Scott Young - Ultralearning, The MIT Challenge

I feel like people are just way too unambitious in general, and not in, like, the ambition like, "I wanna be better than other people" way, but they just don't think of big projects. They don't work on them. They don't, they don't have, like, you know, big dreams to do cool things, or if they are, it's usually to something, like, I don't know, it usually boils down to something like social status, like, "I wanna be the, you know, the person that does this that's better than other people." And I don't know. I feel like I don't know how you change that, but I do think that, uh, rewarding kind of a culture where you wanna do kind of ambitious, original things that, um, are kinda interesting and you don't know where they're gonna lead, I think that that's, having that in you is, is kinda rare, and I think that cultivating it is probably good for yourself and society.

(Instrumental music) Okay. Today, I have the pleasure of speaking with Scott Young, who is the author of the book Ultralearning: Accelerate Your Career, Master Hard Skills, and Outsmart Your Competition. So Scott, I'll ask you some practical s- questions in a second, but, uh, first, let's talk about Einstein and Newton. So they both had an annus mirabilis, a miracle year within which their, many of their important contributions were concentrated. W- what explains this phenomenon of miracle years?

Well, I, I don't know. I think whenever you look at the sort of outlier people, like, and Newton and Einstein are certainly one, um, y- you have to realize that most people never have a year where they accomplish anything like that. So I think it's just... E- e- it's j- I think it's a lot of it's selection effect, that you have a smart person who just happens to be working on the problem that will lead to a huge breakthrough. And so, I mean, it, we could've lived in a world where Newton spent a lot of time on alchemy and then discovered a way to turn lead into gold and then, like, that worked, but that's not the world that we live in. And so I think that, you know, his work on, uh, physics and the Principia and stuff like that was what led to the breakthrough. And I think Einstein's a little rare that he had kind of a couple key insights that led to physics. Like, I mean, he discovers or sort of proves through Brownian motion the existence of atoms. He disc- the photoelectric effect, which is the thing he actually won the Nobel for, not his relativity, which is what he's, you know... The, the thing he revolutionized physics for, uh, is not really even what he, uh, got the, uh, Nobel Prize for was the photoelectric effect, which, I mean, I guess it started quantum mechanics, so it's not really (laughs) , can't downplay it too much, but... Then special relativity and then he struggles with the math for, like, eight years to get general relativity. So I think Einstein's a, you know, he's a little bit of an exception in that he, he did have, like, multiple huge breakthroughs. And so when people are talking about, like, lists of geniuses or people who are important, sometimes that list gets populated by people who don't really deserve to be there. But Einstein is definitely, like, not... He's like an accurately relate- rated genius that, uh, ex- is seen as being extremely smart and important b- and actually is extremely smart (laughs) and important.