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Today’s episode features an enlightening conversation with Scott Young
, a leading expert in accelerated learning and the acclaimed author of “Ultralearning.” If you’ve ever wondered why gaining real expertise in investing, business, or any new discipline feels daunting—or why traditional education often falls short—this episode is for you.
Scott Young brings the science and practice of learning to life, drawing from decades of personal projects like self-studying MIT’s computer science curriculum in one year and traveling the globe to master new languages. He shares foundational frameworks developed through experience and research, designed to help anyone map out a clear path to mastery—no matter the skill or subject.
This episode is packed with actionable insights. Scott Young breaks down the psychology behind effective learning, the critical importance of focus amidst information overload, and how to avoid the most common dead ends that keep people stuck. He also explores how AI and modern technology can both empower and distract us—and what it takes to use these tools to your advantage without outsourcing your critical thinking.
Whether your goal is to become a better investor, reduce taxes, or level up any area of your life, Scott Young’s practical advice will help you accelerate your results and build lasting expertise.
In This Episode
- Why most people get stuck on the path to expertise—and how to map out a successful learning journey
- The role of focus and deliberate practice in mastering new skills
- How to use AI and modern tools without losing your ability to think critically
- Frameworks and strategies to cut through information overload and learn more efficiently
How can I deepen my knowledge, make myself aware of things that I wasn’t aware of before, and design these sorts of learning maps so that I, you know, don’t have this like, well, I can’t. I wouldn’t even know where to start with learning about X. And you know now where to start, and now you can do the work. And so I’m hopeful that AI is going to have some of those effects. But I’m also well aware of at least recent precedent of some of the dangers.
Welcome to the Wealth Strategy Secrets of the Ultra Wealthy podcast, where we help entrepreneurs like you exponentially build wealth through passive income to live a life of freedom and prosperity. Are you tired of paying too much in taxes and gambling your future on the stock market and want to learn about hidden strategies for making your money work for you? And now your host, Dave Wolcott, serial entrepreneur and author of the best-selling book, the Holistic Wealth Strategy.
How’s it going, everyone? And welcome back to Wealth Strategy Secrets of the Ultra Wealthy. I’m your host, Dave Walcott, and today’s conversation tackles a foundational but often overlooked pillar of wealth building, how you learn. My guest, Scott Young, is a leading expert in accelerated learning and author of Ultra Learning. In this episode, we break down why most people struggle to gain real expertise and how to avoid common dead ends that keep you stuck. We explore how to map out any new skill, apply focus and deliberate practice, and strategically compress the learning curve. Whether you’re mastering investing, reducing taxes, or building a new domain of expertise. Scott also shares practical frameworks for cutting through information overload and leveraging tools like AI without outsourcing your thinking. If you want to become more effective, more informed, and ultimately make better wealth decisions, this episode is a must.
Listen, Scott, welcome to the show.
Yeah, it’s great to be here.
Yeah. Grateful to have you on the show and really talk about a topic I think is near and dear to my heart and many of our listeners, which is really education and learning. And frankly, I think it’s one of the biggest systemic issues around investing that we have. And you know, one of the core things that people are trying to solve in life, right, is trying to create financial security and financial freedom in their lives. But investing is not taught anywhere, right? It’s not actually taught, you know, in grade school; it’s not taught in college or anywhere. So people kind of have to, you know, retrofit some type of learning later on in life and then also really provide some shortcuts. Right. How do we do some accelerated learning?
And of course, you know, this not only applies to the investing world but also to other things, like I’ve been trying to learn another language and learning Italian. And that can be, you know, challenging midlife to learn new things and retool things. So really excited today, Scott, to help you talk to the audience about how we can do some accelerated learning and how you can become an expert in some new fields with some of your cognitive and behavioral type science approaches.
Yeah, no, I’m happy to dig into it.
Awesome. Why don’t we start and talk a little bit about how you got here? I mean, obviously you’ve probably had quite a journey in terms of your education and everything. So how did that begin for you?
Yeah, so I’ve been writing for about 20 years. I even started when I was in university. I kind of ran like a little very early, sort of a paid newsletter type thing where I was giving students studying tips. So I was kind of sharing some of my findings, like this is an effective way to study. And then that evolved later after I graduated into doing certain kinds of projects. So I did one project where I was learning MIT’s computer science curriculum, and I was self-studying it over one year. I did another project with a friend. We traveled to four different countries, learning four different languages.
