Latest / ContraMinds Podcast - Unlocking Personal Growth and Professional Excellence / Scott H. Young on How to Build Mastery in Anything (#052)

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Scott H. Young on How to Build Mastery in Anything (#052) · ContraMinds Podcast - Unlocking Personal Growth and Professional Excellence

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you work your job, it's stressful in the beginning, you're learning a bit, but then after like five, 10 years, you know, you're not a top performer, but you're not getting that much better.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: You can spend another 10 years, and all that's going to change is it's going to be more comfortable, more fluent as it is.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: And a big part of this is what what um what I talk about in the book is Anders Ericsson's research uh on deliberate practice, which is this idea that simply doing something over and over again tends to just make it more automatic.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't necessarily make you better at it.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: Or if it does, it does so very slowly.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: And so often what we need to do to master our skills when we've reached that fluent stage is a kind of unlearning, is a kind of, okay, we need to bring back the deliberate attention, make it more effortful, focus on things that have long since been pushed to our subconscious to actually make improvements.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: And that's uncomfortable and it's difficult.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think that's one of the real reasons why you need this mastering mindset to make progress.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: Because yeah, just showing up at your job and just doing it for another 10 years is not going to make you that much better once you've reached that plateau.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: It's just gonna make you more comfortable.
• 1:07
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• 2:39
  SPEAKER_01: In this episode, I am talking to Scott Young.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_01: Scott Young is an author, programmer, and an entrepreneur.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_01: Scott's work has been featured in the New York Times, BBC, CEREX, Pocket and Business Insider.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_01: Scott is also the author of the Wall Street best-selling book Ultra Learning.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_01: Scott's new book, Get Better at Anything, is out in the stands now.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_01: I had a chance to catch up with Scott and talk about the book and what does it take to build a mastery mindset.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_01: His ideas and the research that he's done for the book were shared with me, and he had fantastic ideas on the components and the tenets of building mastery.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_01: Over to my conversation with Scott.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_01: Hi Scott.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks a ton for uh joining the podcast, and it's absolutely a privilege to talk to you.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks a ton for taking time in the midst of your busy schedule, given that you're launching this new book.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_01: So thanks a ton and lovely having a conversation with you.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I mean, having conversations, uh especially especially about the new book.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: This is this is my full-time job right now.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: So it's it's really my privilege.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for having me on it to to talk about my my book and some of my things that I've been working on for the last couple of years.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_01: So, first things first, uh congrats uh on this new book, uh, get better at anything.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_01: Uh it's fantastic, uh, especially a book that talks about the nuances of how you build mastery.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_01: So that's something that uh I really thought was very interesting.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_01: And uh congrats, and I'm sure this is going to get a lot of interest, and uh, you know, it's going to get a lot of uh big write-ups and reviews as you go along.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_01: So congrats to you.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, thank you.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, hopefully, fingers crossed.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, when you write a book, we're recording this before the book uh actually comes out.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, when you write a book, you're you're essentially like you're spending multiple years of your life like in this rabbit hole working on this project, and then you just you just hope when you surface at the end of it that people are gonna be like, oh yeah, you know that that was that was good, and not looking at you askew, like, hmm, okay.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_01: Um so Scott, I first wanted to um you know get to your backstory.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_01: And uh clearly uh you've been doing this for a lot of years.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_01: And uh what is the trigger for you to actually do research and uh you know write about how to learn about learning and uh doing research around mastery.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_01: So what's the trigger and interest to do this kind of work?
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I mean, I have a very unusual story because like the right the right kind of background for doing this sort of book is you know, I got my PhD in psychology or some, you know, some social science field, and and then I did some like narrow research program where I proved some like very small fact about X, and then you know, I get a splashy book deal and I get to tell everyone I'm from Harvard.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not that kind of expert.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I don't know whether you could even call me an expert.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: I prefer to call myself a learning enthusiast, but I am someone who basically I started writing um uh my own kind of personal essays and this kind of stuff on a website uh when I was 17, which was a long time ago.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the topics that emerged early on, especially because I was a college student when I was doing a lot of this writing, was learning how to study.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_00: And this was sort of an area where I started getting traction.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: And as the blog grew, that kind of interest deepened.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_00: And after I graduated, I did a few sort of these little uh what I call ultra learning challenges or learning experiments.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: So one of them was learning MIT's computer science curriculum.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: I did a little project doing that over a 12-month period of time that got me some attention or notoriety or whatever you want to say about it.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_00: And then um uh a year later, I did a project uh with a friend.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: We went traveling around the world learning multiple languages, and these individual projects kicked off a kind of a deeper interest in uh cognitive science and the science of learning itself.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: And so that first culminated a little bit in my book, Ultra Learning 2019, that uh went on to be a Wall Street Journal bestseller.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_00: And that was sort of talking a little bit more from a personal perspective.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_00: So talking about some of my projects, some projects of people that have uh really inspired me, and then kind of digging into a little bit of the basic principles of cognitive science, the science of learning.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_00: And uh more recently, in like the last five years, it really deepened into uh a much more serious research project.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_00: So this get better at anything was a little bit less personal, a little bit less about me and what's worked for me, and more just me reading hundreds of books and like almost thousands of papers, trying to synthesize an overall picture of the science of learning.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: So, what do we know about learning?
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_00: And I tried to be as much of a generalist as possible when doing this book because I think if there's any advantage of being someone like me, it's not being, you know, the expert on some super narrow fact X that I got my PhD in, but of looking at the anthropologists and the economists and the you know, psychologists and the cognitive scientists and all these different fields, all these different ways of looking at it, all these different domains, and asking what are the broad uh things that seem to be true across all these domains.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_00: And so, you know, in this book, I'm covering things like mathematicians solving problems to, you know, fighter jet pilot training, to uh science fiction writing to jazz improvisation and all these different kinds of subjects to try to really get a as broad a view as possible of how do people learn?
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_00: What are the basic mechanisms for learning, what are the ingredients that need to be there to make improvement, and what are the things that are kind of like the rate limiting steps that make it hard to improve, which is obviously something we deal with.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_00: And so I hope that the audience who is gonna read this book is someone like me who's interested in this topic and and would like kind of a survey introduction to some of these ideas, some of these big ideas that are important in understanding how we learn.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_01: Fantastic.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so the first uh you know thing that hit me when I started following you a couple of years back, and then uh, you know, when I had a preview to this uh book, uh one question that popped in my mind uh was uh how do you differentiate between mastery and excellence?
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_00: Hmm.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I don't know.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_00: I haven't really thought about that.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_00: I think for me, a lot of these words that we use in everyday English, they don't have really technical definitions.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: So mastery, you know, in some podcasts I've had conversations where we talk about mastery, and mastery means some kind of like elite level of performance.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_00: You know, uh I know you know, and some people for that reason don't like the word mastery because they're like, well, I'm not gonna be, you know, I'm not gonna be Tiger Woods at golf, I'm not going to be, you know, uh Bill Gates as a CEO.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_00: So like what this is irrelevant for me, right?
