Scott young is an extraordinary man he speaks multiple languages learned the MIT computer science course from scratch in a year and so 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 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 WI 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 two 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 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 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 trading 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 are 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 weakness during our practice perhaps our vocabulary is letting us down during our conversations and 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 achieve 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 focus direct work and focus 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 three 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 Scot 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