And that project, the kind of crux of it, was that we weren’t going to speak English that time. So we called it the Year Without English. I’ve done other projects, learning quantum mechanics and portrait drawing and all sorts of things and documenting them in my own blog. And then this culminated in a book that I published in 2019 called Ultralearning, which took sort of my stories, other people’s stories, and a lot of the cognitive science of how learning works and tried to package it together so the people who are interested in becoming skilled or knowledgeable about something might have a roadmap for how to do it. So this has been a major part of my writing, not the only thing, but a central part of what I’ve done for the last two decades.
Yeah, interesting. And I know there are really so many different approaches out there. There’s, you know, Jim Kwik and Tim Ferriss. Right. Talks about, you know, how you can take, you know, becoming a master in 10,000 hours and then kind of compressing that in different fields of discipline. So talk to us about the book and then some of the core principles about how to achieve ultralearning.
Yeah, so I think my motto or my mindset about it is that there aren’t really any shortcuts in learning and that you can do something without doing the actual work. But there are a lot of dead ends. And so a lot of what we’re trying to do when we’re saying we’re stuck with learning or we’re not able to make progress is that we’re in some kind of dead end. So it’s about recognizing where those dead ends are. What’s the sort of thing that’s preventing you from moving forward, whether it is learning that language or becoming a great investor or whatever you’re trying to do? And so I really try to blend a mix of, like, you know, what the basic science says about how learning works, how memory works, how understanding works, and how skills work? And then trying to combine that in careful ways so you can sort of think about how to make things more efficient. So, you know, just to use an example, when we were doing this language learning project, like a central bottleneck in learning a language is often that you don’t get enough practice. A big part of being fluent in a language and fluency in any skill is repetition and doing it enough that it just comes out automatically.
Most people aren’t stuck because they can’t learn, they’re stuck because they’re learning the wrong way.
And for a lot of us, we study in school, we learn it, but we don’t get enough repetition; we don’t get enough practice volume so that it comes out easily. And so one of the ways you can do that is in an immersive environment. If you have to speak all the time, if all your communication has to be in that language, you very quickly overlearn some of these simple patterns. So actually, in a couple months, a lot of your day-to-day basics, you don’t have any difficulty doing. This is an example of, like, understanding the problem of learning and applying some basic science about, like, how practice works and how these things work. And then sort of using that to engineer a project, to design an end result. And the process that I use, like I have in my book Ultralearning, has a bunch of different principles that I discuss that are sort of. They’re not like steps in a formula like you do 1, 2, 3, but they are ways of looking at the problem of, like, okay, here’s a principle of learning, here’s a principle of doing things well. How can you engineer it in? And the one I always like to start with is meta-learning, which is basically any skill you want to learn or knowledge domain you want to learn.
You need to start with a map of what it is that you’re trying to actually get good at. And it’s amazing to me how often people sort of embark on domains with, you know, their map being like, maybe, okay, maybe I want to go sort of this direction, and then there’s this landmark at the end, and that’s it. I don’t have any other details filled in. And so it’s kind of no wonder that people get lost. So that’s usually where I get people to start, which is by trying to map out what it is exactly that you’re trying to get good at. Because if you can define that exactly, then it can be a lot easier to bring to bear some of these ideas about memory and skill and understanding in solving those specific problems along the way that go into mastering it.
Agree. I think focus is so important, especially in the world of investing, right? And today, for instance, we live in a world where we’re in complete information overload, right? You know, you turn on CNBC or, you know, you pick your channel, right? And there’s just so much data actually coming out to you. And one of the things I’ve learned from the ultra-wealthy and family offices is that the best investors actually only focus on one to three asset classes and then get really good at those. So if you want to focus on real estate, you’re getting really, really good at that. And then what that enables you to do is start doing better diligence, right? Because you’re seeing trends, you’re seeing patterns on what might not be a good deal and what could be a good deal. You’re also getting good access to better deals, and you’re just narrowing that focus, you know, versus, you know, conventional thinking, which is diversification, right? Let’s diversify across 100 different equities and then let’s call that investing. But really that’s just kind of, to me, a form of speculation because you don’t know what the answer is.
So we’re just kind of betting on the average, right? And we’re not getting smarter at anything.
Yeah, well, I think you’re absolutely right. Like the amount of knowledge that’s involved in deep expertise. I mean, you mentioned when you were kind of giving the introduction, this 10,000-hour rule; this is obviously sort of associated with Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers. But the original research was largely owing to Anders Ericsson. Anders Ericsson was a psychologist. He passed away recently. But Anders Ericsson was a psychologist who did a lot of research on expertise, on how people become experts. And a major part of his theory is that you become an expert through a process called “deliberate practice,” which is not just doing something over and over again, but doing something in a very particular kind of way where you’re doing effortful practice, usually under the supervision of a coach with a very specific aim of the thing you’re trying to improve. And it’s hard work and it requires so much time in part because what we know from psychology is that expertise is really like having this library in your head of all these patterns.
