Scott H Young Podcast

Is ambition a good thing? Something you should cultivate or abandon? Ambition has allowed for some very positive things, but it also has a hidden dark side.

Hard goals create rapid growth. Pick standards you can't currently reach, without rejecting or lowering them to meet your current abilities.

Nearly any advice you get on improving anything implicitly fits into one of three types: minimum, average or maximum. Which you should aim at?

Would your life be better if you read less news? Should you be reading more olds instead: books and ideas that will last for more than a moment?

Should you set goals, cultivate ambition and strive for greater and better things? Or should you diminish your needs and be more accepting of life?

Why does learning have to be hard work? Why is studying such a chore? Why making your study more like play will help you learn more and have more fun.

Time is limited. But your energy, attention and enthusiasm are limited even more. How can you find time when there always seems to be so little of it?

The ability to focus on hard work for a longer period of time is essential to success in your career and studies. Here's five strategies to do this.

Chance and randomness have a big impact on our lives. Life isn't fair, but the kind of luck that impacts your life can have dramatic differences in how you should respond.

Is it better to read the Stoics, Buddhists and other ancient wisdom? Or is older advice out of date? I try to show both sides of this debate and give my recommendations.

In this episode, I discuss how to keep on track with everything even when you don't have time.

We've updated the format of our bookclub and will be breaking each month's book into smaller, shorter discussions. Hope you enjoy! This month we're reading The Case Against Education by Bryan Caplan. In this thought-provoking book, Caplan argues that the main function of education is not to enhance students' skill but to certify their intelligence, work ethic, and conformity―in other words, to signal the qualities of a good employee. The author draws on the latest social science to show how the labor market values grades over knowledge and even explains why graduation is our society's top conformity signal.

This is the wrap-up video for this month's book club where we read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn. About the book: This is the wrap up video for this mont's book club where we read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn. American historian and philosopher of science, Kuhn was a leading contributor to the change of focus in the philosophy and sociology of science in the 1960s. He taught at Harvard, the University of California at Berkeley, Princeton University, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In 1962, Kuhn published The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which depicted the development of the basic natural sciences in an innovative way. According to Kuhn, the sciences do not uniformly progress strictly by scientific method.

This is the wrap-up video for the twelfth month of the book club. This month we read The Wizard & The Prophet by Charles C. Mann.

This is the wrap-up video for the eleventh month of the book club. This month we read The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins.

This is the wrap-up video for the tenth month of the book club. This month we read The Enigma of Reason by Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber.

This is the wrap-up video for the ninth month of the book club. This month we read Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu.

This is the wrap-up video for the eight month of the book club. This month we read The Elephant In The Brain by Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson.

This is the wrap-up video for the seventh month of the book club. This month we read Seeing Like A State by James C. Scott.

This is the wrap-up video for the sixth month of the book club. This month we read Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter.