Scott Young

Scott Young, who publishes as Scott H. Young, is a writer who describes himself on his website as an author, programmer and entrepreneur. He has published essays on learning, productivity and self-improvement at scotthyoung.com since 2006. His website names the business behind it as ScottHYoung.com Services Ltd. He is not the Canadian sports journalist and novelist Scott Young (1918–2005), father of musician Neil Young, who has his own Wikipedia entry.

According to his own blog, he studied for a business degree at the University of Manitoba. His LinkedIn profile, linked from his website, places him in Vancouver, Canada. No public source consulted gives his date of birth or age.

He became known for self-directed learning projects documented on his blog. In the MIT Challenge, which ran from October 1, 2011 to September 26, 2012 by his account, he worked through the materials of MIT's undergraduate computer science curriculum using MIT OpenCourseWare and reported passing the final exams of 33 classes. In a 2018 follow-up post he acknowledged that he graded his own exams against the answer keys, used a 50% passing threshold, and substituted some courses; applying stricter grading with no partial credit, he wrote, his count fell to 27 of 33. In a later project, "The Year Without English", he and a friend travelled for about a year learning Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin and Korean.

He has written two books published by Harper Business: Ultralearning (August 6, 2019) and Get Better at Anything: 12 Maxims for Mastery (May 7, 2024). His website describes him as a Wall Street Journal bestselling author and lists The New York Times, BBC, TEDx, Pocket and Business Insider as outlets where his work has appeared; we did not locate the individual articles. He has been interviewed on independent podcasts such as The Jordan Harbinger Show (episode 241).

He publishes on YouTube (@ScottHYoungVid, 108K subscribers as displayed on September 14, 2026), hosts the Scott H Young Podcast on Spotify, and links Instagram, X, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts from his About page.

His paid courses are sold on join.ingeniumcourses.com and are listed on his Products page: Rapid Learner (six weeks, on learning), Top Performer (eight weeks, on career skills, co-taught with Cal Newport, author of Deep Work), Life of Focus (three months, co-taught with Newport), Make It Happen (goal setting and follow-through) and Foundations (a 12-month program). They are not open continuously. On September 14, 2026 each sales page sent visitors to a waiting list; the waiting list pages say sessions are normally held about once a year. The Foundations page said its last registration window ran from June 22 to 26, 2026. The sales pages from past sessions still show prices in US dollars with a 60-day money-back guarantee, but those prices cannot be confirmed for a future session.

On his reputation: we found no FTC action or lawsuit under his name, ScottHYoung.com Services Ltd. or Ingenium Courses in a web search on September 14, 2026. We did not check Canadian corporate or consumer-protection registries. The most discussed point about his work is how rigorous the MIT Challenge was, and he addressed it himself in the 2018 post described above. Student numbers and results on the course pages come from his own marketing and have no independent source.