The Entrepreneur Podcast · Eric Janssen and Eric Morse

70. Learning how to learn with Scott Young

·41 min·2 clips

A viral Reddit post from an MIT challenge changed Scott Young’s career path.

Eric Jansen opens with the blunt question of why learning itself is not taught much earlier. Scott Young says the subjects schools teach often feel ad hoc and arbitrary. He treats the issue as both a curriculum problem and a practical skill problem. The conversation stays close to how people actually build capability. Young's career comes up as an example of that process. He describes it as a controlled accident, and that gives the episode its shape. Another thread is the role of public writing and video in creating momentum. Young talks about posting videos while he was working through classes and adding studying advice along the way. His "I'm done now" video took off on Reddit. The reaction was split. Some people loved it. Some people thought it was nonsense. Young treats that moment as a turning point. After it, the opportunities got stranger and more varied. People reached out about social media work. A Microsoft contact tried to arrange an interview. A Chinese publisher wanted one of his college ebooks, and he still gets royalty checks from that work. The episode treats those details as evidence that small experiments can snowball. Young also says momentum is not one event. It is a chain of little milestones. He names the first article, the first outside pickup, the first visitors, and the first dollar earned. Each one matters because it makes the next step possible. That logic fits the broader theme of the interview. Learn something useful, publish something small, and let the work travel. The final stretch returns to motivation and constraint. Young says that having a reason to do the work is critical. A project needs to matter enough to survive a busy life. Business, kids, and other obligations force priorities. For him, the effort has to connect to a book or some other professional goal. The episode ends on that grounded note. Learning is not treated as a slogan. It is treated as work that needs purpose, repetition, and enough structure to keep going.

As heard by us

A practical conversation about learning, momentum, and how one project can lead to the next.

Scott Young takes a familiar school complaint and turns it into something practical. Eric Jansen keeps the conversation steady and lets the main idea land: learning projects, public proof, and small milestones can open the next door.

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Why you'd press play

Press play if you want a smarter way to think about learning itself.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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