So you mentioned the asset classes. Like to be, you know, an expert in real estate, for instance, you have to have all these examples of different real estate deals and different price valuations and different kinds of numbers to create this mental model of like, how do you evaluate these deals and whether they’re good or bad? And you need all these examples; you need all this information as well as potentially other theories and other kinds of ideas about, you know, what’s going on in the market and other things like this. And so collecting all that information takes time. And so I think again, it is kind of going back to what I said earlier. Like there’s no real shortcutting, and there’s no way that you can, let’s say, okay, well, not actually get all that information in your head and still be an expert. But there are lots of ways to go about learning where you’re not actually acquiring it or you’re not doing the right kind of practice. And that was one of the things that Erickson really brought to the fore: that for most of us, even though we spent more than 10,000 hours doing our jobs, we are not world-class at them. We are not like this elite level of performance.
And it’s because the kind of practice we’re doing is just making what we’re doing more and more automatic. You’re just sort of getting the same information, the same ideas. You’re not actually drilling down and building that sort of, that database of knowledge that’s going to make you truly unique and stand out.
Yeah. And what would be your thoughts around, say, the Pareto principle? Right. Like I know Tim Ferriss talked about, like, hey, if you’re trying to learn a language, right? I mean, let’s just break this down and let’s start with the thousand most commonly used words. Right. And if you can master those, you know, you’re already, you know, 70% there. Right?
Yeah. Well, I think this is also an important idea, and it goes back to my point where I was talking about making the map and having your destination. Because a lot of people don’t even realize that they’re wanting two different things, right? So let’s say, you know, you’re going to a restaurant, you’re ordering some food, and you can imagine going to the waiter and being like, “I want the, like, the finest meal that you can possibly make.” You know, you give me that filling amount and steak; I want the lobster, I want the seven-course meal, and I want the table service. And then you can imagine going to a restaurant and being like, give me something fast and cheap and yummy, like give me a McDonald’s hamburger, right? And a lot of people don’t realize that they’re sort of simultaneously asking for the McDonald’s hamburger and the filet mignon steak. And I think that’s true here as well. Like, imagine learning a language. A lot of people are saying, “Oh, I want to learn French,” but they don’t really clearly distinguish in their minds what it is that they’re actually trying to get good at.
So I think the Tim Ferrissian approach of focusing on the sort of core, most essential, most used words in a language is definitely valuable. The word frequency of languages follows this power law called Zipf’s law, where basically the more rare the words are, the less frequently they come up. So it is the case that if you learn a thousand or two thousand words, you’re covering 80% or more of speech. Now that doesn’t mean that you’re going to be able to give a university lecture because you do need to know that long tail of really uncommon words to be able to do that. But if you want to go to, you know, Paris and go see the museum and, you know, have a little chit-chat in Italian, that can be more than enough. And being able to fluently use those thousand words can be enough. And so I think this is this idea of, like, understanding not only how the skill breaks down. So, like, learning a language is this combination of learning the vocabulary and the grammar and the pronunciation, and it’s these little bits and pieces, and figuring out, okay, this is actually what the task is to learn this language, but also really understanding what am I trying to achieve and understanding the trade-offs of that of the, like, McDonald’s hamburger versus the seven-course meal approach. I think that can be true with investing as well.
Like, you can think about this in terms of like, well, am I trying to get enough data so that I can make a reasonable decision in this particular case? And so you’re really trying to figure out what the essential details are, what is the most important stuff versus, you know, “I want to be the world’s expert on this,” which is again, like learning that language. Like, you have to go down that long tail of learning all those almost never used words because they don’t come up that often, but they come up some of the time. And that’s what distinguishes people who are, you know, perfectly fluent versus someone who, you know, gets by.
Yeah. And what is the difference between, you know, the conventional schooling system? Right. I always found it quite interesting that, you know, I, when I went through the traditional schooling system, you know, right through college and everything, I didn’t have a huge affinity, let’s just say, towards, you know, towards learning in that manner. And I always kind of look back, and was it the fact that I wasn’t really passionate about maybe some of those subjects? Was it the teachers? Maybe certain ones. Certain subjectivity? Or was it the way we’re learning, right? From kind of just a rote perspective, and then you had to memorize things and then regurgitate them in a test, you know? Versus today, I spend six figures a year on my education and growth. Like, and I’m. I’m so hungry to learn.
