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Welcome to Stand Up to Stand Out, the podcast.

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Helping you master how you communicate.

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Let’s dive in.

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I am delighted to have Wall Street Journal bestselling author Scott H. Young.

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He has written a book called Ultra Learning and many, many books.

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Unbelievably prolific on his blog.

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You should absolutely check that out and we’ll have links in the notes.

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He also has courses that he does regularly, like Rapid Learner and others, and just unbelievably prolific about learning and skill development and leadership and all kinds of themes.

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I’m missing a lot from the website, but we’ll dive into it today.

00:44-00:55
Scott, I have probably a million questions, but I’m going to try to whittle it down to my focus area, which is how do I help people build skills in an area that it’s hard to replicate reality?

00:56-01:25
which is sometimes people getting into conversations or presentations where they’re stressing out or where they’re really kind of in a high stakes situation. And from my background, I just did comedy for years. So I had baptism by fire. So I was always exposed to these uncomfortable situations, but for a lot of my clients in the professional sphere, they don’t have that. So I guess I want to start right in the middle of it, which is on something that I know you talk a lot about, which is skill development.

01:26-01:37
And then how we can get better at it is specifically around like building these skills and then replicating reality in a way that is meaningful for execution.

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Did I deliver any kind of question there?

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All right.

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Yeah, yeah.

01:41-01:41
No, you know what?

01:41-01:49
I’m actually going to, for the first question, I’m going to start off on a detour because I think what you raised is a really important point.

01:49-01:57
And I think this is an important distinction, because often when you talk about learning or skill development, we use like kind of broad terms like, oh, I want to get better at this.

01:57-01:59
And then sometimes when you talk to people, get a little bit different.

02:01-02:05
The thing they’re trying to get better at, it’s not always the same thing.

02:05-02:11
And so what you were talking about right there, I thought was a really good case in point that dealing with high stakes, uncomfortable situations.

02:11-02:14
So, you know, you’re dealing with a business negotiation, you’re giving a very important speech.

02:15-02:19
And there’s a skill like the way I would use the word skill more narrowly.

02:19-02:24
There is a skill component there of like being a proficient speaker, you know, having good timing for your jokes.

02:25-02:26
These are the kind of skill components of it.

02:27-02:30
But a lot of communication skills is what you said is like it’s being comfortable.

02:31-02:38
So I mean, you could you could listen to this right now and critique my ability to be a good podcast guest and speak articulately.

02:38-02:42
But part of it is also like, you know, do I have sweaty palms?

02:42-02:44
I’m like freaking out right now or am I relaxed?

02:44-02:52
And in many social situations, if we’re trying to build social skills, really it’s the emotional component rather than the skill component that predominates.

02:52-03:04
Like to be a good public speaker or to be an OK public speaker, I guess, is like 80% being just comfortable on the stage and maybe only like 20%, you know, being like really good delivery and stuff.

03:04-03:05
Like there’s definitely a skill there.

03:06-03:10
But I think the the being comfortable is the part that most people have difficulty with.

03:11-03:18
And so this is something that I think, you know, there’s a whole set of research on like how we develop skills and the brain systems involved.

03:19-03:57
But there’s a completely different set of like principles and brain systems that are involved with fear and anxiety and emotions. So I just actually finished writing a book, it’s going to be out in May, called Get Better at Anything. And I have a whole chapter where I’m digging in like, the research on anxiety and fears and things because it’s so relevant to, you know, skills like public speaking and this kind of thing. And one of the key findings is just that exposure, the ability to like be exposed to the situation, independently of like getting better at it, just exposure to the situation and not having like complete disastrous things happening, really awful things happening, it reduces your fear response.

03:57-04:07
And this has been one of like the most robust findings over the last like century really is just that having this exposure is so important for being able to overcome your anxiety.

04:08-04:13
And so, you know, if you were to ask someone, okay, well, what’s the best way to get good at public speaking?

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I would say you need to find a way to get yourself on stage enough times in the situation that kind of scares you so that you can bring down your level of anxiety.

04:21-04:31
So the best thing I’ve found for learning public speaking in this case is an organization like Toastmasters, where you can give like really low stakes speeches, you know, multiple times a week.

04:31-04:34
And it turns out that if you do this repeatedly, you’ll lower your anxiety.

04:34-04:36
Now, it’s different for different skills.

04:36-04:42
Like we were talking about like negotiations or if you’re doing some kind of high stakes thing, you know, you can do these little mock interviews.

04:42-04:46
You can do these little mock situations and those will help.

04:46-04:52
They’re not as good as being in the real real thing, the real situation, but they will help with that kind of emotional response.

04:53-05:02
But, you know, just to go back to the original point, I think it’s very important to understand what it is you’re actually trying to get good at, what it is that you are finding your obstacle is.

05:02-05:06
Is it actually a skill or is it like I just need to be more comfortable doing this?

05:06-05:10
So that is, I think, an important distinction to make, even just at the outset of what you’re trying to improve.

05:11-06:16
I agree. And, you know, there’s a distinction that you made early in that excellent response, which when I read Daniel Coyle’s book, I think it’s 52 ways to get better at anything. He’s the guy who wrote culture code and the talent code. So one of the things he distinguishes is between hard skills, which is like a golf swing or a solid tennis swing. But also you could actually chalk that up to the act of speaking. That’s actually a hard skill that you can, you know, here I am enunciating here I am stringing a sentence together the soft skills he categorizes with the three r’s uh first is reading the situation second is recognizing patterns and then third he calls it reacting but I actually replace that with responding because responding feels like you’re more in control reacting feels almost sort of impulsive but either way it’s read uh read recognize and then respond. Okay. So now to go back into the emotion component, I think you’re absolutely right. You said 80% is around managing the emotional component.

06:16-06:21
Well, that’s made up, but yes, of course. Yeah, no, it’s 81.6%. Right, right. Exactly.

06:22-06:51
What you’re saying is the large part is managing emotions. And I tend to agree. I’ve done this for over two decades, getting your emotional state correct, uh, and in the right place. Here’s the challenge is that for any skill, if you look at this book that you’ve written or skill development books, it seems like the common thinking is how do I get much better at something much more quickly or with less effort or with deliberate practice to use that Anders Ericsson kind of concept.

06:51-07:56
And the challenge that I have found is how can I synthesize a reality that is stressful and feels dialed in with the emotional resonance of the reality. For example, if I’m negotiating a multi-billion dollar contract, I can’t always just go up and negotiate a coupon at my local pizza shop and say, okay, now I’m primed and ready for negotiating in a high stakes. How does one bring that high sense of drama to practicing and getting that comfort level and that emotional resonance dialed in. Yeah. I mean, I, I think this is, this is also something that’s a little bit outside of my expertise. I feel like the, the main advice that I usually have for people in these kinds of situations is you’re going to try to find something that is in the similar vein of what you’re trying to do. But of course there are certain events in life that you can’t simulate that you’re, you’re only going to do them once, or they’re only going to come up at, in a very specific time. And they are going to be much more stressful than anything else that you’ve experienced.

07:57-08:02
So, you know, like the Olympic athlete who’s doing the gold medal race is going to have high tension.

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And there’s a certain sense which you can’t simulate all of that.

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And I think in those situations, you can’t just get rid of your anxiety.