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_00: I just care about getting better, which is one of the reasons I titled it uh get better at anything.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: And uh to me, I think of both mastery and excellence and these concepts as just being like there's a continuum of proficiency that we have with skills from the person who knows nothing, the person who's starting out, the person who is like sort of a middling performer to someone who's really good at it.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_00: And mastery just is what we define as being at kind of the tail end of that spectrum.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_00: Now, people can do the cutoff point differently.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: And so, I mean, if we're talking about world-class performance where there's only like a handful of people in the world who are at that level, I mean, most of us are never gonna master anything.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_00: But I think of it more directionally, I think of it more like going from wherever you are to another increment forward, and that it is different at different stages, and I get into that in the book that there's differences between being, you know, the number five golfer and trying to become the number four golfer to, you know, uh, I'm I'm trying to like, you know, swing the ball so it like hits the fairway.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_00: Like, those are different problems, but I think they involve a lot of the same mechanisms, they involve a lot of the same um background research and the same principles of learning.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_00: So that's really what I I care about is those principles.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_00: And however we want to define words like mastery and excellence is I think up to the reader.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, great.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_01: Uh there's one point uh that you uh you know uh you really uh you know make in the book, which is the pride of achieving excellence versus the pride of achieving mastery, right?
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_01: There are different motivations that people have, right?
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_01: Because you talk about uh, you know, what you call as uh your see, do, and feedback loop, right?
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_01: That's the principle that you largely talk about in this book.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_01: And uh therefore there's this whole feeling that uh you know there is a different pride in achieving excellence, and there's a different pride in achieving mastery.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_01: In your research, uh, what did you think were the differences that you saw, which uh the nuances, so to speak, that you could capture, and uh what is it that you learned out of the vast amount of research that you have done for this book?
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_00: So I think I think I know what you're getting at, and I think uh if I can hopefully um I'm following your thread in the right direction here.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_00: Um, there is a distinction in in a lot of the learning research on um what are called like mastery motivations versus uh it's usually called performance motivations.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_00: So the classic context of that is like if you have a group of students in a math class, right?
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_00: There's going to be some students that are mostly motivated to get an A in the class, and there's gonna be some students that are motivated to learn the material.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_00: So learning the material is the mastery motivation, getting the A in the class is the performance motivation.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, in general, they kind of talk about like the mastery motivation is probably better in the long term, especially in a classroom environment where you know the getting an A in the class usually doesn't fully capture the learning objectives of the course.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_00: So it's possible to get an A in the class and have maybe a more superficial understanding that's desired.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_00: And at the same time, you know, you can do things that will allow you to get the A that are not gonna be good for setting you up for long-term mastery.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, maybe just memorizing things that you were supposed to have really understood, um, cramming so that you know you're gonna forget it right away, but it'll help you on the test.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_00: These are things where these kind of motivations can be in contrast.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, my basic assumption is that pretty much anyone who is reading a book like this has a mastery motivation.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, if you had a performance motivation, the easiest way to pass a test is to like get someone who can help you learn that particular test, right?
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_00: Is it's someone who can be like, okay, well, this is exactly how you practice for this particular exam.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_00: And these are the little tricks and little like, you know, hooks that you can use to cheat your way into getting a better mark than your actual understanding would normally allow.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas, you know, the kind of person is going to sit through and read a you know, a fairly densely cited, popular um nonfiction book about learning about mastery is someone who wants to improve for itself, who wants to have that as a goal.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_00: So I I have the privilege, I think, of being able to talk to an audience that largely has the right motivation.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_00: And I think you're you're even listening to Pogas', you've made it in a few minutes, you care about mastery.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_00: You're not just like, you know, okay, I want to just narrowly get by on this particular class or this particular exam, even if that is also a goal of yours.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think um the mastery motivation is something that binds uh my readers and my audience together.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_00: And I think the mastery motivation is so powerful because a lot of what you're dealing with, I think, in a lot of educational research in that context is the problem that a lot of students are just not motivated, that a lot of students don't really care about what you're teaching them.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_00: And so you have this problem of like, uh, well, you're not only trying to teach them the right way, but you're trying to teach them in a way that like using carrots and sticks to get them to do the work.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, we even talk about that in there's a chapter I write on um uh on mastery learning, which is a uh is a sort of a philosophy of teaching classes, which avoids using um assignments and quizzes for grades, so that you know, if you fail one that you're having like hampered your ability to pass the overall class.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_00: But obviously, I understand why teachers do that, because if you don't assign points for intermediate homework or quizzes, students won't try to study for it because they have a performance incentive.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_00: So I think you know, that is the real benefit, the real joy of being able to write a book like this is that you're essentially filtering out to only target an audience that actually cares about mastery.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_01: Uh see, one of the things uh that I see uh as I read this book, uh some of the thoughts that crossed my mind was this big shift that's happening in the way we work, right?
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_01: So if you look at it hundred years back, we were in an industrial mindset or a factory mindset, which is really around uh, you know, uh you're pretty much mass producing goods, uh, and therefore you're you're you're getting the stuff out of the factory, right?
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_01: Now I think you're moving to an era where you're actually doing knowledge work and therefore the need for mastery in a job is more important than what it was before, right?
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_01: Uh yet, do you believe uh the organizations leave uh at one point, I think let's leave the students aside, but I'm a beginner getting into a work world and I'm actually moving up my career.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_01: Uh one of the challenges that I find is if you don't have a mastery mindset, okay, what happens is you just are not phenomenal in your job.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_01: The the Edison example that you give in the book, right?
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_01: So the fact that if I'm actually in a job and I'm at a workplace, uh the fact that the new workplace of the future requires a mastery mindset.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_01: And uh therefore, if I were to actually agree on that as the direction that workplace is changing, what would you say are the principles that I need to build in what I do to build mastery in anything that I do?
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I think again, understanding these basic principles of learning is so important because I think this is a topic we're not really taught that much about.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_00: So, I mean, if you go, you could go through, you know, 16 years of schooling and never encounter a single class where they talk about how learning works, how memory works, all the research we've discovered about this subject.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_00: And that's somewhat unfortunate because you know, it it makes people, it puts people in a position where they're often, you know, they're relying on their own intuitions about what's the right way to learn and how people improve and how they get better at things, which can sometimes be accurate.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_00: I don't want to say that, like, you know, if you spent 16 years learning in school, you have some idea about how to pass tests and study for things.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_00: But there's also a lot of blind spots.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_00: And I even covered some of these in my last book.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_00: Like one of the classic ones is uh retrieval versus review.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, students, when you give them these like measurement tests, they think that reading their notes over and over again is the right way to um remember the information, that that is a better method.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but actually, when you test them, they do better with repeated testing than with repeated um reading and rereading.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_00: And so there's a lot of these little blind spots.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_00: Spacing is another one.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_00: You know, people tend to think you learn more when you're cramming, but you actually are more efficient learning when you space things out.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_00: Um but I think even even at a even at a deeper level, there's issues with, you know, we're talking about mastery in the long run.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_00: One of the things that I think is a common belief is that you get better and better just with more experience.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_00: And this is one of the things that I've had to push back on because um Malcolm Gladwell published a very fun and engaging book called Outliers, and it popularized this um idea of research called the 10,000 hour rule.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_00: And as with all popularizations, you know, I don't want to be too hard on Malcolm Gladwell because you're always simplifying things and people take ideas in ways you didn't expect.
