Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 39: DAVID EPSTEIN on Skills, Practice, and the Subtle Art of Cultivating a Meaningful Career

Episode Date: October 26, 2020

In this episode of DEEP QUESTIONS we're joined by a guest host: David Epstein.David is the New York Times bestselling author of THE SPORTS GENE and RANGE. I probably get asked questions about RANGE more than any other book by listeners of this podcast, so I knew we had to get David on the show to share his wisdom.We talk about his career, his (short-lived) public feud with Malcolm Gladwell, and his research habits, but most importantly, we go deep on his breakthrough ideas about skills, practice, and meaning in careers -- answering many of your questions as well as a few of my own.You can find out more about David at https://davidepstein.com.To submit your own questions for this podcast, sign up for my mailing list at calnewport.com.Thanks to our sponsor Magic Spoon (use magicspoon.com/CAL to receive free shipping).Thank you to listener Jay Kerstens for the intro music. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, the show where I answer queries from my readers about work, technology, and the deep life. I am particularly excited about today's episode because I will be joined by a special guest host. This individual is probably the author whose books I get asked about the most by the listeners of the Deep Question podcast, and I am talking about David Epstein, author of The Sports Gene and more recently, Range. In this interview, we get into David's story. We find out about how a track running environmental scientist from Columbia ended up a senior sports writer at Sports Illustrated. We also get into some of the details of his system.

He is famous among other writers who know him for the prodigion. amount of research he will do for his science books. He tells us in this interview that he aims for processing 10 academic papers a day. So we get into the nitty-gritty details of how he gets that done. We also get into a lot of your questions, questions in which David's expertise on things like specialization and deliberate practice theory and how people get good at things and how people build satisfying careers, questions where that expertise is quite relevant will really go deep into David's philosophies, the science he's uncovered, will compare and contrast it to the ideas and books I've written, like So Good They Can't Ignore You and Deep Work. It is a deep and rich

conversation. It is also a conversation that is right up the alley of deep questions listeners, because it is deep into the types of topics we love to talk about here on the show. A quick reminder, if you want to submit your own questions for the Deep Questions podcast, sign up for my mailing list at calnewport.com. That's where you'll also get my famous weekly article, which I have been writing since 2007. It's where you'll find out about things like the Time Block Academy event. I am holding for those who pre-order my new planner,

the Time Block Planner, and it's where I send the survey together questions for this podcast. Also, as always, thank you to those who have subscribed to the podcast or rated it or reviewed. I read all the reviews, and I really, appreciate them. All right, that's enough preamble. Let's bring David into the show and start answering some questions.

David, thank you for joining me here on Deep Questions. It is my pleasure. And since we're almost neighbors, I wish we could do it in person, maybe someday in the future. I know. I was joking before, COVID or not, I literally don't have the technology to do it in person. So this has been a crutch for me. It's like, look, I would set up the nice studio with the mics, but, you know, COVID and it's prevented me from having to figure that out. So fair enough.

Silver Lines. Now, I was telling you off air, I get asked about your most recent book, Range probably more than anything else. I probably hear about questions about range maybe once a week on average. And so this is a great treat for my listeners because I can stop paraphrasing you. And they can learn about all of the detail that was lost when I tried to paraphrase your book. I think I speak for my listeners when they're excited that you're here. I really appreciate that. I'm sorry that you have to hear about Range so much, though.

No, no. It's been great. It's been great. So the conceit here is that we will answer some questions from readers, but I wanted to, I like to establish a little foundation first. And, you know, my listeners are often interested in people's stories or their timelines. And so I'm trying to, I'm trying to disentangle your timeline here. So maybe you could help us.

How, if you're willing to share, how old are you? 40. Okay. So there is false information on the internet about your age. I'm not sure if you're aware about this. I'm definitely aware of that. I don't really know what to do about that or what the original source of that is. Maybe there's a guy somewhere we asked to change it.

How's that work? Yeah, I don't know. I think it might, the first time that I ever noticed this was when I looked at sort of some of the front matter of some foreign translations of my first book, it had a number that I thought was like indicating my birth year, but I wasn't really sure. And since it wasn't right, I didn't know. But I don't know where that got dragged from, but I think it might have come from something that went into some sort of database for classifying books. Yeah, because they have you, the internet has you in places 37 years old.

And so I was trying to do the math with your college degree. And I was doing the math and you would have graduated when you were 19 or something like this. I did not. And I was like, well, maybe he was, maybe he was prodigious, but you also ran, you ran Division I one track. I'm like, I don't know if that would work. I don't know if there's a lot of 15-year-olds running, running collegiate track. I couldn't make it square.

I appreciate that. You did like a sort of like a Fermi estimation, you know, of my timeline. Nobody really picks up on that. But it's definitely true. And again, I don't know, like I see fairly frequently something that's, you know. not right about me on the internet and, you know, there's a little consequence, but this one is, I don't know exactly what the origin is, but I think it's cool that you noticed that and impressive that you sort of thought about the timeline.

Well, now you have to explain to us Fermi estimation. I have been reading about this, as I recommend to all my listeners, on the range report, David's email newsletter, and he wrote recently about Fermi estimations of, was it multi-system inflammatory condition, the inflammatory condition that COVID can cause in young kids. And you had this long thing about a Fermi calculation. And so I feel like we need to know what this is now. I hope you're not subscribing to my newsletter because I'm trying to pretend that nobody actually reads it.