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You’re not going to be in a position where, you know, in this particular high stakes event, you’re going to just be cool as a cucumber.

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And maybe you don’t want to be.

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But in those situations, I think if you’ve rehearsed appropriately and you’ve built kind of a certain amount of automaticity in the situation where you’ve built like enough practice, you’ve done it a lot of times, then you just have to learn, I think, psychologically to deal with that high anxiety, high arousal state and just go through the motion.

08:37-09:06
So I think, you know, with athletes, the big thing you want to avoid is having them overthink their performance, right? Because you don’t have as much mental bandwidth when you’re in a highly anxious or highly around state. And you do have sort of skills or patterns that maybe you’ve rehearsed many, many, many, many times that are going to run on autopilot. They’re going to run without that much thinking. And they’re probably going to be better than what you can kind of like improvise or override in the moment.

09:07-09:18
And so I think in that kind of situation where you are dealing with something that’s going to be very high stakes, the repetition in the practice is so important because you want that to be able to fall back on.

09:18-09:36
So if I’m going to give a speech and I know it’s going to be in a situation where it’s going to be stressful or this kind of thing, if I know that I have rehearsed the speech enough that I could black out consciously and still utter the entire speech, then I’m not going to be as worried as if it’s sort of like, well, I know I’m going to sort of talk about this.

09:36-09:38
And then you get on stage and you panic. Right.

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And so I think that is one way of dealing with it.

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But I mean, the idea is not that we should always eliminate our emotions, but even just to recognize, OK, this is going to be a stressful situation.

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What is that going to do to my cognitive performance?

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You know, it’s going to be in a situation where it’s going to be harder to improvise.

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It’s going to be harder to think things up.

09:59-10:04
So having things more rehearsed, having things more prepared, you know, athletes do a lot of visualization too.

10:04-10:15
I mean, visualization is not going to be the same as the real thing, but there is some sense that if you visualize something, you are going to control the situation when you’re there.

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An example I can think of myself is that when I turned 30, I went bungee jumping and I am like naturally very scared of heights.

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I’m the kind of person that like when I’m like near a side of a building, it’s like, oh, okay.

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And, but I wanted to do this.

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And I was thinking, okay, I’m going to do this.

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And I remember in my head, just kind of like going through, like, you know, in the week or two leading up to just like visualizing this, like, okay, I’m going to stand there.

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And I’m just going to jump.

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I’m going to stand there.

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I’m going to just jump.

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And the funny thing was, is that like, when you go there, there is a moment where the very natural instinct would be to freeze up because, you know, your body’s telling you don’t do this.

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Don’t jump off of this suspension bridge that you’re hanging over.

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This is going to lead to a very bad time.

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But because I’d rehearsed enough, that wasn’t where I froze up.

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I just went through it.

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And then when I was dropping, there was the concomitant panic.

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But in this moment, there was nothing that I could do prior to doing the bungee jump that would have made it like, oh, well, I’m totally confident and relaxed doing this.

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But if you prepare yourself enough, then even in a high arousal state, you can still deliver. And I think this is something that elite athletes and people who must perform under really high intensity situations is regularly what they’re doing is that by having that practice component, having the sort of fundamental skills, um, mastered in this sort of previous situation, then, you know, when you, you know, the, the vision goes down to that little point, you, you sort of rely back on that sort of automatic habits and, and rehearsed practice. So it’s an excellent example. And as I’m thinking about it, you know, sometimes the, the simplicity of looking at athletes in a game, let’s, let’s think of a baseball batter, right? So they’re at the plate, they’re in a very specific spot. The strike zone has a very specific measurement. Um, the, the mound is a certain number of feet from the strike zone.

12:15-13:10
So all of these variables are fixed. And then you’ve got a bat that’s regulated. You’ve got all of these things that sort of have so what i’m saying is you can eliminate a lot of variables and then focus on your swing and all of that and what i found is that sometimes you have to apply a similar methodology around presenting or negotiating or being in the moment so that you can fall back on your training and have an open question summarizing back but of course like any good athlete, you can’t just show your hand. This is the script I’m following. And it shouldn’t be a script. It’s more like a step or a formula. So I feel like the more people can recognize, okay, I’m in this type of situation. And these are the simple skills that I’m going to fall back on to support me. I think that can be helpful to get through that situation successfully.

13:10-16:38
Well, I mean, we’re even talking of right now in this podcast, and I can say, uh, I’ve done quite a few interviews. And so having this conversation doesn’t stress me out. But when I was, you know, when I just finished writing my book, I’d been only maybe on one or two podcasts, the idea of like, okay, I’ve got to talk about this, kind of made me a little bit nervous. And so I had kind of like stories, little like bits or things like that, that I kind of already sort of worked through in advance. It’s like, okay, well, I’ll talk about this, or I’ll talk about that. Now, I don’t need those now in part because it feels pretty natural to me to have this conversation with you. But I think that idea of like relying a little bit more on fixed patterns when you are in a, I don’t even say an anxious state, let’s call it like a high arousal state, like a high general arousal state, like a very alert state is a kind of good pattern to flow by because basically the cognitive science of it is that we have this thing called working memory. This is like storing the contents of our consciousness. And this bandwidth, when you are anxious, or you’re worried, it tends to be your attention has to be a more narrow focus. So there’s maybe some intruding thoughts, maybe there’s some worries that are kind of impulsively like, Oh, my God, what do they think about this? Or am I sweating too much? Or this kind of stuff is coming up, that is crowding out some of the space for work. But the basic idea is that when you are in a higher arousal state, more complicated tasks, things where you have to do more serious problem solving, more reflective thinking, where you have to do complicated reasoning tend to be more difficult. And so this is just a trade off of our human nervous system that when you’re in a high arousal state, it’s sort of priming you for very focused, direct action and not for, you know, musing. If a tiger is going to jump out at you from the bushes, you need to make actions and moves now relevant to the tiger. You can’t be like, what do I want for dinner tonight? And so, so this is a very adaptive hardwiring. But I think if you know that that’s what’s going to happen, then you can plan for it. And we have already talked about how, you know, if you do have the opportunity to get exposure in, it doesn’t have to be exactly the same situation, but in similar situations, you can lessen the anxiety. It’s probably not going to go away exactly until you’re actually doing the real thing. But this is how, you know, if, if I’ve done, you know, dozens of these interviews, and they’ve, you know, I haven’t been totally humiliated after each one, like they’ve gone fairly well, then just my baseline level of arousal alertness in doing them is going to go down, and it’s easier for me to improvise. And so you see that even with like, college professors who maybe they would have relied on a script when they’re giving their first class to an auditorium of 300 freshmen students. And then you know, 20-30 years down, they can just go there and talk, not only because they’ve mastered the material and they’ve given enough speeches that they’ve built these automatic components of communication skills, but also because, you know, just speaking in front of a big auditorium full of students just doesn’t, it doesn’t raise their general arousal level that much, even though the same person, if you ask them to like, I don’t know, give a, give an elevator pitch or something for a business idea, they might panic again. So I think this is a is an important concept. If like if you know you’re going to be in a high arousal state, you know that your attention is going to be more narrowly focused, you’re going to be less able to handle complex tasks. So the more you can kind of prepare and offload some of that, the more you can rely on your training, you can rely on the things that you practiced.