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_00: But one of the ways that he took in that he didn't expect, or that I think is not a good reading of the research, is that, well, the key to getting good at something is to spend 10,000 hours doing it.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_00: And that's not actually what the research shows, that spending a lot of time doing something leads to confidence and it leads to fluency.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_00: Now, fluency, I think we all understand from a linguistic point of view, is the ability to talk without interruptions.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_00: But it has a more general meaning in cognitive science, which is uh that you can do something with low effort.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_00: So think about driving a car.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_00: In some ways, it's weird to think about driving a car fluently, but it is a skill that you've learned to the point if you drive regularly that you don't have to process a lot of uh mental bandwidth to think about doing it.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I drove here to work this morning and it was just sort of in the back of my mind.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_00: I wasn't really thinking about like, okay, where is the brake pedal?
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_00: Where's my 10 and 2 with the steering wheel?
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not thinking about that, right?
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_00: But am I a great driver?
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_00: No, probably not.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I'm I'm a middling driver.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_00: Is there better levels of driving skill I could attain?
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_00: Definitely.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_00: Definitely, you know, like you compare me to like a race car driver or someone who, you know, drives a taxi.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_00: Well, in Mumbai, for instance, it would be, I would be a disaster driving there, right?
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_00: Like it's a much more chaotic, frenetic environment to drive a car in.
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_00: Um, if you drive there, you're a much better driver than I am.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_00: And so why is that?
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_00: Why is it that I can spend lots of time driving and my skill level is essentially flat?
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_00: And this is related to what you're talking about.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you work your job, it's stressful in the beginning, you're learning a bit, but then after like five, 10 years, you know, you're not a top performer, but you're not getting that much better.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_00: You can spend another 10 years, and all that's going to change is it's gonna be more comfortable and more fluent as it is.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_00: And a big part of this is what what um what I talk about in the book is Anders Erickson's research uh on deliberate practice, which is this idea that simply doing something over and over again tends to just make It's more automatic.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't necessarily make you better at it.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_00: Or if it does, it does so very slowly.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_00: And so often what we need to do to master our skills when we've reached that fluent stage is a kind of unlearning, is a kind of, okay, we need to bring back the deliberate attention, make it more effortful, focus on things that have long since been pushed to our subconscious to actually make improvements.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_00: And that's uncomfortable and it's difficult.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think that's one of the real reasons why you need this mastery mindset to make progress.
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_00: Because yeah, just showing up at your job and just doing it for another 10 years is not going to make you that much better once you've reached that plateau.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_00: It's just going to make you more comfortable.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_01: So if uh I need to develop that mastery mindset, uh, what are the three steps that uh, you know, you talk about this uh, you know, seeing, doing, and taking feedback as one principle, and there are many uh maxims within this uh you know framework that you have put out here.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so talk to me about uh, you know, I'm I'm I'm actually in this uh job and I'm a programmer or I'm an architect or I'm a uh you know a musician or I'm a uh you know I'm somebody who's uh running my own business and I'm somebody who wants to build his mastery mindset.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_01: So which means that you've got a fantastic framework that I saw with these 12 maxims that are coming in under these three, I would say, pillars, which is uh you know, seeing, doing, and taking feedback.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_01: So talk to me about it, and therefore, if I were to build a discipline in my head on how I need to do it, uh talk to me about a few interesting points.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_01: I'm sure they will pick up the stuff from the book, but give me some large headlines which help me understand what the process is.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I mean, part of writing this book is that you're just encountering so much research, so many different ideas that you know, these individual trees, you're like, what's the forest?
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_00: What's the big picture?
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_00: And so the eventual framework that I thought best organized these ideas is dividing it between these three factors.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_00: And I mean, they sound simple, but they but that betrays a lot of nuance, a lot of detail.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_00: So seeing, doing, and getting feedback.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_00: So seeing is the idea that most of what we know comes from other people, that uh human creativity, human problem solving is like the tip of the iceberg of all the cultural learning, all the transmitted knowledge that we get from other people.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_00: And so to achieve excellence in any field, you are really standing atop mostly knowledge created by other people.
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_00: And where this was interesting for me was that there's lots of examples of differences in our ability to learn from other people.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_00: So if an environment makes it a little bit easier or a little bit harder, that can totally change the trajectory of not only just mastery of an individual, but for an entire group.
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_00: So the story that I opened the book with is one that was uh given to me by um the blogger uh John Green talking about Tetris proficiency.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_00: And this is, you know, not something that is really important for our jobs or for our work, but I thought it was beautiful because it illustrates something that is deep and important across many fields.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_00: And here's the idea the game comes out in 1990, people are obsessed with it, they're witnessing falling blocks, but the best players, the people who they're keeping world records about, are nowhere close to as good as like 13-year-old kids are today.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_00: And the difference is that in the last decade or so, there's been an explosion of online streaming and tools and tournaments, and basically things that make it much easier for players to learn techniques and strategies from each other.
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_00: So a new player today who's like 10 years old can go online and be like, oh, this is the right way to play elite level Tetris, and they can quickly learn what would have taken trial and error, you know, a decade or more from for a lot of players to get to.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_00: And in some cases, they would never get to it because of what we talked about about this increasing automaticity of maybe using an inefficient method, you just keep using it more and more.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_00: And so this idea of seeing is very important because essentially, in our work, in our professional lives, it's huge because yeah, you can learn stuff from school, and that does give you a foundation.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_00: Certainly in the hard sciences, uh the STEM fields, you need it to be able to work.
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_00: But so much of what matters for performing at the frontier of a discipline is not taught in school.
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_00: It's taught in the field, in practice.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_00: And so if you are in a company that's doing cutting edge work and you are able to witness the best people doing it, you're able to see their explanations.
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, that can be orders of magnitude difference.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_00: You can be the smartest person in the world, but if you're working at the wrong company, you're not going to make an important contribution.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_00: And that's an unfair truth, but it is also something that's very important to recognize is that being able to see and learn from other people, it's huge.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_00: Do is the obvious idea that we get better through practice.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_00: And I spend a lot of time talking about exactly what practice is doing, exactly what it is doing to make us better.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_00: Because on the one hand, practice is essential, you can't avoid it.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_00: But on the other hand, there's some misconceptions about what practice is doing and about what the best way to practice is.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_00: And so I spend a lot of time talking about, you know, how we can kind of, in some ways, overcome our own brain's tendencies to like do practice that isn't as helpful for us.