No, that’s great. I mean, I think this happens for a lot of people too, though. I think there is one of those things that, you know, when the student is ready, the teacher appears kind of thing. Right. And so I think for a lot of us when we’re in school, especially when we’re young, a lot of it can seem unmotivated. I don’t want to suggest that there is; you know, I’m not really a big fan of taking the idea that, like, oh, well, if we could totally overhaul education, everyone would love school. I think rather, you know, my motto and the way that I think about it and my focus on self-education and, indeed, what you’re talking about, your project, are also just sort of to note that point that very often we are not ready to learn something until we are ready to, like, invest that effort. And we have that motivation.
We have the rationale for why I’m really interested in investing or learning Italian. And it can even be the case sometimes that the process for getting good at it isn’t even necessarily all that different. So it’s not even that, like, oh, the class that you took that was in Spanish in school, like, the class was bad. Maybe it was bad, but it was also maybe that at the time you didn’t have a motivating reason to learn that Spanish. You didn’t have the reason to hook it into your memory. You didn’t. This wasn’t something you were hungry for. This is something that you were being fed, force-fed, even.
And that itself affects how the food tastes and how much of it you digest. And so I think that can be a big factor. So I tend to think that once you’re hungry for it, once you are sort of ready to, okay, I really want to learn this, then the mindset shifts, then the student becomes active, and you are now sort of like, okay, all right, now I want the structure. Now I want to know how this thing breaks down. Now I want to learn it. And so I don’t know. To me, I feel like one of my major goals in my life is to try to just show people possibilities with learning so that maybe that’s going to be the thing that clicks for someone, that they’re going to be like, you know what? Yeah, I am going to learn that language, or I am going to go do that thing, or read those dozen books, which seemed really hard, but now I actually feel like I’m capable of doing and clicking together. That motivation can be kind of mysterious, but I think once you do it, you can unlock a lot of things.
You’ve mentioned a number of really good insights in terms of, you know, overall learning, but you said you didn’t have an overall framework, right? Is there some type of approach or anything that you can put all of, you know, these top learnings that you’ve had from ultralearning, like, into a sequence so that we can help the audience figure out, like, how am I supposed to, you know, approach learning in this manner?
Yeah, well, of course, I mean, I definitely have frameworks that I teach for students, but the way I like to think about it is that when you are tackling a learning project, every project has its own sort of unique difficulties and its own unique stumbling blocks. So, not every single project is going to use the full menu of methods available. But once you understand, okay, this is the major problem with this project, then that kind of lets you see, all right, this is going to be the thing that I’m going to be dealing with. So in ultralearning, I break it down into nine principles, which, again, I wouldn’t say that every single project involves all nine principles, but I think they give you the menu of what some of the things are available. So we already talked about one of them, which was meta-learning, which is this idea that before you start a project, you should have a pretty good map of where you’re going. What are the destinations? What are the trade-offs? So, like, we talked about with the language learning, it makes a really big difference of whether your goal of learning French is, you know, I’m going on a trip to Paris in two weeks and I want to be able to, like, do some stuff in French or, you know, I need to, you know, read Moliere in the original and do literary analysis. Like, these are very different goals, even though they’re both under the header of Learning French. And I’m sure you can imagine the same thing is true in whatever you’re trying to learn. The second principle we talk about is focus.
And focus is the idea that you, for almost all cases (there are very few exceptions), only learn what you pay attention to. And so the control of attention is what you pay attention to in the moment. So, sort of like being actually focused on reading and paying attention to what you’re reading is very important for learning. But also at the sort of larger scale, how do you allocate enough time to actually do this? And I know that that’s certainly the big problem facing people maybe like you and me; that you have lives, you have to earn money, you’ve got—maybe you got kids, you’ve got to walk the dog. These are all things that impede our schedule. And so a major thing that I feel like successful self-educators do is they know how to marshal together chunks of time. And when they have those chunks of time, they’re able to focus on the thing that they want to focus on. So there are different techniques you can use to sort of enhance your focus.
But like a simple one that we could talk about is even just taking notes. Because when you take notes, you have to do something physically with your hands. You have to write down things. And if you are, especially if you’re not taking too detailed notes, you’re not like literally transcribing word for word. Then when you write down what the person is saying, you have to think a little bit about what they’re saying. Okay, how do I say what Scott just said in two or three words, right? And I have to write it down. And this act of doing this activity of note-taking forces me to pay attention to it. Whereas if you just have this in the background, you’re folding laundry, or you know, you’re walking the dog, or you’re doing something else, or even you’re just listening to it and you’re.