16:39-17:21
But that’s not, you know, universal for those skills. If as you get better, you can improvise more, you can be a little bit more spontaneous, just because you don’t have to manage the um the high arousal level yeah and two things about that one I find that you’re right if you have these moments that whether it’s your opening or in the middle or at the end you have a more of a practiced set way of delivering it whether it’s a 30 second script or I often tell people get your opening crisp and right and land it um in a very clear and concise way and then you can just mirror that at the closing and people will think you’re a genius because it has this cohesion to it.

17:21-17:30
And you’ve had a small investment of time and energy for a larger benefit overall, because people will retain that a little bit better, especially if you’re doing it throughout.

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Yeah.

17:31-17:45
The second thing though, and it never occurred to me until this conversation was ensuring that you have the right level of stimulus to deliver the content in a meaningful way, because we’ve also seen those college professors who have just, they’re snoring through the material.

17:46-17:58
Yeah. Well, they’re so low arousal. They’re so like, you know, speaking to 300 students is such a mundane activity for them that they’re no longer a good speaker.

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They’re not even so that’s true of athletes as well.

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Like you want to be if you’re in a big tennis game, especially a sport which requires some thinking or something, you want to have enough arousal that you are focused and alert, not so much stress that you start choking or having these difficulties.

18:15-19:04
But you also don’t want to be the opposite thing where you’re just like, you’re drowsy and you’re sleepy and you’re kind of like, oh yeah, whoa, I guess I missed that one. Like, I think that’s also not good for performance. So there’s often an optimal level of arousal. I just bring this up because, you know, in the situations where people do have a lot of anticipatory anxiety about this particular event that they’re going to do, it’s usually the case that they’re worried that the arousal level is going to be too high, that like they’re going to stand on stage and it’s going to be like, oh, I am like full sweat. I’m panicked. My heart is, you know, know, like I just sprinting right now and I still have to be like witty and funny and not appear like I’m, you know, floundering up there. Right. And I tell people, you know, your job is to, when you’re up there, it’s to land the plane, you’re in the air and you’re the pilot of this presentation. You got to get on the tarmac with your answers or whatever it would be.

19:04-19:11
Yeah. Um, all right. So I, something that I’ve been thinking about since I heard about this book is deliberate practice.

19:12-19:14
There’s a book called Peak, I think, by Anders Ericsson.

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And there’s a lot of research that came out from almost 20 years ago, if memory serves.

19:20-19:22
And I know you talked a lot about this.

19:22-19:26
I kind of weave it into this concept of meta-learning, sort of learning how to learn.

19:27-19:36
You know, I guess what I’m curious about in your experience is where does deliberate practice tend to work like wonders or from what you’ve seen?

19:36-19:47
And where is the impact maybe a little more muted or inconclusive specifically around these soft skills, communication skills?

19:48-19:53
Right. So, I mean, I think it’s important to talk about what deliberate practice is.

19:54-19:59
And I think it’s also important to give the background context that like deliberate practice was an academic theory.

19:59-20:07
Right. So sometimes when we talk about things in an applied or practical context, it’s like, oh, well, you know, I need to do deliberate practice right now.

20:08-20:12
Maybe that’s not so helpful because the theory was built to explain certain things.

20:12-20:31
So in my impression from Anders Ericsson’s body of work is that the idea of deliberate practice was that a certain form of basically the kind of practice that musicians do in like with a coach where they’re like getting them to repeat the particular piece and play it faster and play it more accurately.

20:31-20:50
they’re getting feedback, the kind of thing that we, you know, you can see across competitive domains, you can see it in music, you can see it in athletics, you can see it in chess players who are, you know, doing their chess study, and they’re like working with another grandmaster to work on like, well, this is going to be my opening when they do the Berlin defense or whatever, right?

20:52-21:00
This is what deliberate practice, the argument was that it’s large quantities of this kind of practice that result in sort of world-class performance.

21:01-21:08
And so I think there is lots and lots of nuances there in terms of like what it is that you’re actually doing, right?

21:08-21:16
Like the deliberate practice for a chess grandmaster is going to look different than, you know, for a sprinter, right?

21:16-21:18
There’s different processes involved.

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And so, you know, the question of like, what is most effective and when I think really depends on, well, what is the nature of the skill you’re looking at?

21:26-21:35
I think the main idea of Deliver Practice is that having focused practice sessions removed from the constraints of actual performance.

21:35-21:44
So, you know, if you want to be a really good speaker, this means giving speeches where, you know, this is not the speech that you’re giving for work.

21:44-21:48
This is like at Toastmasters or this is at some kind of rehearsal situation.

21:49-21:51
You’re getting some kind of feedback on your performance.

21:52-21:53
You are getting some coaching.

21:53-21:56
So you’re having someone who’s like watching you and telling you what you should be doing.

21:57-22:00
And there’s some attention played to some aspects of your performance.

22:00-22:01
So you’re up on stage.

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You’re like, you know what?

22:02-22:08
I’m going to really work on mastering the kind of spatial component of my delivery.

22:09-22:11
Because some people like stay in a box and, you know, they don’t move.

22:12-22:16
And it’s more natural if you are also maybe using your body.

22:16-22:18
And, you know, there’s lots of different ways you could do this.

22:18-22:23
But, you know, even just like you’re moving depending on how what you’re talking about as you move into points.

22:23-22:42
as you move out of points, as you tell stories and this kind of thing. So the idea is that there’s lots of things going on in your performance of that speech. The attention paid to a specific element of the thing is going to give you more cognitive resources to be like, okay, this is how I’m going to move my hands. And this is how I’m going to work on delivering this speech.

22:43-23:48
And then combined with the feedback and coaching, this is going to make, you know, sort of small improvements in your ability, which are going to accumulate over time. So that’s how I sort of take the deliberate practice theory i mean i think there’s but as i said like there’s lots of different aspects to learning so it depends on kind of what you’re talking about like we’re talking about well my main bottleneck for speaking is the anxiety i feel when i’m speaking then maybe what you need is not like this kind of coaching intensive practice but just like stage time so that you can get the exposure and reduce your anxiety levels if we’re talking about you know uh a subject that you don’t anything about, then maybe just like sitting and watching lectures is actually like an effective way of like getting the background knowledge. So learning is a complicated activity. There’s like many different factors, but I think the original theory’s value was was largely in this idea that, you know, practice matters a lot and the right kind of practice matters a lot and that it can be used to explain differences in performance that are frequently, you know, explained in terms of talent or underlying ability.