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_00: And then finally, feedback.
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_00: This this is so important.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_00: And I, you know, I opened this section of the book talking about how there's whole fields where experts are supremely confident and they actually are very mediocre in their uh ability to make judgments or uh that you know we would normally expect of experts.
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_00: And and the reason is simply that if you don't have good feedback, if you're not getting information from your environment that's allowing you to adjust and calibrate your skills, um basically it's just what we talked about.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_00: You keep doing something, you get more and more confident, you get more and more comfortable, but your improvement pretty much flatlines.
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_00: And so these three ingredients are important, but they are really just a starting point for thinking about how you're learning because it's not like this is a trick or a technique.
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_00: It's bigger than that.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_00: It's more like, okay, if I'm in an environment where learning from other people is gonna be hard, I could be the smartest, most hardworking person on the planet, and I'm not gonna make progress in this skill.
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_00: If I'm in a field which has poor feedback, then I got to be very careful because I can be feeling really confident and still be making lousy predictions.
• 28:46
  SPEAKER_00: And similarly, you know, if I'm doing the wrong kind of practice, you can spend 10,000 hours and not become world-class at anything.
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_00: So I think there's both potential and danger here.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's why I think it's so important to understand these principles.
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, in fact, you make a very interesting point in the book, uh Scott, where you talk about the power of apprenticeship, right?
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, where uh I think uh you covered that point very well saying that there are fields where apprenticeship is actually done uh, you know, in professions like music and you know other uh uh maybe in a medical profession where a lot of uh you know apprenticeship helps you build mastery, right?
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so talk to me about the power of apprenticeship in building mastery.
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_00: So apprenticeship is a kind of uh I think when you look at so I'll just preface this, whenever you look at any learning system or any kind of framework, there's always strengths and weaknesses.
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_00: There's always things that it does well and things that it doesn't do so well.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_00: So uh if I were to like talk about learning systems or learning environments, um, I don't have any that I would point to and be like, well, this is the ideal way to learn everything, right?
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's always this trade-off.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_00: And so to me, what apprenticeships do really well is that you are getting good feedback.
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_00: The skill is very close to the one that's actually practiced, which is a major problem.
• 30:14
  SPEAKER_00: I talk about it a lot in my my first book, Ultra Learning, of this indirectness, where you are in a classroom, the teacher doesn't know where you're gonna be working, they don't know what you're gonna be doing.
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_00: So they try to give you quite generic skills.
• 30:28
  SPEAKER_00: And sometimes that's useful.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, if you're gonna go in any math field, learning algebra is important, you have to do it.
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't really think there's another way of doing it.
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_00: But I, you know, I went to business school and I remember sitting through a lot of classes that would talk about business strategy in such an abstract, detached way that you really question whether or not these kids would not just be better off working for a couple of years than sitting through these classes.
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's true of a lot of a lot of fields.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I did uh this kind of um computer science uh sort of self-education project that I talked about at the, you know, when we opened from MIT.
• 31:03
  SPEAKER_00: And like MIT classes are great, but they're super conceptual and abstract.
• 31:07
  SPEAKER_00: And so you could definitely just take all those classes and not be a very good programmer, whereas, you know, what you need to do to program is program a lot.
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_00: So apprenticeship gives you that repetition, it gives you that directness, it gives you those actual skills.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_00: What is apprenticeship?
• 31:19
  SPEAKER_00: What is the weakness of apprenticeship?
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_00: Well, the weakness of apprenticeship is that the people who are teaching you are too busy to teach you, they don't have time or patience to tell you how to do the job.
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_00: And um, you are in an environment where you're trying to get work done.
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_00: And because you're trying to get work done, there can be this sort of like, well, let's not let this person do the actual important work because they're gonna screw it up, even if that's what they need to learn.
• 31:43
  SPEAKER_00: So I think apprenticeship is just this essential vehicle.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_00: But when you're in an apprenticeship environment versus a school environment, you have these kind of like counterbalancing uh weaknesses that the school environment is indirect, but it's also like you have someone who it's their whole job to teach you.
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe they're not doing a good job, but that's what their job is.
• 32:02
  SPEAKER_00: You have peers, everything is about learning, it's not about like, you know, making sales quotas.
• 32:07
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas when you're doing apprenticeship, it's so important to try to like get some of that school environment in the apprenticeship process, like be on projects where you can genuinely learn and grow, and be with people that you can ask stupid questions to and they can give you helpful answers and you can navigate that social network.
• 32:26
  SPEAKER_00: And when you're in the school, it's good to have the work experience and the things that are like, okay, this is actually what you're gonna be doing, and so you can get that experience.
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think apprenticeship is really important, it's underused, but it's also something that you know essentially that's how we get good at our jobs in almost every job is some form of apprenticeship.
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_01: Fantastic.
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_01: So uh uh, you know, my follow-up question to this, Court, is uh so when you look at the journey of mastery when you you know when I read through this book, uh one thing that uh comes back, and I think it comes with a lot of your work that you do, is uh I tend to look at mastery when I know that I want to be the best in my profession.
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, uh, but what profession I'm going to get in is something that I'm not sure when I'm in college or I'm in school.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_01: Okay?
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_01: And suddenly I'm in a job or probably at work, and suddenly you're talking to me about mastery, right?
• 33:27
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm not prepared in my mental models are not there for building mastery.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_01: So is there something that uh you know one needs to do?
• 33:37
  SPEAKER_01: For example, uh, you know, I was thinking as I was reading your book that uh in schools you start teaching subjects, right?
• 33:45
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, but when I uh saw what Edison did, or when you when I saw uh you know the gaming uh you know example that you just gave, uh uh one of the things that I see is uh uh I have to be the best tennis player in the world, I have to be the best golfer in the world.
• 34:04
  SPEAKER_01: So therefore, does mastery start with defining uh profession first that you would get interested in, and then you start teaching the subjects which leads to mastery?
• 34:20
  SPEAKER_00: Well, this is a really interesting question because I think um I think what we're hitting on here is not just a question of like what's involved in becoming world class and what's involved in in mastering a skill, but also thinking about you as an individual, you in your career, what is the sort of portfolio of skills that you bring to the table?
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_00: And I think this is a deep question because a lot of the research, like again, if we go to Anders Erickson, is the person that I love to cite here because he he did so much to our understanding of expertise and mastery.
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_00: He was really focused on, I would call them fairly narrow professions.
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_00: So, like chess grandmasters and you know, tennis players and people who had kind of reached the pinnacle of a specialization of some narrow skill that was well defined.
• 35:10
  SPEAKER_00: And uh the you know, the author David Epstein, he kind of wrote a book critiquing the Andrews Ericsson to just sort of talk about like, well, in a lot of workplaces, being really, really good at one thing is not actually what the game is, right?
• 35:23
  SPEAKER_00: That it's about having this sort of portfolio of skills, this range, you know, as he calls it.
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's a useful point.