I just sort of started as a pandemic project. And like I might actually have to concentrate if I feel like, you know, you're, you are out there reading it. But Fermi estimation is named for, Orn Rico Fermi, of course, the scientist who led the first sustained nuclear fission reaction under the football stands at the University of Chicago. And he had this habit of when he would start to approach a problem or assess claims that other people made of trying to do sort of back of the envelope calculations to see if they were

sensible or what kind of project he should tackle and so forth. One of the famous ones was when he, at the first nuclear bomb test, he knew approximately how far away he was observing from, and he dropped a piece of paper and guessed about how far it moved from the blast wave and used that to sort of estimate the force of the explosion. And he wasn't accurate, of course, but it gave him an idea of what was sensible. And that's sort of a cognitive tool that I like to apply to the news sometimes. So in the case that you were talking about about this Kawasaki-like syndrome that is a real problem for some really young kids who have COVID. Having a very young kid and being a first-time

parent, I had been wondering how prevalent this was because all I would see was a headline once in a while about a kid who, you know, was in serious, serious condition, even though we know kids do a lot better with COVID in general. And the key to Fermi estimation, which I should have said from the beginning, is to sort of put your intuition aside and break down a problem into lots of different chunks. And then none of your single estimates have to be that accurate for you to get a reasonable overall picture. So the classic example is how many piano tuners are there in New York City. So I actually had that question on a freshman chemistry exam in college and I answered 10,000 because my instinct was, this is not fair, like WTF, you know, and just put down my intuition. But if you break it down

to, okay, I know, you know, there's about 9 million people. Let's say there's three people in an average household, you know, let's say 10% have a piano and maybe you tune it once a year. Maybe that takes an hour. And so how many pianos could a tuner tune in a day, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And you end up with the right order of magnitude without actually knowing anything about anything. And so why I was likening your reasoning to this Fermi estimation is you noticed that something was implausible just by doing some sort of back of the envelope thinking and putting a few

of the pieces together. And it's incredibly powerful tool for basically detecting bullshit in news. I mean, you detected some bullshit in the information that you were finding. No, is part of the statistical intuition behind Fermi calculations, you break it down in these pieces and you have error, but the error is somewhat randomly distributed. So it kind of cancels itself out enough that actually, if you break it down and make reasonable guesses, that noise will cancel out enough that you'll fall within order of magnitude. Yeah. And even sometimes if you're, you know, not in order of magnitude, depending on what you're looking at.

Like, even if I had done really poorly, I would have, maybe I'd say there were a thousand piano tuners in New York where it's probably, it's where it's a few hundred. But I still would have realized that my initial answer was wrong. And so it's especially useful for picking up on BS, you know, which is often like stats in the news. Yeah, or a mistake. I mean, I think I heard like in the presidential debate last night, I think Biden mentioned something about 200,000 more deaths by the end of the year.

And that was like a place where I guess a Fermi estimation would say, oh, he probably didn't mean end of the year because that's two months away and let me quickly do the back of the envelope and how many people would have to die per day and how does that compare? And actually that would be more per day than we've ever had, you know, like whatever. So that would be an example, I guess, again, of doing a quick back of the envelope conversation, like, okay, something something was probably off there, even if it was in that case, accidental. Totally. But that's like a quick, you know, and in that case, he maybe didn't define even so clearly what he what he was talking about. But no, totally. And so I think it's a really interesting tool. I mean, I use it constantly.

Sometimes if I'm reading through, like, journal papers to assess the plausibility of a claim sometimes. And in a few occasions, that's led me to dissect more deeply work that became productive for me. Just that original BS detection step. So, all right, so back the timeline. So you went to Columbia for undergrad, right? Yep. And grad, yeah, yeah. So I saw online both environmental science.

and the journalism school mentioned as your graduate education. Did you go from one to the other? As far as I know, that Columbia Journalism School does not have an environmental science concentration. So how do we square that information? Well, I was at one time intending to be a scientist. And this actually gets to something that dovetails with somebody asking me about some of your work.

So I was intending to be a, you know, I lived up in the Arctic. studying Arctic plant physiology, and I lived on the ship in the Pacific Ocean, studying geological sciences and planned to be a scientist. And almost captured by pirates, if I understand correctly. I didn't get almost captured by pirates. The ship that I lived on had been attacked by pirates before I was on it. You could blend this story to make it more exciting, though.

Just sort of like, well, you know, pirates were in my... Edit that out. In fact, I was the first man over the plank, you know? I remind me of a good, not to digress too much, but my favorite passage in the first Don Quixote is where Don gives an impromptu speech about what is the bravest class of person in the world, the student or the soldier.

And the student has to delay gratification while they're poor and studying and all this stuff. The soldier obviously can get killed. And he ultimately decides it's the first person across the plank when two ships come together for battle at sea. So sorry for that digression, but I thought you might find it cool. I'm a big donkey hoodie fan, so. Oh, great.

So, yeah, so I thought I was going to be a scientist, and a few things happened. One, I started to, my research was getting so niche. I was encouraged to make my research so niche that it would be something that nobody else had taken on, in large part, I think, because nobody cared. And you were in a master's program at this point? Well, even before, I had started in my research since I saw that path grad school. I'd even started it while I was still an undergrad. Okay. I worked in a lab like in the summers and partly during the year.

And I started to ask myself, you know, am I the type of person who wants to learn sort of one thing new to the world or shorter spans of time learning things new to me and sharing them? And I started to realize sort of increasingly I was the latter. So that was one thing. Second was I started to realize that while I felt I was pretty average as a scientist, my writing skills gave me a huge advantage. It made me look like a better scientist than I was, basically. So there was a skill there that sort of stood out. And thirdly, I had had a friend who was a track training partner and one of the top-ranked

guys in the country in his age group who died at a few steps. after a race. And that sort of threw me for a loop and I wanted to investigate it. And I sort of decided eventually that I was going to use my interests in sports and my background in science to write about this condition. I signed, I had his family signed a waiver allowing me to gather up all of his medical records. And I sort of started an investigation. It turned out he died of this disease caused by a single genetic mutation. Like when you hear of young athletes dropping dead, it's almost always this. Yep.

And I wanted to write about that for a popular audience. So sort of the confluence of these things, sort of a realization of strengths in different places that I might have initially thought, you know, and a particular project that was spurring me on, basically. So you saw this, this occurred when you were running. So during your undergrad years, where did you go right after, if we're trying to get down to the details of the timeline, right after you graduated? Mm-hmm.

Where did you go from there? Right away, I went and worked on a ship in the Pacific Ocean. And then, and I started grad school in, in environmental sciences right away. At Columbia with the same professors you had been working with, basically? Yeah, I mean, I started working pretty much. Yeah, yeah. Same related, yeah, scientists. And were you working on this writing project at that point as well?

I was I was sort of working on it in like a personal way I was writing things kind of for myself and I was investigating but I didn't have it was occurring to me

this was something I wanted to write about but I didn't have sort of a specific target although that started to coalesce pretty soon when I came back you know off the ship and I came back I took a night course

in environmental writing at the journalism school So just this one course said, well, I don't know anything about journalism, but I'll take a class in maybe where I have some content knowledge. And I really enjoyed that class. I had no idea what I was doing. I wasn't a reader of the newspaper. The first assignment I turned in was an editorial. And the professor had to say, like, that's not really what we mean by journalism. But I loved the class and really realized there that I wanted to sort of formalize this writing about sudden cardiac death and athletes in a different way. And then I sort of started plotting my, my course. course change out of science grad school toward journalism grad school. Yeah. And those type of course changes, you know, here on this podcast, my listeners are really interested in how those are actually plotted and the real story of how they happen.

And so when we look at you going from that situation, finishing your night course in environmental journalism, from there to the Sports Illustrated job, what fills in that gap in between. What happened? I rarely get, I almost never get asked that. That's interesting. So I eventually, you know, finished my master's thesis in environmental science and journalism sort of at the same time. So I ended up graduating from both programs at the same, you know, on the same day because of sort of the way I transitioned, you know, was like doing cross-fading on the audio or something. I like just transition from one to the

other. Yep. And because I wanted to write about sudden cardiac death and athletes now, now I really, I was increasingly deciding that's something I was going to do. And I thought a book form would be the best way to do it because, again, I knew nothing about journalism. So I went to a professor at the journalism school who I knew had written books and said, this is what I want to do. Like, will you take me on as an advisee, you know, and help me learn how to write books? And he liked the pitch. His name is Kevin Coyne. and he did that.

And eventually I went full time in the journalism school and made the development of a, you know, a long piece on sudden cardiac death and athletes. So sort of a science-based narrative piece, my master's thesis there. Master's thesis is a journalism school, a lot less weighty than the science one, sort of almost feels weird to use the term. But, and then I wanted to write about it for a public audience, you know, because I thought there was some good that could be done. not for people like me who were picking, you know, spending their disposable income on Scientific American or whatever.

So I sought out a professor who had once worked at Sports Illustrated, made my pitch to him and said, you know, could you suggest someone for me to send it to? And he suggested someone. And so I sent it there and it landed on the desk of a guy who had dropped out of med school and really liked sports science coverage. And he said, look, we don't take unsolicited stuff and you don't have any experience, but we really like this. in touch while you get some experience. And so then I realized I needed some journalism, some journalism experience. So I started applying to anything, you know, Wyoming Eagle Tribune, never heard back, by the way, applying to just everything that I could.

And I applied for an internship with a tabloid, the New York Daily News, got turned down. And then they came back to me and said, the guy who starts at midnight and goes to the morning is retiring. If you're willing to do that job, you know, you can come in. And so I went and did that. So I was the guy who starts at midnight. And there's only one person on duty then. You know, nothing happy that's going in New York Daily News happens between midnight

in the morning. But it was incredible boot camp for learning reporting, learning how to track people down who aren't on the internet. And, you know, from there, I left that and took a job at a startup. I've twice gone from very sort of comfortable name brand, name brand jobs to startups. And I went to startup in D.C. actually covering higher ed policy

and would send to this guy at Sports Illustrated when I thought I did something worthwhile. And at one point he said, hey, we've got someone going on maternity leave. Do you want to come in for a six-month temp fact-checking job?

And I'm like, you know, I have a dentist here in D.C. Like, do I want to leave for a six-month temp fact-checking job? Yeah. And I did because that was the place I wanted to get in the door. Once I got my foot in the door there,

I'm really drawing this story out here. But once I got my foot in the door, there just as a fact checker. I'm now six years older than the people I'm like doing menial work for, maybe five years. And I pitch my sudden cardiac death and athletes and they say, you're the temp fact checker. That's not your lane. And then the Olympic marathon trials in 2008 come to New York City and the guy ranked six in the country drops dead like 15 blocks from our office. Say, hey, don't you know something about this? And so I had a cover story on SI of the temp fact checker. And then became a science writer there. Very quickly realized that, whereas my writing had

set me apart among my science peers. The science set me apart among my writing peers. And so I sort of zoomed from Temp Fact Checker to youngest senior writer there very quickly. So when that story happened in 2008, you had what years basically of research already done on that particular on that particular condition. That's right. That's fascinating. Had you seen yourself all along when you were trying to get the foot in the door there, I'm going to be the science guy writing about sports. That had been the plan. This was basically the insight you had way back

when you were in your MS program in environmental science. I didn't even think that far ahead. Once I realized I wanted to write about sudden cardiac death and athletes, I sort of targeted Sports Illustrated because I knew it was big and I'd grown up with it. I didn't really think beyond getting to that story. So actually, after that story got published, I was sort of like, what do I do now?