Then your mind daydreams a little bit, you kind of go off task, and you don’t even realize you’re doing it. And all of a sudden you’re not paying attention and you’re not absorbing the information. So this is very important, especially with the material that’s maybe not so engrossing that you can’t. Like, it’s a page turner. You can’t turn away. I know, investment prospectuses. Everyone loves just, you know, it’s just like a Harry Potter novel. You just can’t stop reading it till the end.
But I think that can be a situation for some people. So that’s the second principle. And we could go through all nine. But I mean, we have. The other ones we have are directness, which is the idea of doing the thing that you’re trying to get good at. Practice specificity. Specificity is really important. Drill, or the idea of breaking down the complexity to focus on weak points and build up sub-skills retrieval, which is the idea that we remember more when we try to remember rather than just looking at it.
Again, something that’s quite underrated and shown with many studies of students getting this wrong when they’re studying for tests. Retention, the idea that when we space out information and expose it to ourselves over longer periods of time, learning becomes more efficient. We can go on with experimentation. The idea that we want to try different things out and intuition, and that we want to build deeper understandings. So, I mean, we can go into some of these principles here. But this is sort of the broad framework that I try to outline in UltralUnion.
So let’s work through a practical example. And this is. This is a great one. Right. Many of the audience out there are trying to reduce their taxes, right? And learning about taxes would be up there with reading a prospectus or a PPM document. Right?
Real fun stuff. I know.
Yeah, real fun stuff. Exactly. And so people are, you know, trying to accelerate that learning and figure out options. But it’s real money, right? And that’s it. I learned about taxes and have been able to get my taxes into, you know, the single digits. But it’s because I learned, right. I learned how they work, how to structure them, and how to make it work in my favor.
So that being said, let’s use that as the example. And, you know, how would you? If you created a goal, let’s say that, you know, you want to reduce your taxes by, you know, 10 or 20% this year. And in order to do that, you need to learn about that. How would you approach that?
Yeah, well, I think. I mean, this is obviously a situation where the end goal is just. I want to reduce my taxes; then one thing you could do is hire a tax accountant. I just want to bring this up not to say that the learning goal is not important, but well, it is important.
You know what? Let me, let me interrupt you there for a sec, Scott. So that’s, you know, the intuitive response. But what I learned after five, hiring five different CPA firms over the course of many years, is that, you know, just actually hiring someone and trying to offload it does not, you know, completely get you to your goal. Right? Because if you don’t have the knowledge to ask the right question, you’re not going to get the right results. And it’s, it’s, it’s actually very akin to AI right now. Right. If you do not know how to ask the right questions and to interface with it in the way that can yield those exponential results, you know, it’s kind of like garbage in, garbage out, right? So if I just tell my CPA, “Hey, I want to reduce my taxes,” maybe he finds a couple extra deductions and everything, but did he tell me about this one strategy that completely aligns with my wealth strategy and is going to be the one thing? Right.
You know, no, I had to actually learn that on my own and then ask him, and then he helped to implement it. So I think there’s this whole component of knowledge and learning that goes into it as well.
We’re living in a time where you can become exponential, but only if you commit to learning.
Well, I think what you’re saying is absolutely right. I mean, definitely when we outsource our skills and knowledge to someone else, we often don’t know to ask the right questions. Right. We don’t know how to guide that discussion in productive ways. So maybe, you know, there is a way of, like, if you had a completely different structure for your business or this kind of thing, you could have a certain kind of tax outcome that you wouldn’t be able to get if, you know, just the way things are right now. And that sort of move in that kind of, like, strategy is not something maybe that they’re even going to think to ask you. So, you know, my knowledge of American tax law is a little bit sparse, so you’ll have to excuse me not being able to give you concrete examples here. But my point being, and sort of to back it up, is to not deny what you’re saying.
But my point is that when we are examining learning goals, I always like to start with, like, what is the goal? What are you trying to accomplish? And to also sort of start with, like, well, what is the motivation for learning it? Because I think in your case, what you’re saying is that, okay, well, this is very important to me, and I’m not able to get sufficient results through outsourcing it. But that may not be true for everyone in all goals. And that’s a useful thing to think about too because sometimes I notice people are like, I want to learn X. But what they’re doing, even when they’re trying to learn it in an efficient and effective way, is going to be more work than hiring some expert. And maybe hiring the expert is going to give you a sufficient goal for that particular idea. So I always like to work backward. Is this an instrumental project? Is this some reason why you’re learning for a particular outcome? So for instance, if the goal was like, well, I want to travel in France, and I don’t, you know, I want to be able to get around, well, maybe you don’t even need to learn French; you know, you could use AI or do this kind of thing. So I like to hit on that motivation point because if you’re going to be learning French, it must be because there’s something more because you can probably get around Paris without knowing French. You could use a guidebook.