• 35:30
  SPEAKER_00: I think um, you know, I I don't have the citation offhand, but I recall um running into a paper where which was arguing about uh double majors, so people who take two different majors in university, um, having like kind of the one major is sort of like the specialist animal.
• 35:47
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, it's like it's the it's the giant panda that only eats bamboo.
• 35:51
  SPEAKER_00: And the having the double major is like being the omnivore.
• 35:54
  SPEAKER_00: It's like you're being like the city rat who can, you know, eat every kind of garbage.
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_00: And in an environment which is very stable and predictable, being the specialist pays off because you're only learning what's relevant to that job.
• 36:05
  SPEAKER_00: You're gonna create a lot of waste if you learn skills that you don't end up using.
• 36:10
  SPEAKER_00: But if you have more breadth, you have more um tolerance to variation in risk.
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_00: So I think that is it as a young person who doesn't know their career or who is in an early stage of their career, I do think um I do think you need to have this kind of portfolio analysis because uh if you let's say, okay, what is the highest paying profession?
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_00: And like the classic example that often gets cited is like petroleum engineers.
• 36:36
  SPEAKER_00: So petroleum engineers, I don't know when this was, this would have been like in the early 2000s or something, were like, you know, exorbitantly paid because there was a shortage of them, there was a real boom in like, you know, gas and oil fracking.
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_00: So if you were a petroleum engineer and you were just graduating with your like PhD at that time, they're paying you like millions of dollars to do your work, right?
• 36:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and you're a no student, you're like, I want to go in, like, I just want to make money.
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe you're just a hypothetical, super materialistic student.
• 37:03
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna go into petroleum engineering.
• 37:05
  SPEAKER_00: And then you get to the end of the your career, and then you find out, oh, actually, gas prices, oil have fallen, and they're laying people off.
• 37:13
  SPEAKER_00: And now you have this like really well-developed hyper specialty that turns out is useless for like most other lines of work.
• 37:20
  SPEAKER_00: And so you've made an investment that was like owning one stock.
• 37:24
  SPEAKER_00: If it does well, you've made much more money.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_00: But the safer strategy is to own a portfolio of different stocks so you have diversification.
• 37:32
  SPEAKER_00: So I tend to think of that problem in terms of, you know, if you're really young, like if you're going into school, it's better to choose.
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, again, the there's there's nothing wrong with choosing based on prestige.
• 37:44
  SPEAKER_00: I think a lot of people know this, especially in India.
• 37:46
  SPEAKER_00: If you go to an IIT, you're probably gonna get a job even if it's not in tech later because they know you're smart.
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_00: That's the game everyone knows, everyone knows you're playing.
• 37:54
  SPEAKER_00: But in terms of just content knowledge of things that you're trying to do, I think having a bit more breadth, knowing a little bit more of some different things is probably valuable to a point.
• 38:04
  SPEAKER_00: And when you start out in your work, it's helpful to look for workplaces that also introduce variability, that introduced different context, different industries.
• 38:16
  SPEAKER_00: So, my classic example of this is if you're gonna go into accounting, for instance, um, you can go into a big accounting firm, which has lots of clients in lots of different industries, or you can go work for a firm and do their internal accounting.
• 38:30
  SPEAKER_00: But if you work for the firm where you do their internal accounting, you get really familiar with one industry, one practice, one way of doing things.
• 38:37
  SPEAKER_00: And it can be a little bit harder to switch fields.
• 38:39
  SPEAKER_00: Not impossible, but a little harder.
• 38:41
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas if you went to one of the big accounting firms, you can basically work anywhere you want after that.
• 38:46
  SPEAKER_00: And there's a similar process in a lot of industries.
• 38:48
  SPEAKER_00: So I think early on, having that intense, varied experience, even if it's not ideally what you want from a work-life balance, can be beneficial because it sets you up so that, well, you know, you have this sort of foundation.
• 39:02
  SPEAKER_00: So if you get into a new job and you need to spend the next couple years quickly getting yourself acclimatized, you're in a much better position.
• 39:11
  SPEAKER_01: So I think uh that's the reason why you talk about this point on varied practice, yeah.
• 39:17
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, which is very key to building mastery, right?
• 39:21
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, can you talk to me about uh the importance of varied practice?
• 39:25
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe that's something that's very critical early in your career.
• 39:28
  SPEAKER_01: You even talk about uh, you know, go and join a company that's got uh you know volatility, stressful uh you know situations, and that prepares you for uh you know uh the future.
• 39:40
  SPEAKER_01: So you even talk about that in the book.
• 39:42
  SPEAKER_01: So uh so how does varied practice help you build mastery?
• 39:46
  SPEAKER_01: Because these are things that are not normally uh you know told in schools and colleges.
• 39:51
  SPEAKER_01: They say, you know, go to the large company, get into a routine job, get comfortable, and then you and then your you know your you your muzzle becomes lazy, right?
• 40:00
  SPEAKER_01: Then you're not able to switch and do things.
• 40:03
  SPEAKER_01: So I found these very interesting things that you talk in the book.
• 40:06
  SPEAKER_01: So, how does varied practice help build mastery?
• 40:10
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 40:10
  SPEAKER_00: So, so in that there's a chapter I have, uh, which I call variability over repetition.
• 40:16
  SPEAKER_00: And this is um this is a more specific point.
• 40:18
  SPEAKER_00: So we were talking about this kind of, I'll call it like the portfolio model of skill development, which is not so much a question of how do you learn, but a question of like you're making investments in your own human capital.
• 40:30
  SPEAKER_00: What is the right, like, like to use an investing metaphor, what's the right way to make those investments?
• 40:36
  SPEAKER_00: And and I tend to think that you're probably better off with some degree of diversification, not like you learn every single skill, the jack of all trades is the master of none, but that you have a little bit more breadth.
• 40:48
  SPEAKER_00: So changing economic conditions, changing opportunities, you're a bit more flexible.
• 40:53
  SPEAKER_00: This other idea about variable practice is is a deeper cognitive science principle that I think like this applies even if you were trying to just be a specialist.
• 41:02
  SPEAKER_00: So even if you just wanted to be only a chess player, or as I talk about in the book, like only a jazz player, this is very important.
• 41:09
  SPEAKER_00: And the basic idea is that um when we practice things, a tendency is to want to like repeat it until we get it right.
• 41:16
  SPEAKER_00: So just keep repeating it until you get it right.
• 41:19
  SPEAKER_00: And um there's a whole interesting line of research uh from called contextual interference, uh interleaving, um uh there's there's a whole bunch of different names where this research has been done with different paradigms, which basically shows that for a lot of skills, if you are able to mix up the practice so that you are practicing different skills that are similar in uh in alternation, in different orders, at a random schedule, it has two effects.
• 41:53
  SPEAKER_00: One, you tend to learn a little bit more slowly.
• 41:56
  SPEAKER_00: So this is sort of the obvious reason why we try to favor repetition often is that it seems like we're making faster progress.