But I also had, I mean, one thing I left out was I was able to extend my temp gig because of my crime reporting experience. So in my first weeks there, again, where I'm like fact-checking TV listings, the backup kicker at the University of Northern Colorado stabs the starter in his kicking leg and never to take his job. And they're like, don't you have crime reporting experience? So it was like very New York story. I like run out and wave a $100 billion to cabbie to like take me to the airport and do. and whatnot, and it worked out really well. And so with this combination of crime reporting, which is not uncommon, but was uncommon at Sports Illustrated, and science gave me, gave me this really unique skill set compared to my, to my peers there. And so I was sort of realizing that,

you know, there were 40 people in line to be the next NFL beat writer, but that if I could, if I could bring my sort of unique skills to be, I was only competing against myself. I was totally on my own turf. And I sort of realized that once I regrouped from the sudden cardiac death and athlete's story, and so then I started sort of exploiting it purposely to become the science writer and an investigative reporter there. And so that's why your first book, The Sports Gene, made sense. I mean, the title itself literally has sports and a scientific concept in it. And that's how I first came to know your work.

I really enjoyed that book. And I also really enjoyed that temporary, the temporary nerd feud with Malcolm Gladwell that turned into a friendship. But that was really interesting. I remember that playing out in the pages of The New Yorker. How do you, how would you summarize basically what the initial disagreement was? This would have been like 2013, I guess. Yeah. And actually, we are, our initial debate, which was the first time we ever met in person is on YouTube.

at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, and then an updated one from this last March where we met again and sort of said how our minds have changed since the original one. But I'd say, you know, he called it 10,000 hours the magic rule to success in sort of any domain. And my criticism, I would say my primary criticism of the work was that by virtue of being an average,

it actually totally obscured this tremendous variability that pervades literature on skill acquisition and development of expertise that suggests actually you want to be figuring out what your best abilities are, like what your talents are. And that comes across, again, in all of skill acquisition literature. And so the idea that there was this average number, and the paper, the original paper, did not include any measures of variance. And Anders Erickson and I talked about that quite a bit. But my main argument was that he made wrong extrapolations by using an average when, in fact,

nobody in that study had accumulated 10,000 hours of practice. Right. So you were saying the precision of that number. And so then he was saying in that original, I guess he had a, there was a magazine, piece, which didn't really get into it, but he had his website, at the New Yorker website, he had a piece that was a little bit more sharp. And so what I guess he was saying there, he's kind of backing off a little bit saying, well, okay, for certain things, there is great variability, but let's focus in on what, cognitively demanding skills. Like no one's a,

no one is a surgeon prodigy, was his example, right? And it takes, it takes a lot of work. Once he's backed it off to that, is that getting to a place that I guess is pretty much more commensical, or was there still points of disagreement there? I think there is still some disagreement, which is that to the extent that his point was that it takes a lot of practice to be great at a lot of things and often much more than people think. I agree with that. I also think that people can typically underestimate how good they can get at most things. But we still had some disagreement in that when he said, well, this is for cognitively complex tasks, yes, that means it takes longer to develop certain levels of expertise, but you actually see a widening of the gap

between how long it takes people. So in simple, in pretty simple tasks, like there's interesting literature in like air traffic controlling, for example, when the task is simple in a simulation where someone just has to move a plane, there's all this research in the military for obvious reasons, where you just have to, like, move a plane off of a simulated runway and get ready for another one, people become, they gravitate to the same level of performance because ultimately it just becomes a perceptual motor skill. But as it gets more complex, where you have to remember multiple things going on at once and make some predictions, then they actually start diverging with practice. So as the complexity level goes up, yes, it takes, it takes longer for anyone

to achieve mastery, but the differences between people get even. even larger. So like I, you know, I mentioned, I think he criticized in those articles. I haven't read them in a long time, but a take that I made about chess, possibly, where in chess research, it takes 11,053 hours on average to reach international master status, but some people made it in 3,000 hours, and others were being tracked at 25,000 and they still haven't made it. So the 11,053 hour rule didn't really tell you anything. And his argument was those international masters are not actually elite. They're not, and I'm saying, but they're way over 10,000 hours. So you're saying they're, they're not elite, but they've practiced more than the average rule you laid out. So we sort of

argued about that. Yeah. And now, and now more recently, he says that you convinced him. So, I mean, I know you know you were running, running buddies for a while. So when he says you've convinced him, so how do you think he would, what have you convinced him? Like, if we had him here, what would be his summary in agreement with you. Because my audience, by the way, is fascinated by this topic. That's why I'm pushing out. They're fascinated about deliberate practice and getting better and what the focus on, whether it matters.