23:54-26:44
yeah it’s super interesting because as you’re speaking it reminds me of you know when i was first doing a lot of public speaking my coach who was a trained playwright but also performer was said focus on one thing that you want to improve whether it was pauses or you know your presence or just your eye contact and it allowed you to also be deliberate around it but it also allowed for quick wins in real time that would then build confidence to then possibly add the second and third. Multiple exposures helps. But I think what I’m understanding here, because I have a mindset management plan or anxiety management plan that some people have called it, where you hit all of the components from different angles. So for example, if there’s anxiety, this is one way to do it is to manage your breathing, focus on calming down, holding a cold cup of water. If you have sweaty palms or a hot cup of cotter, if you have a hot cup of coffee, if you have, you know, so basically approaching it physiologically, approaching it mentally, psychologically and saying, what am I here to do? How am I here to help? And so my point is you can sort of stretch out your perspective and then use that to probably zero in on one aspect that you want to deliberately focus on, if I’m using that correctly. And then you can make some meaningful progress towards that and then possibly add the second goal or shift your perspective. Yeah. I mean, I think one of the other lessons or findings, I guess you’d say of deliberate practice is that just doing something a lot is not sufficient to ensure that you become really good at it. And I think this is even been sort of mirrored in some of the debates that Anders Ericsson had against kind of detractors of his theory. I know there was a paper by McNamara and others where they were kind of saying, well, look, if you look at the variance of outcomes that are explained by deliberate practice, like quantities of what they were calling deliberate practice, they can be quite small. So you could like for chess players, it was like only like 30 percent. And for professionals, it was like even one percent, which, you know, draws on questions of whether this is a valid academic theory. But you know, I am somewhat partial to Erickson’s reply to those criticisms, which was that, yes, but the whole idea of the theory is that it’s only certain kinds of practice that count. And just doing something a lot, and especially if you have these really like, unrefined metrics of like how much someone’s doing something a lot is not a good indicator, it’s not very predictive of how well you’ll perform. And so there’s, there are sort of, I think there was a study about students in studying time, and it was finding that like gross number of hours you spend studying is not that predictive of like how well you’ll perform.

26:44-26:59
But it’s partly because you can do a lot of activities that just don’t result in that much improvement. And so I think with what Erickson was kind of focusing on, which was this sort of elite performance, which is dealing with a phase of learning that goes beyond the beginner phase.

26:59-27:09
So we’re not talking about someone who I’ve never given a speech before. What am I doing to get good good at speaking, but someone who I’ve been speaking for 10 years, but I’m not world class.

27:10-27:58
What is the difference between the person who’s been speaking for 10 years and they’re spectacular versus the person who’s just mediocre? And in those cases, part of the difficulty is that so much of our performance, again, going back to this rehearsal, to this automaticity, it’s stuff you’re doing without even realizing it. It’s stuff you’re doing without conscious, deliberate control. But that also means that if it’s ineffective, if what you’re doing is not the best way to do it, you’re kind of unaware of it. And so that’s why you need the coaching. That’s why you need the feedback. That’s why you need the practice, which focuses in on that particular element, because otherwise it’s invisible to you. So, I mean, I mean, I’m sure people are listening to this right now could probably pick up things that maybe I’m doing is like, oh, he’s doing this and that’s bugging me. He’s talking too fast or he’s using some jargon and doing things like this.

27:58-27:59
But for me, it’s invisible, right?

28:00-28:02
I’m just focusing on what I’m trying to say to you right now.

28:03-28:09
So if I wanted to be a better podcast guest, I’d have to have someone listen to my podcast, be like, you know what?

28:09-28:11
You’re talking a bit too fast.

28:11-28:12
You need to like work on your pausing.

28:12-28:18
And then I’d have to have, you know, interviews, maybe mock interviews, maybe not even ones that are going to be recorded where I’m working on my pausing.

28:19-28:21
And then I’m getting some feedback and be like, you know what?

28:21-28:22
Watch that again.

28:22-28:23
Like, see what you did there.

28:23-28:24
Did you pause enough there?

28:25-29:02
And so this deliberate component of it is the bringing something that’s unconscious back into the conscious awareness, back into that little narrow window of attention so that you can potentially at least select a better response. And this is hard to do and there’s lots of complications to it. But I think that general idea that if you just do something over and over and over again, you’re going to get better. It’s going to get more and more fluent. It’s going to be something that’s going to get easier and easier for you to do. But if the way to get better is to sort of resist a tempting impulse, then then more and more practice is it going to help at all.

29:03-29:38
And I think the best example we can all think of is driving like how many of us you know, if you drive your car on a daily basis, I’m assuming that a lot of people who are listening to this do, it’s probably pretty autopilot for you can listen to a podcast, you listen to the radio, you know, sometimes you just start driving toward work and you’re actually going to a different destination and you take the wrong turn off because it’s so automatic. You weren’t even paying attention to the directions you’re driving. Nevermind like how you’re pressing, depressing the gas pedal, moving the steering wheel. But despite years of driving, like most of us are not race car drivers. Most of us are not like at the pinnacle that we could achieve of driving skill.

29:39-30:17
And that’s just because whatever decisions we’re making, however, the kind of cognitive processes that we’re going through that are involved in driving are just so automated. They’re so fluent by now that they’re invisible. We don’t pay attention to them. And so Erickson’s sort of deliberate practice idea is that it’s actually the performer who’s in that situation, the person who has such a well-automated portfolio, that they need the deliberate practice to like surface some element of their performance that is not optimal and deliberately change it. And so I think, I think that’s where the deliberate practice idea applies. So this whole idea we were talking about at the beginning about like the person who give is given like four speeches in the last decade.

30:17-30:21
And they have like panic attacks on stage. Like this person doesn’t need deliberate practice.

30:21-31:47
They just need to be on stage more, but it’s because the, the, you know, the purpose of the theory was very different. I think. Well, there’s levels to it. It reminds me because oftentimes I design training curriculums and I think of this training curriculum that I went through 20 years ago, getting ready for a marathon. And I remember first you, you joined this nonprofit. I was at a school at the time. So you get community, then they kind of get you into the mindset of what you’re trying to do. And then they start with five Ks, then 10 Ks. Then you get the half marathons a few times, and then you get an 18 miler and then eventually you trend your way up to a marathon. But the thing is you’re a very different person throughout this process and the feedback you need changes, the improvements you need change, the mindset changes, your nutrition changes. So in some ways, I think we tend to oversimplify what it takes to really master a skill. And I feel like you have to constantly change the environment, change the goals, change your perspective, and then use a process to bring in outside variables, outside perspective, internal journey. I mean, it really, it can feel complex, but it, it, for me, the best analogy would be that preparation for the marathon because it’s a big audacious goal, but you start with these small deliberate steps and then you change along the way and you change your protocols.

31:48-32:09
I mean, this is, this is huge. This is like a major, major component of skill development improvement is that like the thing that you need to get to the next level is very often not the thing you needed to get to the level you’re at right now. And I’m gonna, I’m gonna maybe make mistake of the name, but I believe it was Crombach and Snow who I think it was in the 1970s.

32:10-32:38
So I was going to have to correct my citations here, but they made a big point that, you know, part of the thing that makes studying learning so difficult is that something that’s going to be effective for someone at a particular level will turn out to actually be maybe not effective or even actively harmful at a later level. And so this really overcomplicates things, because if it was just like, you know, nutritional advice, like, well, everyone should, you know, eat their veggies, right?

32:39-32:39
That’s good advice.

32:39-32:41
Okay, everyone eat their veggies now.

32:41-32:45
But if it’s like, well, no, no, no, you should eat your veggies if you’re in this particular situation.

32:46-32:48
But if you eat your veggies in that situation, it’s going to be bad.

32:48-32:49
Then you’re going to have problems.

32:49-32:55
And the issue is that learning is this accumulation of knowledge and procedures and skill.

32:55-32:57
Lots of things are happening in the brain.