• 42:03
  SPEAKER_00: But if you average out over all those skills, you tend to be more efficient doing the varied practice than the very consistent or repetitive practice.
• 42:12
  SPEAKER_00: And this manifests in different ways.
• 42:14
  SPEAKER_00: But one of the things that I think it really helps with is developing a kind of deeper understanding or deeper flexibility with the skill.
• 42:24
  SPEAKER_00: So when you continually practice the same skill over and over and over again, you get faster, fluent at it very quickly, like what we were talking about.
• 42:33
  SPEAKER_00: But what is sort of weakened in that is that because you're doing the same thing over and over and over again, the ability to decide whether or not you should use that skill, like is this the situation that calls for it, is relatively underpracticed.
• 42:46
  SPEAKER_00: And so this leads to what some researchers call the paradox of transfer.
• 42:50
  SPEAKER_00: So transfer is this idea if you learn one skill, does it help you with something else?
• 42:54
  SPEAKER_00: And what they find is that these varied practice schedules tend to make learning slower.
• 42:59
  SPEAKER_00: They tend to make, you know, if you're trying to get good at one particular thing, it makes it a bit slower.
• 43:04
  SPEAKER_00: But it tends to make your ability to learn new things better.
• 43:07
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think this is a very interesting idea.
• 43:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um, obviously, there's limitations to it.
• 43:12
  SPEAKER_00: I don't want to suggest that, you know, you learn 10 different subjects is going to make you learn subject 11 a lot faster.
• 43:19
  SPEAKER_00: That's not, I think, what's particularly shown by the research, but it does show that if you are in environments where you are practiced in a varied way, um, you're able to pick up new cases, new problems, new skills within the discipline uh more quickly.
• 43:32
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's very important for mastery, where you know, in a lot of our professional fields, it's not about being able to, you know, punch out a widget, you know, a tenth of a second faster.
• 43:42
  SPEAKER_00: It's about encountering a new situation and resolving it appropriately.
• 43:47
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 43:48
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I think no conversation uh you know will be complete without uh AI, which is really something that everybody talks about.
• 43:57
  SPEAKER_01: And I think in this uh book you talk about.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_01: You know how AI can influence building mastery.
• 44:06
  SPEAKER_01: And you talk about known practice and unknown practice, right?
• 44:10
  SPEAKER_01: You talk about the concept and therefore how even though there is AI, the fact that there are known practices which probably AI will know, but unknown practices, which probably is not known to the world, and therefore that being a big point in building mastery.
• 44:31
  SPEAKER_01: So talk to me about that.
• 44:32
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that was a very interesting concept that I really loved.
• 44:37
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I gotta say, first of all, like uh everyone, everyone including myself, is just gobsmacked by the developments of large language models and generative AI.
• 44:46
  SPEAKER_00: This was something that I think really was unexpected to people 10 years ago.
• 44:52
  SPEAKER_00: And uh I I uh when I was writing this book, I mean, one of the reviewers, um, you know, I I love her, but she she was like very critical of me because I didn't write more about AI.
• 45:03
  SPEAKER_00: She was like, you're writing this book and you don't have a big section on AI.
• 45:07
  SPEAKER_00: And uh the reason I didn't is because book publishing is a slow process.
• 45:11
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I started this book before ChatGPT had even come out, and it's gonna be out hopefully for another decade or two.
• 45:19
  SPEAKER_00: And there's a real risk of making pronouncements about new technologies that just seem totally ridiculous 10 years later.
• 45:27
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and it's just because making predictions about things is hard.
• 45:30
  SPEAKER_00: And so I personally think our own ability to say where these technologies are going and what the actual implications are, is pretty weak right now.
• 45:40
  SPEAKER_00: So I don't want to be here with my crystal ball saying, ah, this is what's gonna happen now with large language models.
• 45:45
  SPEAKER_00: And I think anyone who is saying that is talking out of their butt a little bit.
• 45:50
  SPEAKER_00: But what I will say about it, and what I think is kind of generally true of technologies, is that technologies enable new cognitive powers in people and they also open up new cognitive terrain for skills that we hadn't appreciated or imagined before.
• 46:06
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think often when there is a new technology, um, we often focus on the substitution effect first.
• 46:14
  SPEAKER_00: So we often focus on what is this replacing that previously people were doing, and it seems like the share for the human mind has shrunk.
• 46:23
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, my the classic example of this that everyone talks about is Socrates.
• 46:28
  SPEAKER_00: And Socrates, when paper was coming out and people were writing down ideas, which previously was this oral tradition that was memorized speeches that were given handed down from teacher to student, he was saying, you know what, this is gonna rob the faculty of memory because we had to memorize things and now students will just be able to look it up.
• 46:46
  SPEAKER_00: And the thing is that he wasn't wrong.
• 46:48
  SPEAKER_00: You know, the ancient Greeks had these elaborate mnemonic techniques to memorize things, and we don't really use them anymore, and we don't have as good memories as Socrates did.
• 46:56
  SPEAKER_00: But what he missed was by focusing on this substitution effect, he was missing this new domain, which was that once you write down knowledge, all of a sudden you can accumulate far more than a person could study in a lifestyle in a durable format.
• 47:13
  SPEAKER_00: So what he was focused on was, well, you're not gonna be able to memorize things.
• 47:16
  SPEAKER_00: But what he didn't understand was that now that you didn't have to memorize things, you could accumulate far more knowledge that could be inside any one person's head.
• 47:26
  SPEAKER_00: And so I tend to think that the substitution effect, the way that we see, well, you know, all these like kind of low-end programming tasks can now be taken over with AI.
• 47:34
  SPEAKER_00: Or, you know, I was previously I had to, you know, hire some illustrator to storyboard some images, and now I can just get AI to do it for me for this first draft and stuff.
• 47:44
  SPEAKER_00: But what I think is missing is all the ways that having these tools in the long run is going to enable new forms of creativity, new forms of problem solving, new forms of uh knowledge representation discovery.
• 47:59
  SPEAKER_00: And I mean, the reliability and usefulness and domain of these tools still has to be proven.
• 48:04
  SPEAKER_00: I think they still have a lot of bugs in them.
• 48:07
  SPEAKER_00: Like I wouldn't use large language models for doing research for my book because they make too many mistakes and they get stuff wrong.
• 48:13
  SPEAKER_00: And so I'd rather still use Google Scholar and some of these existing tools.
• 48:17
  SPEAKER_00: Like I'd rather use Wikipedia because I know Wikipedia sometimes makes mistakes, but there was a real human who was really trying to cite things properly when they were writing those essays.
• 48:27
  SPEAKER_00: Um but who knows where it's gonna go in the future?
• 48:30
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think all I would say right now is to keep an open mind and to keep open the idea that while some skills will be substituted, new skills are gonna be created.
• 48:40
  SPEAKER_00: And I think it's those new skills that are gonna be created that they may end up defining the future of work for the next 30 or 40 years if it turns out that you know what it means to be a programmer just fundamentally changes when you can have an AI that can do like 80% of the programming work.