A lot of people speak English.
English.
You have to have some sort of other motivation to want to learn it. And so in your case, it may be because outsourcing is inferior or maybe because, you know, I’m going to face this problem many times in my life, like I’m actually going to do business in France, you know, every two weeks. And so learning French is going to be this long-term investment. So I think that’s an important thing to get clear. The second thing I would say is that when you’re looking at this, okay, how are we going to break down this tax approach? So like one part, like the naive approach would be like, okay, let’s get that big tax code book or whatever it is and then just read through it page by page and then hopefully something will occur to me. To do this strategy is probably not the right way to do it. Probably the right way to do it would be to be like, “Okay, my outcome that I’m looking for is not to be an all-round tax expert of being able to, like, machine, like, know every single tax code for the United States.” But for my particular situation, what kinds of strategies are relevant? What things should I know? What things do I need to watch out for? And so for that you probably want to use what I call the expert interview method.
Where we want to find people who already have this knowledge and use them to try to map out what the things are that I should be looking into and what my starting places should be. So if you know someone who understands this sort of aspect of the tax code, they know what kinds of things they should be looking into. Maybe they’re in a similar line of business. That would be a good place to start. Now, we have great tools like ChatGPT and these kinds of things where they can suggest starting points, they can suggest people to look into, books to look into, and resources to guide, and you can use that to, like, start sketching out, “Okay, this is going to be maybe a curriculum.” I need to read these books; I need to understand these strategies. I need to have this kind of knowledge about, you know, this sort of aspect of tax law or this sort of aspect of, like, okay, well, there are these sorts of rules that I don’t really understand about accounting, but I have to get a handle on them. Once you’ve mapped that out, then you can kind of create a curriculum.
So it can be like, okay, I need to read these books. I need to understand these concepts. I need to understand, sort of maybe, if there’s some math or some other things involved; I need to actually maybe do a little bit of practice, maybe not so much for taxing, because you’re maybe only solving the problem once in your own particular case. But certainly if you were, you know, going to become an accountant and you had to do your P and L every single year, you might need to understand certain procedures for this kind of stuff that you’d actually have to do some practice for. And so once you have that sort of trickle-down, then you can, like, have these little specific components. So it’s like, I want to read this book. What’s an efficient way to read this book? So maybe I’ll skim it first. Maybe after.
I’m going to read it through carefully, take some notes, and then I’m going to quiz myself on some key ideas that are relevant to the stuff that I’ve pulled out so that they’ll stick in my memory. Like this. This is sort of the filtering process. You start with sort of the goal. You map it out. And then once you have those little components, then you’re applying these more specific procedures for dealing with memory or practice or understanding.
Let me ask you something. If you’re earning multiple six figures, maybe even seven, do you ever feel like you’re doing all the right things, but your wealth still feels fragile, like it’s dependent on the market, your taxes are still way too high, and you don’t have the level of control you actually want? Because here’s the truth. Most high-income professionals are following a wealth strategy that was never actually designed for them. It was designed for Wall Street, not for building real controllable cash-flowing wealth. And the problem is you don’t realize it until it’s cost you years or even decades. That’s exactly why I just put together a private 25-minute masterclass called the Contrarian Wealth Blueprint, where I break down the invisible structural mistakes I see in high earners and how sophisticated investors actually build wealth differently. This is not about chasing higher returns.
It’s about building a system that gives you more control, more liquidity, and significantly better tax efficiency. If that resonates with you, go to contrarianwealthbuilder.com and reserve access. It’s quick, it’s free, and it may completely change how you look at your wealth strategy. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. In fact, this is exactly why we produce this podcast, right? It is to bring in, you know, experts, right, in different domains around trying to, you know, grow legacy wealth, trying to reduce taxes, access private markets, and all of these things, you know, in one source so that people can learn and really try to accelerate from there. But I love your point about really just understanding the why first. You know, it’s so important, and we talk about that in wealth strategy as well. It’s like, you know, if you don’t have a vision, if you don’t understand your why, you know you’re going to miss every time, right? You’re never going to actually get it right.
And this is why people fail in the gym as well. They have these great New Year’s resolutions, and they may learn a new workout profile and things like that, but they don’t really have the why and play. So when you actually have the “why,” that’s really meaningful. Like, you know, when I was, I was determined that after, you know, year after year, subsequent years of getting, like, surprise tax bills, you know, and paying large six-figure tax bills and, you know, that I didn’t even, you know, know were coming, you know, I was determined to really solve that problem and start to figure it out. And I thought naively that I could just outsource this problem to these supposed experts. But what was found is that, you know, it’s a very unique set of people that actually really understand the problem and, you know, as an entrepreneur and investor, how to actually solve it. And in parallel to that, Scott, I mean, I’ll point out as well that I think along the same lines, right? This is where so many people get it wrong, where they outsource their wealth to a traditional financial planner because they make it seem like you’re not smart enough to manage your own money. Right.
Because you don’t know enough, right? About investing. So hey, I’m just going to hire this person and then completely outsource that and take no responsibility. But look, you’ve worked so hard to earn your precious capital. Doesn’t it make sense to have some ownership in, you know, your own why and why you want to learn about investing and start to make some decisions for yourself and then hire that right team who can implement or support that but not completely take it over?
Yeah, and I think you’re right. I think there’s, to me, also, you need a lot of knowledge even to outsource. Well, you know, so you need a lot of knowledge to know who to hire and how not to get ripped off and this kind of thing too. So I think, you know, the people who are best at, let’s say, hiring programmers are people who have—you don’t need to be the best programmer in the world, but you need to understand something about how software works and this kind of thing. Otherwise, your own ignorance about the field, your lack of conceptual understanding, and your lack of, like, some of the basic information, the details, and the constraints mean that it’s very difficult to evaluate people. It’s hard when they say, “Oh, this is impossible” if they’re actually telling the truth or they just don’t want to do it because it’s too much work, or you know, you have a much harder time navigating that kind of relationship. And so I’m very much, you know, my whole brand is about learning. So I’m very much encouraging people to learn.
But I think it’s important to go through that process that you talk about to understand what your personal motivation for learning this is. What is your personal reason why you want to be the one to have this knowledge and to make that investment? And because since we’re talking about investments, it is an investment. And I think it’s one of those things that you have to think about your kind of portfolio of knowledge that you’re trying to acquire and things that you’re trying to be either an expert in or not an expert, but competent enough to hire the right expert and manage the expert or to have a passing understanding, like to have that kind of, you know, making these sorts of informational decisions about what you’re going to specialize in and build in your knowledge base. I think these are very important decisions to make, and they’re probably just as important as the kinds of decisions you make about where to put your money.
How should we be thinking about learning in this day and age of AI?
Yeah, well, I think AI, I don’t know, it’s it’s. AI is so new that I feel like it’s the full implications of how it’s going to change them. Our cognitive lives have yet to be shaken out. Like, we have yet to see the second- and third-order effects. Like, it’s hard to, it’s hard to imagine how much it’s penetrated our society and our thinking when like, you know, ChatGPT comes out in like 2022. Like, this is very recent. So it’s hard to make these extreme predictions, especially with how quickly the technology is changing. But my guess from the way things are right now is that AI is kind of like other technologies when it comes to learning: it has incredible power but also risks.
So when I was writing Ultralearning, I wrote this kind of thesis based a little bit on the economist Tyler Cowen’s book Average Is Over, which is the sense that technology has exacerbated certain kinds of career inequalities. That’s because of technology; the people who are the sort of best can earn more, and the people who are, you know, sort of middling performers, their jobs become a little bit obsolete, they get automated away, and they’re sort of pushed down into the bottom a little bit. And it’s not necessarily bad on average, but it is something that we have to be aware of; we want to be in that higher skill category. And I would say that something applies to learning as well. Like if you think about the invention, the Internet. For someone who is an eager, curious, you know, self-driven person, the Internet is an incredible boon for learning. Like, you could Google things and find out just knowledge about anything almost instantaneously. Like Wikipedia is a resource that, you know, if someone told you, “Oh, you know, Encyclopedia Britannica, you know, those things that salesmen would go door-to-door and sell you and it would cost, you know, thousands of dollars and you’d pay in installments and it would be out of date,” you could have like a thousand times as much knowledge as that and it would be totally free; this would be an amazing thing.
But at the same time, we also live in a world. Is that what people do with the Internet? No, like they spend a lot of time, you know, watching video shorts and seeing silly videos. And getting in social media arguments and letting their brain rot from whatever memes are out there right now. So there is a dual nature to technology. It allows us to, you know, self-improve and to gain knowledge and education and enhance ourselves. And it also creates this potential for distraction, for misinformation, for, you know, things that, you know, they shouldn’t have. They wouldn’t have been published in a publishing era, but because it’s self-published, you can just have this kind of nonsense. And so I think AI is similar in some ways in that it allows you to have sort of on-demand access to sort of cognition to be able to like analyze things.