32:57-33:02
But the thing that you need at the very beginning stage is not going to be what you need at the later stage.

33:02-33:15
And sometimes where people struggle is that they found something that works for them at a at a particular stage that like this is what got them through some difficulty, but then they’re not able to let go of it when they need to get to the next level.

33:16-33:19
You know, I’ll use an example for me, which has been language learning.

33:20-33:25
Now, I have I’ve learned a couple languages and to varying levels of ability.

33:26-34:38
And one of the things that I found extremely helpful at their very early stages of learning language was having lots of like simple conversation practice, which tends to be undersupplied. You know, most people who are doing language learning on their own, they’re going to be on Duolingo, they’re going to be doing this kind of thing, they’re not having those conversations. And the conversations quickly build fluency in sort of the basic patterns of conversational pattern, which, you know, is not the entirety of the language, but it’s a very important component. And so if you are doing a sort of an immersive process where you’re speaking every single day for long periods of time, you can actually get to a decent level of ability in a lot of languages in a time period that seems really, really short. However, speaking and having conversations is just a sort of limited part of our linguistic repertoire. And so if you are trying to get to a more advanced level, then just having more and more conversations is actually probably pretty inefficient and that you actually need to be like reading books or writing essays or doing something else. And so I think, again, this, this difficulty is that often the way that we are approaching learning is we’re just trying out different activities at random. And then sometimes one we hit upon and like, ah, this works, this works. I’m getting better. I’m getting better.

34:39-34:47
But then once you get to that level of diminishing returns, you need to move to something else, but it’s not clear what you need to do. And so I think this is just a general property of learning.

34:47-34:57
And that’s why having a coach, that’s why having people who have been through the whole process, who can kind of like be like, well, for where you are, you need to be doing this, uh, is often very beneficial.

34:58-35:07
What you just said that where you are, you need to be doing this is so critical because I think about what happens with like, you know, I play drums or played tennis.

35:07-35:19
And what happens when I don’t play for a while is I go back to basics, but probably not in a way that’s helpful for me because I do it out of rote memorization, but not because it’s going to serve me well.

35:19-35:43
I think it’s occurred to me over the last few years as I work with a lot of people trying to assess where they are, trying to quickly assess their level, their skill, their comfort, their desire, their motivation, and then sort of quickly size them up and say, okay, if life is a mountain, you’re at base camp or you’re almost at the peak, like, where are you and where do you want to go?

35:43-36:00
And I know that’s been oversaid a million times, but I think that art and science of quickly figuring out who they are, where they are, what they want is critical to getting them quickly to the next level because it’s so different for person A versus person B.

36:00-36:21
Yeah. And I mean, as I said, I think that’s the major challenge is that we get into these plateaus in our learning. And I mean, there’s a certain extent that learning plateaus naturally just as you get kind of like closer and closer to the optimal technique, closer and closer to the optimal way of doing things. It’s not the case that you can just make linear improvement forever.

36:22-36:52
but I think sometimes we get stuck at a particular level and it is just because of that it’s because whatever we were doing ceases to be particularly effective but we keep doing it and so I think again understanding principles understanding kind of you know that there’s going to be some sort of spectrum of activity that you’re going to be doing and that something that when you were starting out or when you were at the beginning level it was safe for you to ignore that or you should be ignoring that now suddenly becomes important now suddenly becomes something that you should be like paying more attention to.

36:53-36:59
You know, to use another example, like I was thinking about like drawing or we’re producing art.

37:00-37:11
And this is something that like one of the major things that beginners struggle with is that we have a hard time converting the sort of three dimensional world we perceive into just like a two dimensional picture.

37:11-37:15
And so there’s some like basic skills that get you quite a bit of the way if you can do them.

37:16-37:50
So things like being able to understand perspective, being able to sense sort of like basic lighting, this kind of stuff. But then as you as you get further, you’re going to maybe need some of the things that well, that wasn’t going to be helpful for me at the beginning. So like if you’re doing human figures or something like studying anatomy is probably not like super useful if you’re like barely able to draw stick figures. But there’s going to be a point where it matters increasingly. And so I think that’s something that that you have to factor in is that you always have to be kind of aware that what’s going to work for you or what’s going to get you to the next level is going to be shifting is going to be changing.

37:51-38:06
Yeah. And one final thing to say about that. And then I want to talk about about eight other things, but I won’t, um, was I remember when, uh, you know, I was doing a lot of whiteboarding and drawing for clients and stuff. And I realized that I was just defaulting to stick figures.

38:07-38:10
And I said, I need to stop this because I’ve been doing this for decades now.

38:10-38:12
And I actually went to a cartooning class.

38:13-38:18
And while I didn’t become some cartoonist, I didn’t want to.

38:18-38:24
I wanted to just be able to think and look at a piece of paper and not have to default to a stick figure.

38:24-38:34
And so for me, if I take that example, I think what happens for a lot of people, me included, is you tend to just see the pieces of paper in life and the stick figure.

38:34-38:37
And I don’t want to become faster or better at stick figure.

38:37-38:38
I need to see it through a new lens.

38:38-38:40
I need to look at it differently.

38:40-38:43
I need to challenge my assumptions and maybe go back to basics.

38:44-38:47
First principles thinking, what am I trying to actually do here?

38:48-38:50
And then just have someone show you a different way.

38:50-38:52
So I think that’s valuable.

38:52-39:01
Well, so one of the things that I wanted to shift to is something I’ve read about and know a little bit about, which is this Feynman technique.

39:02-39:17
So what I’ve heard over and over again, and just to give you some context, Scott, you know, A lot of times, uh, my clients deal with incredibly complex science, and then they have to be able to translate complexity for non-technical crowds.

39:17-39:26
Now this is not, they’re not unintelligent, they’re not uninformed, but when you take something that’s incredibly complex and you have to simplify it, but not oversimplify it.

39:27-39:29
So this eats up a lot of their bandwidth.

39:29-39:34
And of course, most people devolve to going deeper, getting too much information.

39:35-39:48
So I guess I’m curious what you have seen or know about simplifying complex ideas, given that a lot of what I feel like you tend to do in your writing is simplifying research or academic science or whatever.

39:49-39:51
Do you have a process that you follow to make this?

39:52-39:52
Yeah.

39:53-39:56
I don’t want to say easier, but you know, more streamlined.

39:56-39:57
Well, I think so.

39:57-40:10
I think the difficulty of trying to communicate something in which you are an expert is that take for granted how much background knowledge you need in order to be able to understand things.

40:11-41:33
And so there is a, I think, a perverse tendency to assume that the person who doesn’t understand you is like they’re less intelligent. Like it’s so obvious, but I have to explain it to you. And so you get these explanations that they’re almost condescending. They’re almost like they’re done in a way, you know, I’ve seen these university classes where they’re dealing with an incredibly complicated topic and they’re you know it’s not necessarily a problem but they’re like they’re doing it with like little cartoons or little kind of like the examples are so trite that it’s sort of like do they think I’m a child do they think the problem is that I am like a five-year-old with a low attention span and like I need to have like colorful cartoons to make sense of it I think the issue is that if you don’t have the background knowledge if you don’t have the the mental models that the person has, that when they explain something, you don’t understand it. And so the tendency is to go the other direction and to like oversimplify or dumb it down. And so I actually think like the people to study here are popular nonfiction writers, because not experts who write popular nonfiction, but like people like Malcolm Gladwell or something, for instance, because, you know, someone who has the ability to captivate and, you know, translate an idea without condescending, right?