So like what is the, what is Gladwell now convinced of? Because we want to be convinced of this too. Yeah, and I'll try to put it in his words as much. And again, this is on our more recent, our 2019 MIT Stone Sports Analytics, which is discussion, because this time it wasn't really a,

debate on YouTube. And I'm pretty sure he's, I ask him, you know, where's your mind now in the last few minutes? And he says, this isn't word for word, but it's pretty close. He says, I think I made an error of conflation, conflating the idea that a lot of practice is necessary to be great at something, which I think is true, with the idea that that implies narrow specialization as early as possible, which I now think is false. And I think that brings us on to very common. and ground. Yeah. And so what is this factor? When you get to more cognitively demanding task, you can see more variance in the training. So the X factor here is what? Talent? That's certainly what a lot of psychologists would suggest. I think it's hard to disentangle, you know, when you're taking direct

measurements, what is, what's talent and what was that person getting nurtured to a certain point that allows them to express that, but it does seem to be something that isn't changing with practice in that area. So we can put it that way. I'm not sure. And I'm assuming talent is a hopelessly vague term as well, I guess, once you start pulling that thread. You know, like, well, what? So I guess it's a statistical reality, a something that seems to not vary with other types of changes to independent variables or something like that. But it's, we don't really know what it is for some of the, like, is talent a,

training discipline? Is it a physiological thing in the way you perceive certain things? And I know in the sports scene, you had a very nice hardware software approach where you tried to differentiate some of these things. But that always seems a little bit hopelessly ambiguous. You know, like it's useful but not useful. It's like, okay, it's like what do they call it in IQ, G or whatever, Q or like there's some factor that it's a statistical reality.

Right. But no one, it's hard to say what that actually is. is. Right. It just pops out of factor analysis basically. Yeah. No, I agree with you. And I've come to think that some, like in my most recent book, generalist is obviously in the subtitle, but barely appears in the book because frankly, as I thought about it, every different area of research operationalized breadth with different metrics. And so you get to this semantic issue of if I, you know, using words that more obscure than clarify, And I think talent can be that sometimes.

And one of the main takeaways for me from the reporting that went into sports gene, because my book proposal was like diametrically opposed to the book that I ended up writing, honestly. But one of the revelations for me was that the correlation between someone's ability at baseline when they were tested and their ability to improve with training was sometimes correlated, sometimes lightly correlated, and sometimes not correlated at all. And to me, that says we need to be really wary about looking at someone at a certain cross-section and assuming that we understand something about their potential.

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So let me, all right, so moving on to your new book range. I'm going to ask a question, it's not from a specific reader, but it's from many specific reader. So I've been asked this question enough times. I'm just going to give you the generic form. Okay. Okay. So essentially, let's read it this way. I'm in my 20s.

Should I start specializing in a skill to build my career around or not? I think without knowing someone's, let me step back for a second. I hope you won't see this as a cop-out, which is that with these questions I take on balance of nature and nurture and developing a skill, how broad or specialized to be. I know I can't answer these questions perfectly because a lot of the most important factors depend on an individual's particular life milieu. But everyone has these discussions

and usually only with their intuition. And so my goal is to kind of bring stories and research to bear to hopefully make those discussions more interesting and productive. And so that's me partly saying, I don't know how to answer this for any individual person. what I do think you should be doing is investing in skill building and investing in learning. So for me, when I was investing in sharpening my science tools, I thought I was going to be building a career around that.

That absolutely turned out not to be the case, but because I sharpened some tools, they ended up being extremely valuable nonetheless, right? these skills that were ordinary in one area, suddenly I took them somewhere else where they were seen as extraordinary. I couldn't have foreseen that, I don't think. I don't think a lot of us can foresee what, where exactly our careers are going. So I think most important is to be, most of the time, I think most people are doing things that already feel easy or relatively easy to them.

And I think the most important thing is to be continually, whatever that skill is, because you can't really predict what's going to be what the work world you're going to enter will look like, what opportunities will be available to you. So I think the most important is looking to diversify your challenges such that you are not gravitating toward doing things that you're already kind of competent at that stage. So investing in building your skills in your toolbox, I think. Is that a couple answer? Do you want me to take like a shorter shot at just saying should you specialize or not? Okay. Well, so let me try to, I'll try to condense it and then you can push back.

Okay. If I'm not getting it right. So like if you're talking to someone in your 20s, you would say it's important that at the moment you're trying to sharpen a skill. You know, you don't want to not be trying to sharpen skills, but you also should not be too worried about the idea that you need to be figuring out right now and committing to a single skill that you will continue. you to sharpen for the rest of your career. And so the key is sharpening is, we've talked about this before, you know, just one-on-one. Like, sharpening is non-trivial. Like, for a lot of people, there's, it's a revelation to learn about like, oh, what is, how do I learn something hard? How do I learn it quick? Even if I don't want to be world expert, but just to get, you know, good at environmental

science like you did. What does that take? Oh, it takes some focus. It takes some deliberate practice. It takes some, some discipline. And so now my condensation is now longer. than your original answer. So this is not going well. But basically, ABS, like, you always want to be sharpening something. Like, you always want to be trying to learn something and something that your environment is telling you might be useful or interesting, but also be ready that if those environmental conditions change, that you might put that sharpened stick into your belt and pick up another

one to sharpen. Totally. And you might, and I'm a big fan of taking advantage of the early part of the learning curve in multiple things and sort of overlapping them in a unique way. Right. Whereas, like, again, when I came from science, suddenly the people I knew in science viewed me as the ultimate generalist, whereas the journalist viewed me as a specialist because I was coming into

science background. So I think you put it, I think you put it really well. And I, and, and like you said, that sharpening is, is non-trivial because most people aren't, just aren't doing it most of the time. I think, I think the question and your condensation makes me think of the sort of the dark horse project that I write about at a certain point in range, where these people who, you know, have a broad array of skills, but they didn't set out to say, oh, I'm going to be, I'm going to be a polymath or I'm going to be a generalist or whatever. They basically set out in search of, you know, finding, exploring their talents and their opportunities. And so they would frequently say, here's what I'm good at right now.