Okay, I have this 300-page research paper. I can feed it to Notebook LM and get some sort of summary of what the analysis is. But this also creates this temptation to outsource our thinking, to not do the hard work to basically do what we were talking about before, to not make the investment, to actually have that knowledge internalized. So I think it’ll be interesting to see how it plays out. I mean, the cynic in me suggests that most people are going to use AI to do their homework, not to get really good at the homework. But I’m hopeful at least that for the kind of people who are listening to this podcast who are interested in self-improvement and who are interested in sort of maximizing their potential, they can be one of the few that are using it in this effective way of using it. How can I deepen my knowledge, make myself aware of things that I wasn’t aware of before, and design these sorts of learning maps so that I, you know, don’t have this like, well, I can’t; I wouldn’t even know where to start with learning about X and, you know, nowhere to start. And now you can do the work.
And so I’m hopeful that AI is going to have some of those effects. But I’m also well aware of at least recent precedent from some of the decades.
Scott, if you could give just one piece of advice to the audience about how they could accelerate their learning process, what would it be?
Well, I think this is not a very specific learning tip, but I think it is a very healthy habit to follow: try to have at least one learning project on the go at all times. So have something specific and concrete that you want to be more knowledgeable about, more expert in. It’s better if it’s time constrained. So it’s better if it’s like, so for the next three months or for the next month, I’m focused on X; get some books about it. If it’s a skill, practice it and work on it. Have this as something that you always have in the background, and very soon you will become much more knowledgeable and much more skilled than you can imagine.
Love it. So what are—what is your topic that you’re learning right now?
Yeah, so right now I’m doing a big deep dive into the research in psychology on fatigue, on energy, and on motivation. So this is sort of an intersecting area of psychology, medicine, biology, all sorts of things. So I’ve got all sorts of obscure academic monographs on things like the psychology of fatigue and goal setting and things like this. Lots of fascinating stuff.
If you could summarize what you’ve learned so far from that, do you have any insights you could share?
Well, I would summarize it in three broad ways. That having lots of energy would be a combination of taking care of the biological strata. So that means things like getting enough sleep, eating well, exercising—super important and very underrated—and managing your stress. Also, something that if you’re imagining you’re dealing with companies, you’re an investor, something that can be something to watch. You also want to work on managing the actual flow, having cycles of like energy, effort, expenditure, and then also recovery. That’s also something that’s missing. Especially in our nonstop work days. We tend to think that we can just continue peak performance without taking any breaks.
And then finally we need to have the right attitude about work, where it is something that is meaningful and important. And again, I think that’s also something where, especially if your goal is just to make more money, if your goal is just to sort of increase your net worth, you know, that can be exciting. And certainly for some people that’s the game they’re playing. But I think for a lot of us, we want something more. And I think that being able to attach what you’re doing to some deeper wellspring of meaning, whether it’s leaving a legacy, whether it’s, you know, making some contribution to society, whether that’s, you know, benefiting your children or other people that matter closely to you, this is also a source of motivation. So very, very brief overview, but that would be what I would say that I’ve taken away from it.
Yeah, great, great takeaway, Scott. I appreciate that if people would like to connect with you and learn more about your books, what is the best place?
Yeah, so my books are Ultralearning and Get Better at Anything. And you can check out my website @scotthyoung.com. I have, I think, over 1500, maybe 1600 now. Essays on learning motivation. Many of the stuff that we’ve been talking about here, including giving away five free ebooks on many of these topics. We have a complete guide to motivation and mental models for learning these kinds of things. If you join my newsletter.
Awesome. I think I’ll take them all and put them all into AI. Give me the 10.
Don’t read them.
Just let’s do ultra learning so I can implement it and, you know, get my 10,000-hour badge really fast. Well, thanks for sharing that, Scott. Really good tips, and yeah, definitely, you know, encourage people to, you know, think about their learning and, you know, in new ways, especially in light of AI. Right. How can you, how can you actually enhance your learning and not be one of those ones who are just consuming it in the wrong way and getting their dopamine centers, you know, ruined all the time by short streams of information but really becoming more savvy with it because, you know, we truly live in a time where, you know, we can literally become limitless and exponential with our thinking? We’ve seen the first, you know, billion-dollar company generated with one person, and I think that’s literally just, you know, the beginning of what can happen. So. But it all starts with learning, right?
For sure. So definitely.
Awesome. Well, thanks so much, Scott. I really appreciate it. And we’ll make sure we get all those links in the show. Notes for everyone.
Thanks again. Thanks for listening to this episode of Wealth Strategy Secrets. If you’d like to get a free copy of the book, go to holisticwealthstrategy.com; that’s holisticwealthstrategy.com. If you’d like to learn more about
For upcoming opportunities at Penny Pantheon, please visit pantheoninvest.com. That’s PantheonInvest.com.