41:33-41:38
Without having it be kind of like, okay, well, I’m going to talk to you like you’re an idiot.

41:39-41:48
And so I think when you are doing it yourself and you’re simplifying it, the big thing you have to kind of realize is like, what are the things that you would need to know to make sense of what I’m getting?

41:48-41:51
So you write out whatever your explanation you’re going to give.

41:52-41:59
And sometimes it helps to have another person look at it and be kind of like, you know, what are the things that you, I’m assuming that you already know?

42:00-42:01
And are those assumptions valid?

42:02-42:04
And sometimes as a writer, I mean, I’ve been doing this for years.

42:05-42:15
And I mean, my job is much more to convey ideas to people who are not aware of them than it is to like do any kind of analysis or or deep expert level thinking.

42:16-42:25
But even for me, having like that being my job, it’s it’s startling to me sometimes how how often I will make that mistake where I will have an assumption.

42:26-42:28
I’ll be like, well, you know what this is, right?

42:28-42:30
And then people will be like, no, I don’t know what that is.

42:30-42:32
And you’re like, oh, okay, all right.

42:32-42:34
So I can’t just assume that when I’m going forward.

42:35-42:37
And so having those little checks is important.

42:37-42:38
I mean, I have an editor.

42:38-42:41
I have someone who, like, they’ll be like, you know, you’re going to need to explain this.

42:41-42:44
Or at least if it’s an essay, like, you’re going to need a link to whatever this concept is.

42:46-42:48
Just because sometimes you take something for granted.

42:48-42:51
So, I mean, I think it can be a challenging idea.

42:51-43:00
But I think when you are working through with people on a regular basis, you start to get a little bit of a sense of, you know, how much do people know about something?

43:01-43:11
So if we’re dealing with like a concept like DNA or something like that, you know, the idea that there is a basis in a DNA is just like, well, of course, right.

43:12-43:15
But actually, a lot of people maybe aren’t that aware of that, right?

43:15-43:19
Like they’re not they’re not aware that like, you know, the way that they bind together in the middle and this kind of thing.

43:19-43:29
And we can go even further into that, you know, like when the vaccines were being rolled out and people were having mRNA vaccines, like how many people knew what mRNA was, right?

43:29-43:34
Like, I mean, yeah, I suppose that isn’t a high school biology class you’re supposed to know, but lots of people didn’t know that.

43:35-43:44
And so if you are communicating it, the idea is not that you need to take mRNA and like make it into some kind of little cutesy diagram like someone’s an idiot.

43:44-43:46
It’s just sort of like, no, you don’t know what those words stand for.

43:47-43:49
And I need to like explain it, right?

43:49-43:53
And so I think this is a skill that it does take time to develop.

43:53-44:09
But I think the main issue is realizing that the difficulty of communicating complicated ideas is that the person you’re talking to does not have your background knowledge, not that the person you’re talking to is unintelligent or unsophisticated, I think is the main takeaway.

44:10-44:43
Yeah. And I agree a hundred percent. And my analogy for excellent decoders of information are chefs, because what I feel they’re doing is they’re showing you a world that is familiar, but not always knowable. Right. And I don’t know the difference between a turnip or a Brussels sprout on the surface, but I’m, I’m interested to learn. The second, I think they have various tools. Sometimes it’s a knife. Sometimes it’s a, you know, uh, you know, a blade or a very specific blade or sometimes it’s just a big butcher knife or a spatula.

44:43-44:45
So they have different tools to access it.

44:46-44:55
And then I also feel like really good people bring a humor to it, or I shouldn’t even say humor, but a positive energy to it.

44:55-44:58
The master for me is Hans rolling has passed away.

44:58-45:21
He’s, uh, done a bunch of Ted talks, um, physician who became sort of a numbers guy or, you know, statistician, but he just brings this youthful exuberance, even in well into his sixties around it in that he felt like he was sharing like the most delicious dish with someone and wanted you to try it. And I felt like all of those really helped as well.

45:22-46:09
Well, I think having your passion for the subject is super important. And I think it’s also important to realize that if someone else is not passionate about it, I think a good sort of starting assumption is that like, you need to break it down to them so that they can understand why you are passionate about it. I think someone who is really deeply interested in what they’re talking about is almost always interesting if you can follow what they’re saying. And so the mistake people make is either they’re not explaining themselves, they’re not actually like they’re leaving lots of things out. So I don’t understand what you’re saying. So I find it boring, right? I think a lot of times students will say, oh, that class was so boring. And the reason is boring is because they’re missing all of the ingredients they need to understand what was being said and why it was important.

46:10-46:17
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read something and it’s been like, well, this is life-changing for me.

46:17-46:19
You said this, I was like, oh, it was so dry, it was so boring.

46:20-46:24
And I’m sure that’s phenomenologically what they experienced.

46:24-46:30
But to me, it’s almost certainly the case that they didn’t understand what they were reading.

46:30-46:32
The implications of it were just lost on them.

46:33-46:35
And that’s not something that they’re maybe missing.

46:35-46:37
It’s maybe that they were lacking some of the background knowledge.

46:38-46:45
And so I think that’s sort of the role you have to take if you’re going to be a communicator of ideas is you have to figure out, like, why does this excite me?

46:46-46:51
And then how do I get the other person to at least understand why it excites me, even if it’s not going to excite them?

46:51-47:00
Because if they can understand why it excites me, then they’re going to be interested, at least for the 15, 20 minutes that I’m giving a speech or a talk or what have you.

47:00-47:07
But if I can’t get to that point, if it’s sort of like, I don’t even understand why you’re interested in this, then you’re not going to have someone’s attention.

47:08-47:08
Yeah.

47:08-47:14
It reminds me of a Latin phrase that I share a lot with clients, which is in dubio abstinence.

47:14-47:16
When people are in doubt, they kind of do nothing.

47:17-47:21
And I feel like a lot of people default to, well, I’m just going to show you all the data.

47:21-47:24
And then Scott, you just draw the conclusion, right?

47:24-47:28
And oftentimes people go, I don’t have enough context.

47:28-47:30
I don’t have enough direction to draw the conclusion.

47:30-47:32
and spell it out for me.

47:33-47:39
And so I think that that comes with confidence and just owning your perception or your point of view.

47:40-47:47
And I mean, making inferences is important too because so much of what we assume is like, well, this is explicitly stated.

47:48-47:50
Like we were very explicit in making this.

47:50-47:53
So everyone who is reasonable should be able to make the proper inference.

47:55-47:58
We omit things that we’re like, well, this is the assumption.

47:58-47:58
This is the assumption.

47:59-47:59
This is the assumption.

47:59-48:06
And so things that like, well, it’s obvious that this would be the conclusion you draw from this experience are very often not obvious.

48:06-48:13
And I think that, again, that that idea that like, you know, and talking to people is a good thing.

48:13-48:34
I think if you are an expert, so if you’re not like me, if you are mostly talking to other people who are in your field, it’s you grossly overestimate how much the average person knows about your field, not because they’re dumb, but just because you’re so immersed in it, you take these things for granted that like the average person is like, wait, I don’t know what that is.