Here's what I'm weak up and need to learn. Here are the opportunities in front of me. I'm going to take this one right now. And, you know, maybe a year from now I will change because I will have learned something about myself or about the opportunities in front of me. And so it's really that focus on short-term improvement as opposed to asking those questions about what should I do now for 20 years down the road, which you really cannot predict where you'll be anyway. So I think that focus on short-term improvement, even though it sounds bad to say like focus on the short term. Because I think that

kind of focusing on the short term is actually focusing on the long term. Yeah. Well, you know, this is what's interesting about like deliberate practice, let's say. So, Gladwell was sort of sharpening the conversation increasingly towards the elite ends of the performance spectrum, which, you know, I always felt like that discussion was getting farther and farther away from where deliberate practice was most relevant to most people, which was basically the scenario you're talking about. It's, okay, I have this job. It seems like if I could learn, I don't know, OBS, you know, I could do really good streaming video production or, if I can learn how to this programming language or something like that,

that's going to be a, to use our metaphor, a sharpen stick that might be really useful. And in the short term, and I might have to use it long term, it seemed like there is where the rubber hit the road for most people that like, okay, knowing that I should be deliberate and how I learned this skill,

I should push myself pass from comfortable as opposed to just trying to learn information or rope repeat things. It's going to take, you know, be willing to do this for a few months. You know, it's not something I can do over a weekend. That actually my experience when I'm working with actual people is where these concepts were really, really interesting.

And so I always found that it's an interesting observation that the sort of debate about these concepts and what was going on with the debate was all taking place at the opposite end of the spectrum, which is where I think the frameworks get interesting and stretched. And you really try to get at what's going on. But when my readers come to me and they're worried about those debates, I say, look, if you're trying to become a chess grandmaster, I don't think I have good advice for you. But if you think learning CSS or something like that is going to be something that's going to help you get some more career cap on your career, then I think deliberate practice has a lot of usefulness to teach you. I agree with that. And you just reminded me of, and I think I brought this up when we talked just privately, which is when I got stuck sort of in my own writing. After the sports gene came out, I went to, you know, I sort of realized some skills I needed to build, and I went to ProPublica, the investigative outfit to do totally, you know, spent a year doing like drug cartel investigations and whatnot.

And after a few years when I decided to write a second book, I realized I was, well, I didn't realize this at first. I was struggling with my writing. That's what I realized. And I decided to take an online fiction writing course for beginners. And I had talked about doing something like this once to Anders Erickson and confirmed that it did not qualify as deliberate practice because it was not, you know, it was different from what I was trying to do. But I sort of think it does in the broader conceptual sense because I go to this class and I'm suddenly totally incompetent, right? It's all beginners. And so all this feeling of competence that I had built up that I took for granted was suddenly gone.

and we're doing these exercises like the one that really made an impression on me was where you had to write a whole story, or short story, without using any quotes. And something about this, I enjoyed it, and it like flipped a light bulb in my head that, oh my gosh, I'm way over relying on quotes because I've been doing investigative reporting for the last couple of years, in which you're very quote heavy, and your lawyers would much prefer you to put things in other people's words. And I went back through what I had of range and realized I'm using quotes to paper over stuff I don't understand or for things that I could write better with narration. I basically overhauled everything I had of the manuscript at that point.

And so while that might not have met the technical definition of deliberate practice, it very much was helpful because it knocked me out of my, what I call it my rut of competence. But what Russ Roberts said, it's a hammock of competence because it's so comfortable that you don't want to get out. Yeah. So, I mean, you're basically what you're advising towards, not that you're giving advice, but I transform everything into advice because that's my disorder. You're advising towards essentially becoming a, it's like you're a training skill acquisition machine. Like you're just very good at like let me, let me pick something up and I'll pick it up well. And then let me, what's something else? Let me pick that up well. And in some sense, whether that ends up, looking in retrospect, like a specialist track or a generalist track, that's influenced by a lot of things you don't really control. And in some sense, maybe it doesn't even really matter. So maybe you're trying to pick up these skills and just you fall into something. And now you spend 40 years picking up skills that all are kind of related to the same thing and you look like a super specialist. But maybe what happens in a different playing forward of that tape, you know,

that job goes away and then you pick up this other skill. But the underlying thing that seems consistently useful is the ability to actually do the cogatively demanding work of picking up skills, like getting them to a point where I can do this better than someone who doesn't know much about it, not I'm the world's best, but just this notion of I can do that deliberate action. I mean, when I think about you and the things you do, it's really common to all your activity that you're very comfortable with. I mean, all these things are hard. Let me learn this.

Let me take this fiction writing class. Let me, okay, now I'm doing the crime beat. Let me figure out how to do that well. Okay, now I'm the science writer or Sports Illustrated. Oh, I got to do that now. So it's like being a skill acquisition engine in a world in which work is cognitive, I guess. Now I'm trying to spin out a self-help book here is useful. Yes.