• 48:56
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that 20% that they can't do, and the you know, other 10%, which is involving like managing the AI, that's gonna become super important.
• 49:04
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think the people who are aware of this and who are on the cutting edge are gonna be people who are like paying attention to this trend and being like, okay, well, what do I need to be really good at to make use of this technology in a productive way?
• 49:18
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 49:19
  SPEAKER_01: Um so one of the things, uh Scott, that uh I think this book, why this book is so important uh in the time that uh you know we are going through this change uh of the future of work that we are doing.
• 49:34
  SPEAKER_01: Um what I believe is happening, the transformation that's happening today, is uh we were a craft-based world before uh you know industrialization took over.
• 49:48
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 49:49
  SPEAKER_01: Uh then when knowledge work started, uh, I think that's where we started our conversation, uh, you know, craft is becoming more and more important, right?
• 49:59
  SPEAKER_01: Because now uh, you know, if uh in fact you talk about this whole thing of saying that uh you know distributed uh you know mastery uh is good is becoming important for problem solving, right?
• 50:13
  SPEAKER_01: So therefore, when I'm going to be working with multiple number of people, with multiple collaborators, the fact that I'll collaborate with somebody who is an expert who has a mastery in that particular area is what I would probably seek out.
• 50:28
  SPEAKER_01: And therefore, do you believe that uh you know individuals who actually you know finish their uh you know degrees, go into work, uh the need for actually building the craft is becoming more and more important, and therefore, the application of this continuous repetitive learning, the fact that uh you know I need to use my intuition, you talk about uh you know examples of uh Da Vinci uh you know, really looking at uh you know how uh you know paintings get done by copying first, and then quality is more important than quantity.
• 51:05
  SPEAKER_01: So some of these principles do you think are going to get back to work?
• 51:10
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, because earlier, I think in the last hundred years, it was all about give me lots of cars, just get mass produce them and send it to me.
• 51:19
  SPEAKER_01: But now it's all about mass personalization and customization, which means that I need to be good in my craft, and therefore the need for mastery is becoming more and more important at workplace rather than just being performance-led.
• 51:35
  SPEAKER_01: Would you agree with that statement?
• 51:37
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I think if you look at the overall trend of um of work over what you were saying, like the last 150 years or so, uh, it definitely has some of these features that the the economy before you know mass production, before um really industrialization had uh spread throughout all the industries, was highly skilled.
• 51:59
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, most people who were in the artisanal class, you needed to learn a fairly complex and cognitively demanding skill in order to produce the work.
• 52:08
  SPEAKER_00: If you think about like how cars were made before Henry Ford, I mean, you would have a mechanic who they knew how to make the entire car, they would hand make all the parts, they would be putting it together.
• 52:18
  SPEAKER_00: Like it was it was like a piece of art that they were making, right?
• 52:22
  SPEAKER_00: And then what changed was Henry Ford was like, well, if I make all the parts super standardized and I get people to do one little bit and they get really good at that one little bit, I can make the cars much cheaper.
• 52:33
  SPEAKER_00: And so what we saw was a real de-skilling of a lot of these professions, that it used to be someone who was like, you know, the equivalent of like a master's in in uh car mechanic was replaced by a guy who, you know, this is someone who's just like just okay, maybe barely speaks the the language, they're coming in there and like, okay, do this, and you do that for 60 hours a week until you're exhausted.
• 52:56
  SPEAKER_00: And and the result was that you had cheap cars.
• 52:59
  SPEAKER_00: And so I do think um we saw a bit of a reversal of that trend with information technology and automation, that some of those things that were done by people in this very repetitive machine-like way started to be done by actual machines.
• 53:14
  SPEAKER_00: And so what was left, this again kind of substitution and what was created in the aftermath, were professions that were more creative, that were more um uh knowledge-demanding.
• 53:26
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think we are living in the aftermath of that world that, you know, starting from 70s, 80s, 90s, uh, I talk about this um idea of education polarization of uh uh income inequality polarization, where the trend in the United States at least is because of things like not only automation but also outsourcing and this kind of stuff, that you see a real growth in inequality at the top end and a compression at the bottom, which is sort of consonant with this idea that these middle class factory jobs just kind of evaporated.
• 53:59
  SPEAKER_00: And either you became a coder who was making six figures at Silicon Valley, or you, you know, you worked the drive-thru window at uh at a restaurant and took orders and got paid minimum wage.
• 54:10
  SPEAKER_00: And I mean, that's an extreme idea, but it is reflective of the fact that we used to have a lot of professions that were medium skilled, that required a little bit of training, but not that much, and could be done relatively repetitively.
• 54:24
  SPEAKER_00: That, you know, we can just get computers to do them now.
• 54:28
  SPEAKER_00: Travel agents, a lot of like, you know, bookkeeping.
• 54:31
  SPEAKER_00: When you used to have to write it in a physical book, it was a very different job than when you had Excel.
• 54:35
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think uh there is a real question about how much this trend is going to continue.
• 54:41
  SPEAKER_00: I tend to think that it probably will continue.
• 54:43
  SPEAKER_00: I know there's some people who think we're maybe on the cusp of a new industrial revolution of de-skilling because of these large language models, and uh, and they can point to some evidence in their favor, but I tend to think that um this trend is broadly just because you know, the kinds of things that we get people to do, um, it's easier to automate the things that are simpler.
• 55:05
  SPEAKER_00: And so you kind of just as technology develops, you get into a zone where uh, you know, it used to be people doing everything, and then it was machines doing just kind of like the very, very simplest parts, and then the more complicated skills.
• 55:19
  SPEAKER_00: And so as we move up and up, I think the the role of people is going to increase.
• 55:25
  SPEAKER_00: We're going to be increasingly having people not just do technical skills, but you're going to be the, you know, need the soft skills, you're going to need the people skills of being able to put together these, you know, automated systems and link it all together.
• 55:39
  SPEAKER_00: So I I tend to think that more skill, more knowledge, more education.
• 55:43
  SPEAKER_00: I think that trend is going to continue, but we'll see.
• 55:47
  SPEAKER_01: Fantastic.
• 55:49
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, so that's great, uh Scott.
• 55:51
  SPEAKER_01: I think uh we're pretty much coming to the end of this conversation, and I have a couple of rapid fire questions for you.
• 55:58
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 55:59
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I'll try to be rapid fire answers.
• 56:03
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so the first question uh that I have for you is uh, what does success mean to you?
• 56:10
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, success is again like it's the meaning of words.
• 56:13
  SPEAKER_00: I think success has a kind of popular definition at large.
• 56:17
  SPEAKER_00: But if you're asking me what do I drive for, what do I want to achieve in my own life?
• 56:22
  SPEAKER_00: I think I want to do work that I'm proud of, and I want to be, you know, happy and fulfilled with uh, you know, my personal life.
