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Financial Independence Podcast

Scott Young - Ultralearning

Financial Independence Podcast

The Mad Fientist

Taxavoidance, Business, Geographicarbitrage, Investing, Tax, Earlyretirement, Travelhacking, Entrepreneurship, Travel, Personalfinance, Stocks, Minimalism, Realestate, Frugality, Retirement, Financialindependence

4.81.7K Ratings

🗓️ 16 October 2019

⏱️ 62 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

On today’s episode of the Financial Independence Podcast, I’m excited to introduce Scott Young!

I first heard about Scott when he decided to complete MIT's entire computer science curriculum in a year.

Scott has taken on a lot of these types of impressive learning projects and he just wrote a great book about it – Ultralearning.

As you know, I’m attempting to tackle a very intimidating project myself so what better way to kick off that effort than with my own 3-month ultralearning project!

In today’s interview, we dive into the details of ultralearning and we design a new ultralearning project from scratch.

Ultralearning projects seem perfect for anyone who is FI or hopes to achieve financial independence one day so hope you get as much out of this discussion as I did!

Highlights

  • Why ultralearning can help you get to FI quicker (while making the journey more enjoyable)
  • How Scott was able to complete MIT’s computer science curriculum in one year
  • Why the first part of learning something new is the hardest and how to use ultralearning to get past that phase sooner
  • How to learn new languages as quickly and efficiently as possible
  • Details about my own ultralearning project and how Scott suggests I design it
  • The imporantance of breaking big goals into concrete stages
  • Why limiting scope is so important when diving into something new
  • What is meta-feedback and why it’s important
  • The power of direct practice and how to use drills to fix specific issues
  • What to do when you hit a block or a plateau in your learning

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

I'm blind to give you a true finance.

0:05.0

Hey what's up everybody it's the Mad scientist welcome to another episode of the

0:09.4

Financial Independence Podcast on today's episode I'm excited to introduce Scott Young and I first came

0:14.9

across Scott many years ago actually I heard about a guy who was doing the entire

0:19.3

MIT computer science curriculum for free online in one year and it was a really

0:25.5

inspiring story to hear about how he went about it and how he ended up you know

0:29.9

completing all the classes all the the assignments, all the tests.

0:32.7

Well, he just released a book called Ultra Learning,

0:35.0

where he documents, you know, how he came up with this project,

0:38.4

how he structured it, and also how he's done

0:41.1

other similar projects in language learning and creative arts.

0:45.0

So after I read the book I knew I had to get him on the show because this ultra-learning idea seems

0:49.1

perfect for people who are just newly retired or who are planning to retire early and want some sort of big

0:55.2

project to sink their teeth into after they leave their job.

0:58.4

And since I just recently shared in my latest post what I've been up to for all these years

1:02.0

and what I'm hoping to accomplish.

1:03.8

I figured it'd be really interesting if I tried to build my own ultra learning project and have

1:08.2

Scott's help and input along the way and then have an experiment that I could share all my results with you and so that's exactly what I'm doing.

1:16.0

So if you have no idea what I'm talking about and you haven't checked out my latest post yet,

1:20.0

I suggest you do that first because this episode will make a lot more sense so head

1:24.1

over to madfiantist.com forward slash goal and you can read about it there and finally

1:28.9

one more thing to tell you about before we get into the interview I also created an experiment's home page since I got a

...

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