And I think one common thing to those is that I, the zigs and zags that I've taken, at first it was sort of incidental. But then I realized that zinging and zagging in a way where, I took things like when I learned certain skills in a certain place, you know, and then you become more common in that place. And then I would try to take it to a place where those particular skills are less common and kind of doing that over and over and over again. Because otherwise, I think it's, you know, of course I think in like track analogies because I was a runner in college, but it's like if you, or you can think of it in weights or whatever. If you lift the same weights, the same number of times every day, you won't get one.

worse, but you aren't going to cause physiological adaptation either to get better. And I think what the very, very, maybe people who listen to this podcast because they follow your work are probably maybe they take this for granted. I don't know. But my impression is that the vast majority of people in all of their work are essentially lifting the same weights. They get to a good enough plateau and lift the same weights the same number of times every day for the rest of their career. And that's We harp about this all the time on the podcast, that the plateau is death. You have to find a way to strain the muscle. There's an analogy I love that, and, you know, that I think of in the context of that,

taking the fiction writing course where I was reading and learning about speed typing, you know, like the court reporters, they use these different kind of keyboards for typing, but then type super fast and their competitions and everything. And the way they get better, apparently we will all just by typing get to between 50 or 80 words a minute, just by sort of doing it. And then you plateau. And those people that are in the competitions, they'll do things like, you know,

set a metronome a little faster and keep up with it no matter how many mistakes they make and do that a couple days and then take it up a little faster. And they can get a lot faster. But I think there's some similarity in a lot of domains where I've looked at the research that it seems like just from doing something for a while, you'll get to a good enough plateau.

But then you start, you come to a point where you see, start having to think a lot more reflectively about how do I challenge myself now? And I think the fact is, it's just, most people just do not do that at all for most of their working life. Yeah, you know, I had a vignette to try to make this point in my book, So Good, They Can't Ignore You. I found this nice conceit where it was a guitar player, you know, I play guitar. And here is someone who was, had been playing guitar for the same amount of time I had. And he started at the same age. He was younger, but he had started at the same age.

By the time he was in his 20s, he was like a well-known guitar player on the professional circuit. And obviously, I never was a well-known guitar player. And so I went to this, I called it the bluegrass frat house. It was this rental house, you know, in Cambridge where all of his bandmates all kind of lived. And I just want to watch you practice. And watching him practice explained that whole difference.

Because what he would do is he would show me, like, okay, here's a lick. here's how comfortable, I can play it comfortably at this speed, right? Great. So here's what I'm going to do today. I'm going to play it 20% faster than that. And he had to concentrate so hard to try to hit the notes 20% faster than his comfort level that he would forget to breathe. And then he would have these ragged gasp, you know, we'd like really suck in the air because his body was forcing him to do it. And the whole point of that story was like, okay, that's why he's a famous guitar player and I'm not, is that he was continually saying, I have no interest in doing things at the level I'm comfortable for. Like, that's what performances are for. You know, I want to, I want to push this. I need to push myself past for I'm comfortable. And if you do that, then a week later, you're much faster at the lick. And that was in a career book, but I was telling that story because exactly what you're saying, is that having that comfort with discomfort, you know, that's where skill comes.

So, okay, let's, now that we're sort of adviceifying your very carefully reported science books, let me give you a real question here. Here's a real scenario. This is a real listener. Let's put this. We'll put your wisdom to work. So Brittany wrote and said, I'm 10 years into my chosen career field. Every time I'm overwhelmed and stressed,

I start thinking about pursuing other fields I'm interested in. It feels like I'd be happier elsewhere. Do you have any suggestions for staying the course? So again, we know you have no other background, so we can treat this as an abstraction. So caveat mTOR, Brittany. But what do you think about when you hear that? That's interesting because the end of that question,

didn't go where I thought it was going to go. I thought she was going to say, do you have any advice for, like, trying something new? Yeah. And she said, do you have advice for staying the course? That's revealing right there, right? Yeah, that's very interesting. Look, I think if you're, you know,

if you look at, it brings to mind that Freakonomics study. It wasn't in Freakonomics, but they used the website to do it about where people who are thinking about changing careers would abide by the result. of a coin flip. And the fact was, more or less, if people were thinking about changing, they should. That was kind of the answer.

So if you're thinking about changing, I wouldn't close your mind to it and only stay the course. But if you want to stay the course, and I assume you want to stay the course without being miserable, I would look for ways to move some of your skills and the things that you do laterally. You know, I don't know what you do. But, again, there's a lot. of potential, you know, in a knowledge economy, right, where people that can engage in knowledge

creation and creative problem solving, we have more lateral mobility than we've ever had in, in recent history anyway. And so I think I would start trying to get a keyhole view into how maybe you can use your skills. And when you say, okay, so if we think narrowly staying the course, like continuing to do exactly what it is that you're doing, you don't want to change at all, then I guess my advice would be to like get a hobby that doesn't relate to your job, because it's shown that if you have a hobby that doesn't relate to your job, it improves your self-efficacy, but if you have a hobby that's directly related to what you do on a daily basis, it actually decreases your self-efficacy. So if what you want is advice for staying doing

exactly what you're doing exactly what you're doing it, then, you know, eat right, get a lot of sleep, exercise, and get a hobby that's not exactly what you're doing already. But if it's capitalizing on the skills that you have, like not feeling like you're going backward with what you've developed, I'd say start, start, this sounds so dumb, but I have this thing I call book of small experiments where I sort of force myself at least every other month to write a hypothesis about some field of work I'm interested in, some skill I'd like to explore, this is where the fiction class came out of. I wanted to explore different types of structure and writing, and I'll write down the hypothesis, like what do I think will help? What do I think I'll be good or

bad at and then I find a way to explore it, whether that can be as simple as talking to someone doing work that I might want to do or actually taking a class. And so I would start running some of your own personal experiences to force yourself to figure out, well, maybe, you know, how can you capitalize on the things that you do without feeling like you're going backward, if that makes sense. So again, I sort of spliced that into what staying in the course means again. exactly if it means like not deviating at all or just sort of transporting your skills. Yeah. And I think that that corresponds to a lot.