• 56:29
  SPEAKER_00: And so those two things can sometimes be intention, is you know, the drive to improve and work on things is you know, it's not the same as taking a vacation, but I think they're more harmonious than just trying to make a lot of money or achieve, you know, outside symbols of status and recognition.
• 56:46
  SPEAKER_01: Great.
• 56:48
  SPEAKER_01: Uh fantastic answer, especially the fact that you're talking about fulfillment and something that you're proud to what uh you're proud of what you are doing.
• 56:57
  SPEAKER_01: I think these are two signs of success.
• 56:59
  SPEAKER_01: I think these are key points that I'm picking up.
• 57:02
  SPEAKER_01: Uh if you were to uh advise an 18-year-old in a university today, uh what's one piece of advice that you would give them?
• 57:13
  SPEAKER_00: I think I think one thing that I would try to encourage someone who is uh, and it depends on the person, but I think who would I encourage someone who is maybe listening to this podcast who is interested and has the mastery mindset and has ambitions is to try to do work on um work on challenging projects that you're excited about.
• 57:35
  SPEAKER_00: I think you need to have both.
• 57:36
  SPEAKER_00: I need it needs to be things that you're excited about.
• 57:38
  SPEAKER_00: It can't be chores that have been assigned to you because just grinding through a lot of drudgery, it's not really a good indicator of your potential.
• 57:47
  SPEAKER_00: But at the same time, I think taking on challenging projects when you're young and when you have the capacity to work on things, when you're as smart as you're gonna be, when you have the most free time that you're gonna have, I think it really sets you up for things.
• 58:01
  SPEAKER_00: And so when I when I think about myself, I'm very grateful that I did take on challenges when I was in that position, when I didn't have kids, when I had the ability to like prove myself.
• 58:10
  SPEAKER_00: But also when I see other people, I I, you know, I can't stress that enough that, you know, the people who are just doing things that are hard and interesting to them, they're the people who, even if that project itself turns out to be a total waste of time, they end up going on to do good things.
• 58:25
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas the person who is like, you know what, how do I get the easy A in the class and not work too hard?
• 58:31
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I mean, they're gonna have a harder time later.
• 58:34
  SPEAKER_00: Or the opposite, people who are just doing what they're told that's like maximizing drudgery.
• 58:39
  SPEAKER_00: I think those people also turn out to underperform later.
• 58:43
  SPEAKER_01: Brilliant.
• 58:44
  SPEAKER_01: Maximizing drudgery is a great uh you know takeaway for me.
• 58:48
  SPEAKER_01: And uh I think that's very interesting.
• 58:51
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, what's uh one piece of advice uh that stays with you even today?
• 58:56
  SPEAKER_01: You may have got lots, but uh, what's one piece of advice over these years that you got that stays with you even today?
• 59:04
  SPEAKER_01: Which you value very much?
• 59:06
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not sure I'm gonna be able to articulate it very well because it's more a feeling than uh than a piece of advice, but the idea that um you are in charge of your own life and you can do whatever you want to do.
• 59:17
  SPEAKER_00: And I think this is something, you know, I don't want to be uh too stereotypical here, but especially in like more traditional cultures like in India, where there is a strong familial pressure, there's a strong pressure from society to conform to certain things.
• 59:32
  SPEAKER_00: I think this idea that, you know, this you are the captain of your own ship and you are the one steering it is really important because of how important, you know, it's not about performance, about mastery, it's not, it's about that personal agency that, like, if you're gonna achieve goals, you are gonna be the one to do them.
• 59:48
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think sometimes, especially when we're buffeted from outside forces, there's a real tendency to look at all these constraints, look at all these things impinging on us, and feel kind of like, well, I don't have a choice.
• 1:00:02
  SPEAKER_00: And I think the more that you can take agency of like, well, those things exist, but I'm still charting my course in and around them, um, is is so important.
• 1:00:11
  SPEAKER_00: And so the first time that I kind of got exposed to that philosophy, I think it really was a an inflection point for me, and and it would be the advice or the attitude I would like to instill in anyone else.
• 1:00:23
  SPEAKER_01: Great.
• 1:00:24
  SPEAKER_01: Uh imagine if uh you want to have a dream dinner with uh you know a couple of people that uh you would like to uh chat and learn from them, who would they be and why?
• 1:00:39
  SPEAKER_00: Well, if I can pick anyone through any period of time, I like the like living and dead category.
• 1:00:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um, if if we're having a fantasy dinner, then I would like to have a dinner with um yeah, Richard Feynman, um, John Anderson, the cognitive psychologist, and hmm, maybe uh those are the two that are coming to mind right now, so I'll I'll leave it at that.
• 1:01:05
  SPEAKER_00: There's probably a dozen more, but uh selecting it down to a manageable guest list would be hard.
• 1:01:11
  SPEAKER_01: And why?
• 1:01:12
  SPEAKER_01: And why?
• 1:01:13
  SPEAKER_00: Well, Richard Feynman just inspires me because I feel like his attitude and approach to life and learning like has been the major inspiration for my life.
• 1:01:21
  SPEAKER_00: Like, I mean, this is someone who was not only incredibly accomplished, won a Nobel Prize in Physics, but had a very deep appreciation of learning and understanding things that has stuck with me to this day.
• 1:01:32
  SPEAKER_00: And uh John Anderson, because I feel like he's probably the smartest uh psychologist that I've ever encountered upon reading, and has the deepest and most thorough appreciation for how the mind works, and I would I would love to just chat with him because I feel like you know, compared to him, everyone else is uh is a specialist, he's the true, you know, um expert among experts there.
• 1:01:56
  SPEAKER_01: Great.
• 1:01:57
  SPEAKER_01: And uh my last question for you, Scott, uh in this conversation is uh what's one thing that you believe in that uh others don't agree with you?
• 1:02:08
  SPEAKER_00: Oh um.
• 1:02:14
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, this is a little it's gonna sound a little trite, and I mean obviously other people do believe in it, but I think the idea that anyone can learn anything, I think is not widely held, and I I hold it deeply that I think that if you can break things down enough and you can put in the effort, then anyone can learn anything.
• 1:02:32
  SPEAKER_00: I think um a lot of people believe that there's like hard mental limits on some people acquiring some skills, and I just don't think those exist.
• 1:02:40
  SPEAKER_00: I don't mean that some people won't learn things faster or have an easier time at things, I just mean the potential is there.
• 1:02:47
  SPEAKER_01: Great.
• 1:02:48
  SPEAKER_01: So thanks a lot, Scott, for your time and uh all the very best uh for the success of this fantastic book.
• 1:02:55
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you so much.
• 1:02:55
  SPEAKER_01: I loved uh I loved reading it, and I'm sure uh you know in this part of the world it's going to get a lot of response, and uh I'm happy that uh I've been able to talk to you on this uh new book that you're uh you're just uh getting it out, and uh all the very best, and thanks a lot for your time.
• 1:03:13
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, thank you so much for having me.
• 1:03:16
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks for listening to this episode.
• 1:03:19
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