48:34-48:34
What is that?

48:35-48:46
And you get glimpses of this when you see things like, you know, if we’re talking about biology or life sciences or things like this, where you see like ridiculous conspiracy theories, which just seem so patently absurd.

48:47-48:50
Like what is the person’s mental model where they could even plausibly believe that this is true?

48:51-48:58
But it’s just because the average person just has like a very rough, there’s not that much background knowledge in your specialty.

48:59-49:04
And so when you come in and you’re sort of like, you know, here’s why CRISPR is important.

49:04-49:10
And then like, you don’t realize that like you need paragraphs of explanation to even get to the point where like, what is CRISPR?

49:10-49:11
Why is it called that?

49:11-49:12
You know what I mean?

49:12-49:13
Like these are important things.

49:14-49:20
And so I think that is something that takes some time, some honing of figuring out, well, this is general knowledge.

49:21-49:22
This is not general knowledge.

49:22-50:54
or this is what everyone’s going to know without thinking versus, well, they maybe heard this before, but they’re going to need a reminder, you know, without, without being condescending or patronizing. And that’s one thing that I think excellent communicators do. They usually tell you a story that sort of ends with the mystery that they then unpack. And so I’ve seen Gladwell do this where they’ll just pull you in with, you know, it’s a dark and stormy night and all of a popcorn. Then you end up with the mystery. And then they kind of expanded and say like, this is actually a mystery for a lot of companies and here’s how they solved it. And all of a sudden by then you’re just sold. So it’s great. Storytelling is always great. I mean, we are equipped to process stories and we think in terms of stories, but I think stories are really good because again, they set the stakes for what you’re talking about. I mean, so many times you’re dealing with like a, you know, a sort of abstract or technical point. And in order for me through all of the like why this matters I need some kind of motivating situation and so if you can give people a puzzle if you can give them something that you know that doesn’t make sense to me or or why would that be the case or I don’t understand that you know I’m more willing to be like okay all right I’ll sit explain to me what’s the what’s the moral of that right do you have you come across research around the way that brain or processes stories because I’ve found some but nothing deeply satisfying, whether it’s functionalized. I don’t know.

50:55-51:34
No, nothing. I don’t, I don’t have like, uh, that is a topic that I’ve wanted to do, uh, deeper research on. So I’m sure it exists. Uh, the economist Tyler Cowen has, um, has, uh, like three laws and the law number two is there’s a literature for everything. So anything that you think there’s some research on there, someone has done some research on it. So I’m sure there is. I know the cognitive scientist, Daniel Willingham has made the point that like stories are like psychologically privileged, like meaning that we are kind of hardwired to interpret and understand stories better than other formats of information. But I’m not aware of any of the deep resources of research that he based that claim on, although it definitely seems true to me.

51:34-53:34
I think one of the ideas is that we are kind of like all of our intellectual faculties, like all of our ability to understand science and reading and writing and math are essentially like kludges of earlier, more sophisticated evolutionary hardware. So like our ability to read letters, for instance, uses a part of the brain that we in, you know, preliterate cultures is mostly devoted to recognizing faces. So it’s this part of the brain that’s like really good at picking up visual patterns and not just visual patterns, but like the patterns in ways that if you rotate them, they’ll look different, right? Because like most objects, if you turn them around, they’ll look different. But if you get a lowercase b and a lowercase d mirror versions, different letters, right? So you have to regard them as distinct. And so this part of your brain is what gets co-opted when you learn to read, you start like funneling the images through that hardware, and it learns to recognize letters instead of just faces. And so similarly, so many of our abstract intellectual abilities are this kind of repurposing of something else. And stories are very much a part of our sort of social dynamics that have existed for, you know, very long periods of time. And so compared to things like understanding biochemistry, we have sort of modules for understanding, well, this is so-and-so and this person was related to this and they felt this, like we have these theory of mind modules, we have these kind of modules regarding causality and temporal events. So there is a certain sense that like fairly complex information can be presented in a story and remembered on the first pass, which might take a lot of repetition, a lot of practice to get it in your head if it were, you know, organic chemistry or something. I mean, how many of us can watch a movie and be like, well, I could give the approximate redux of the whole plot after watching it once, but you read a chemistry textbook and you’re like, okay, I’m going to have to do some flashcards.

53:35-54:15
Well, it’s funny. I did this experiment once where I broke a group that I was with into two, and I took the exact same letters and words. And for one, I jumbled them together. For the other, I made a very simple sentence and I told each group, you know, memorize this in 30 seconds, flip it over and then recount as much as you can. Of course, the ones who had just random letters, uh, they had trouble recalling and then the ones who had a simple phrase, it came right out. And of course, this is just my own, you know, anecdote, but it just proved to them that having something in a, in a pattern that makes sense to an audience is going to help them retain it a bit longer.

54:16-55:46
Well, this is, this is deep in psychology. Like the idea you’re talking about is related to this, idea of chunking or schemas, but basically we have through past experience and also in some cases, maybe like innate evolutionary hardwiring ways of interpreting information. And that not only filters what we are able to perceive, but also what we remember. So I think this, the kind of initial experiment that kind of set up this idea of like schemas in cognitive psychology was there was this British psychologist who gave this story that was a, it was like a Native American myth called the War of the Ghosts. And then they read the story. And then I think it was some kind of like, telephone type situation where they were like, repeating it, I don’t know how many times, but they have like, do it kind of reiterate what they heard about the story. And what he found is that like, over successive iterations of this, all the kind of like, cultural elements that don’t fit into like kind of the Western norms for stories got eliminated and it became kind of like increasingly more like a kind of Western story in terms of what was happening. Like things that were maybe very significant in the Native American cultural context were getting like obliviated over time just because we have some kind of background knowledge template for interpreting things and we press that upon whatever we’re hearing. And so things that don’t fit in that, they often stand out.

55:46-55:50
They often don’t get remembered, you know, just because, okay, oh yeah, it’s this kind of story.

55:50-55:56
So you can even think about that in terms of like, you know, genres of movies, for instance, right?

55:56-55:57
Like you have the murder mystery thriller.

55:58-56:05
Like how many times have you watched that movie and it’s like, they’re all different, but they follow a kind of template that’s familiar to you.

56:05-56:13
So if you were to watch like something where it just totally violated the norms of that convention, like at the end, it turned into romantic comedy or something, it would be jarring.

56:13-56:15
Like it would be like an unexpected kind of twist.

56:16-56:24
And so it’s certainly the case that like the background knowledge we have, the way that we’ve sort of imbibed these patterns really influences how we can think about things.

56:25-56:32
And so a good teacher is someone who has an ability to know, well, what kinds of patterns, what kinds of templates are going to be familiar to this student?

56:33-56:57
So if I can frame the information in terms of those patterns, you know, either to highlight, okay, this is why this makes sense, or to highlight something where, you know, you’re going to forget this point because it’s actually defies your intuition. You’re going to gloss over it by making it more salient, but you can use those things to, to be an effective teacher. Well, and I’ve seen, um, advertisements hijack that.

