it if you get this type of feedback it's already very very helpful but you can upgrade this feedback to informational feedback this would be like Chris Rock asking his audience why do you think that was funny or why do you think it wasn't funny or me looking at the comments to see what it is that people liked or didn't like about a video it tells

you what it is that you're doing wrong or you're doing right but it doesn't tell you why or how to fix the things to improve the third type of feedback and the best type of feedback it's called corrective feedback this not only tells you whether your thing you did was good or bad why it's good or bad but also how to fix the bad parts how do you improve to the next level this type of feedback usually involves having to hire like a mentor or coach where they can like exactly look at whatever it is

you're doing and point out like your golf swing for example maybe you should I don't know like adjust your grip exactly like this in order to improve it or if it's your code doing a code review and pointing out like here is exactly what you can do in order to make your code better this can be really really expensive but just by the fact that how many people are willing to hire like a personal coach just shows how useful this kind of feedback could be by the way this is also an area where AI is

amazing as a learning tool because it's able to give you that individualized informational feedback when you feed it something like your code where you're writing and you ask it to like give you feedback as to how it is that you can correct it and make it better so I recommend playing on with Chach BT to get this kind of feedback at a fraction of the cost to ensure maximum retention principle number seven is retention imagine a bucket with some holes in it that is your brain now imagine that you're pouring water or knowledge or things

that you're learning into the bucket so you're learning things but at the same time it is Flowing out you're also forgetting things at the same time unfortunately our brains are leaky buckets and they can be seen by what is called the forgetting curve after you learn something you immediately start forgetting about it the most amount of forgetting happens right after you learn it and over time the rate of forgetting decreases but you're still like slowly forgetting stuff in the book Scott explains that Ultra Learners not only focus on getting information into the brain they also

address the fact that they need to prevent information from leaking out of the brain as much as possible the book talks about a few different tactics that you can use in order to combat the forgetting curve the first one is spacing out your learning so this is unfortunate news maybe for some of us like me who um have trouble with procrastinating and not cramming things but apparently if you're spacing out your study sessions like instead of cramming 10 hours one day before the exam but you know study 1 hour 10 days for the exam that

is a lot better in remembering things there's also something called a space repetition system where if you're especially trying to like remember something and have some flash cards there's a way of like spacing the learning so that it's the most optimal for your brain there is a free app called anky that does this so definitely check that out if you need to memorize a lot of things another one is called proceduralization you might have heard the phrase that you never forget how to bike where like you never forget how to swim and that's because once

you automate how to do something like biking or swimming it gets encoded into your brain differently so it's very difficult for you to forget in the beginning when you're trying to learn how to ride a bike it might be quite difficult CU you're trying to remember like oh I have to hold the handle like this I have to remember to balance I have to remember to pedal and all these things but after it becomes automated in your head it gets like encoded into your brain and even like 10 years later you get on a bike

you still know how to bike so if you manage to learn something enough so that it becomes automatic and a procedure in your brain then the likelihood of you forgetting it is much lower okay at this point we're nearing Mastery and the last two principles are for people who really want to become expert my spidey sense is tingling the principle of intuition is about really digging deep into a concept into a subject until you gain like almost an uncanny ability of solving problems or just like understanding things a really good example of this is Richard

Fineman he's said to have almost like a magical sense of understanding when it comes to like numbers and it comes to physics and that's because he has a very solid grass of fundamentals if you just tell him f is equal to ma force is equal to masstimes acceleration just memorize that he'll be like no why why is force equals m * 8 why is there a linear relationship why is force measured the way it is why is mass the way it is why is acceleration the way it is like why why why why why why

and he'll just keep digging and digging until he like truly understands all of the components that is the mindset of someone who becomes an expert I'll put on screen out the fan technique U this is what he asks himself every time that he's learning something so he's able to dig really really deep and truly grasp that information hey look experiment 78 the principle of experimentation this is a principle that is crucial to becoming a true master in your field you see whenever you learn something there's always the most amount of resources for beginners like if

you just type introduction to python um onto Google there's like literally so many courses that are here and if you go on YouTube there's like countless videos covering introduction to python however once you start getting to the intermediate and to the Mastery level the amount of resources become fewer and fewer and this is normal because there's just like less people who are at like the Mastery level right and those who are at the Mastery level they're probably focused on like mastering their craft as opposed to like making courses teaching other people about the craft so

that is where experimentation comes in Scott gives the example of enko the amazing painter that painted star KN and a lot of other masterpieces he is someone that embodies experimentation throughout his career he's experimented with so many different things different mediums different usages of color different styles of paints how thick his paint is different techniques the subjects of his painting his internal states he pushes the boundaries and tries things that are just outside of what anybody even imagined and that is how he became a master of his craft unlike artists like Leonardo da Vinci who

was just kind of known as a genius van go a painter like van go became a master he became a genius because of his experimentation and pushing the boundaries maybe in some ways having a lot of talent and being known as a genius may actually PR vent you from pushing the boundaries of what is known but that is the topic of another video all right so thank you so much for watching until the end of this video I try my best to cover this book comprehensively and in like a more action-based way let me know

comments if you like this kind of video cuz I've never actually done a book review video before um you like it we might make it into a series all right thank you all so much for watching and I will see you guys in the next video or live stream