56:57-58:04
And I remember a couple of years ago, there was a Superbowl commercial where the guy from stranger things, who’s the, what’s his name? David. Uh, Oh yeah. Yeah. I don’t know name but i know you’re so he came into like you know all these tropes of of commercials where it was people drinking beer at the beach and all of a sudden he would just come in and say no this is actually a so bad and then it was uh you know the matthew mcconaughey and it was like he’d driving a car and he said nope actually it’s a so bad and so he kept using these like luring you in and then disrupting it it was incredibly effective because it was it would hijack your mind in a way that you to laugh. So, um, I I’ve gone a little over time, but I do have one other question. Cause I feel like I could just keep going. And it was something I remember reading on your site. And I think it’s really appropriate, especially that people often time set goals and it’s what you call these action intention gap. Um, and I, I think it’d be helpful for you to summarize that, but then my follow-up question would also be how can people use that to set more meaningful goals for themselves?

58:04-58:10
goals, especially, you know, over time when those, your willpower can start to erode.

58:10-58:51
I mean, everyone knows what the action intention gap is. It’s like, I want to go to the gym every day. And then when you look at your actually where, how much did you go to the gym? You went like, you know, three times. That’s, that’s the action intention gap. We all do it. I think, I don’t think there’s like a simple, we’ll do this. And then you’re going to immediately follow through and all your goals. But I think part of the self improvement kind of process, the sort of self knowledge process is to understand this gap, like what causes it, like, why do we have some aspiration, something that we are ostensibly committed to, and then don’t follow through or don’t follow through the way that we thought we did. And there’s lots of different reasons for that.

58:52-59:25
One reason is that we’re very poor at planning and imagining the future. Like there’s this whole psychological literature that like when we imagine the future, we kind of just abstract away all of the real world. And we’re focusing on like, well, I’m going to do this and this and this and this, and like nothing impedes you, nothing, you know, messes up your plans. And so one heuristic, one way of avoiding that planning fallacy is to use base rates. So for instance, the psychologist, Daniel Kahneman, I think he gives this example of the planning fallacy where he was on some committee where they were going to write a new textbook for something. I think it was a textbook.

59:25-59:58
and they’re doing their plan and they’re like we should be able to do this in two years like that’s the plan and you know given his background he’s like well how long has it taken other people to do textbooks like this and he asked one of the projects like oh actually i don’t know any project that ever finished before seven years uh and and so it was kind of like uh there was this this sort of mismatch because if you look take the kind of what’s called the outside view if you look at the base rates of like, what is the actual likelihood that something’s going to happen?

59:58-01:00:02
What is the typical length of time for a particular process to have happen?

01:00:03-01:00:08
Versus, well, in my imagination, it should be able to proceed on this timetable.

01:00:08-01:00:09
And there’s a discrepancy.

01:00:10-01:00:17
I mean, you know, you could just say, well, all these unlucky things happened in every case, and this time is going to be different.

01:00:17-01:01:36
But I think if you’re a little bit rational, you’d be like, well, maybe we should inch up the timetable closer to that seven years or or even just take seven years is like okay that’s our baseline that’s how long it’s going to take and so i think that’s one area where intention action gap misfires is that when we think about a goal we’re thinking about that goal we’re not thinking about all the other priorities we have in life and we make mistakes other problems is that when we are in a mindset of thinking about a goal we’re in a particular kind of um mode of thinking about ourselves where we’re kind of more idealistic, we’re more focused on sort of our long range ambitions. But then when you actually have to go to the gym, you’re tired and you just want to watch Netflix. And so there’s a there’s a different construal level mode, like you have a high level construal when you’re planning the goal and you’re actually concrete and practical when you’re doing it. And so a lot of the things we can do to be better and to kind of diminish this gap is by either tweaking how we make the intention. So, okay, this is actually going to take seven years, and I’m not going to just assume it’s going to take two, or we’re tweaking how we’re taking the action so that when we’re in this situation where like, okay, yeah, I really do want to just watch Netflix, but I’ve got some kind of forcing mechanism that’ll get me to the gym. And then, okay, once I’m at the gym, it’s not so bad. You know, there’s different ways you can do this, but basically recognizing this gap, identifying what’s causing it in your particular instance.

01:01:37-01:01:40
I think this is most of what it is to be an effective human being, right?

01:01:41-01:01:46
So, and my last question is, you know, you’re incredibly prolific, right?

01:01:46-01:01:47
You write a lot of essays.

01:01:47-01:01:48
You’ve written many books.

01:01:49-01:01:59
Do you use this thinking to help you manage your own action intention or, you know, gap so that to get things done?

01:01:59-01:02:01
And then how do you correct for that?

01:02:01-01:02:04
I mean, I think I’m like everyone else.

01:02:04-01:02:09
And I think that I write about some of these problems many times because I’m trying to solve them for myself.

01:02:10-01:02:20
I think for myself, for my like writing output for, you know, the things in my life where maybe I’m achieving at a above average level.

01:02:21-01:02:24
Those are also areas where those problems have been resolved.

01:02:24-01:02:25
Now, sometimes that’s intentional.

01:02:26-01:02:34
Sometimes I’m like, OK, well, you know, I’m going to have I’m going to write and publish every week on a schedule, which is like something I do, which a lot of people.

01:02:34-01:02:36
Well, I write when I have an essay to post.

01:02:36-01:02:38
And so they naturally write a lot less.

01:02:38-01:02:38
Right.

01:02:38-01:02:41
Whereas for me, I’m on a writing schedule.

01:02:42-01:02:51
But I think there’s other instances where, you know, you just happen to have a favorable set of circumstances that makes that gap more minimal, you know.

01:02:51-01:02:59
And so for you, it might be that while you have no problem getting your academic research done, spending all of your time in the office studying.

01:02:59-01:03:05
But you do actually tend to forget people’s birthdays or you don’t get to the gym on time.

01:03:05-01:03:10
And so recognizing where you have action intention gaps is, you know, it’s, there’s not a guilt process here.

01:03:10-01:03:11
This isn’t like a character defect.

01:03:11-01:03:18
It’s more just a kind of like an engineering problem that you’re kind of looking at like, well, what was, what was wrong with what my intention was?

01:03:18-01:03:26
What was wrong with what, you know, uh, the, the context or the situation I was taking action and you just make little tweaks and you just keep trying to improve it.

01:03:26-01:03:32
And, uh, hopefully you close it a little bit and you get closer to, you know, doing what you say you’re going to do.

01:03:34-01:03:54
Perfect place to leave it. Scott Young, thank you so much. Where should people best go to find out about you and your work? Yeah. So you go to my blog, scotthyoung.com/blog. I actually have five eBooks that you can get if you want to join the newsletter. And you can also check out my book, Ultra Learning, which is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, wherever you get your books.

01:03:55-01:03:58
You can even listen to it on Audible if you’re not sick of listening to me already.

01:03:58-01:04:11
I love it. I love the book. And then you have another book coming out, which I’m going to look forward to. And it’s called what, how to get better at anything, get better at anything. Yeah. Better at anything. All right. May 2024. Yeah. I love it. All right.

01:04:11-01:04:30
Well, Scott Young, thank you so much for being on the show. It’s just been a delight. And until we speak again. All right. Thank you. Thanks for listening to the show. For more information, please check out influence DNA dot co. And you can also leave us a six star review, but we’ll settle for five.

01:04:31-01:04:32
See you on the next one.