Brittany, you might hear me talk about with career capital theory, you know, taking your career capital somewhere else, but trying to find a place that is going to value those skills or at least allow you to use those skills as leverage if you're going to shift. And I'll also key in just briefly, I'm also worried about the phrase, I'm overwhelmed and stressed. So there's also another boring tactical angle here, Brittany. If you're overwhelmed and stressed because your productivity systems are out of control, that's a factor to try.

You know, it's like when you have insomnia, the doctor says, let's try some lifestyle factors first just to be sure. So give that a try. If you're in a career, I don't think people talk about this enough in the literature, but if you're in a career in which there is no way to sidestep the overwhelm and stress, and there's a lot of careers that's basically baked into it. They will just keep, you have very little autonomous. mean they'll keep increasing the workload, you know, past where you're comfortable, that I often

feel like is a good, a good motivator to shift. I think it's a real issue. It's one we don't, we don't, we don't think about enough. But, well, that's useful. All right. So here's one, sorry, can I get one thing to that? Yeah, please, go ahead. That I've found really useful in my own career. So I mentioned twice I went from places where I was at like an established brand to a startup. So I mean, I had a, you know, eventually had an office on. on 32 floors above 6th Avenue with a big window at Sports Illustrated. And I left that for ProPublica, which was at first I went to ProPublica as an intern from being a senior writer at Sports Illustrated.

Like they were like, do you know what you're applying for here? And you go in your elbow to elbow in a startup office. But I learned skills that benefited me in many ways, you know, including eventually, financially, but not feeling concerned about going backwards in terms of title. or sometimes in salary, if I felt like it was an investment in future skills, I realized was more rare than I thought where I would see some of my colleagues who said, you know, I just got offered this other job. I want to take it.

But my title is going to go from senior reporter to reporter. That doesn't say, you know, go down the masthead. Like, who cares? If those are the skills, you know, you want to learn. So I'd say make sure to also examine if one of the reasons that you are so intent on staying the course is a fear of, you know, taking a temporary step back. backward in some sort of status, and if that really, really is that important to you. I would just make sure you evaluate that. And it may be, but I would spend some time thinking about it.

Now, you had two types, two categories of shifts in your career, which is probably worth unpacking. So when you're talking about, for example, sports illustrated to ProPublica, they're within writing, right? So the same career capital you had built up and illustrated was applicable, pretty directly, but then you also had the other category of shift, which I think for most people would be scarier, which was from a science grad program into writing. And so to try to get at how to make that decision more concretely, here's a question from Asher, who said, is it possible to commit deep work to two different disciplines? But then he elaborates that he is a law student who writes fiction. So for someone in that situation, so they're dealing with category

potentially of shift here. What do you say, what is the advice that you give based on your similar shift you'd give to someone like Asher? And Asher, so Asher's question is, can you do like, you said, can you do deep work in both of these things at once? Yeah, I think he was asking me, can I keep both of these going alive? And I'm kind of elaborating his question because we have you here to say, well, should he? I mean, should he switch from one to the other? Should he be I'm a legal thriller writer. How do you navigate when you're, it's a category to switch. So, uh, between though like vastly different on the surface feels, even though there's

deep connections. Um, how do you think through that type of decision? I mean, for one, I think in, in, and this is kind of specific to fiction writing, but I've been to think that reading and not just reading, but thinking about what you're reading when you read fiction is a really underutilized tool for becoming a better writer. Like fiction writers tend to. experiment with a lot more varied structures than do nonfiction writers. And most nonfiction writers I know read mostly only nonfiction, which is fine. But I think writing and organizing ideas is

incredibly useful no matter what you're doing. And I think for people who are not just like sitting on the beach and doing escapism, but like paying attention, like when I'm reading a novel by the end, the sort of notes I've taken about transitions and sometimes subtle transitions of narrative voice and will the front of the book will be like all written up because I'm trying to think about how transitions are made and how information is ordered. And I think that can be incredibly useful. You know, if you're going to be a lawyer, talking about structuring information to make persuasive arguments. And I think that is something that's done, right? Like the, I think I saw Joe Nesbo, who was, you know, was a professional musician and then became like the best selling. He's like the

girl with a dragon tattoo, but of Norway, like their bestselling crime writer. And he said, basically what you're doing is you take a narrative story and then you, because you know how it's going to go and then you scatter the clues throughout the narrative. And in some ways, I think that would be likening, you know, that could be likened to making an argument in front of a jury or a judge is where you know the picture that you want to create at the end. The problem is how do you assemble these scattered clues to bring the audience along with you? And so I think we don't, you know, we don't have to view these things as totally separate, but people often do. But I think it requires you paying attention to that fiction in a certain way and thinking about how it's applicable to presenting ideas.

Otherwise. So would you think some of the situation do them both, at least for now, like, because they're informing each other? Was that where you would fall? I mean, what I'm realizing in your story is that a key component. to your shift from environmental science into writing was you weren't leaving. It's not like you were leaving a position. You finished your training in one thing. You finished your master's and said, okay, what do I want to do next? I want to shift now towards writing, which is different than let's say you are a practicing scientist. So I'm thinking about in this context here as well, because when it comes to writing in particular,

like one of the nice things about writing is that there's a pretty reliable way to figure out, is my skill at a level for me to do this professionally, which is you can try to sell writing. I think every famous thriller writer, this is a hobby of mine. I like to go through like the famous genre book writers and uncover their origin stories. Every single one of these origin stories is I was writing at 5 a.m.

I was writing, like Clive Custler's case, I was writing at night. My wife worked the night shift and I was bored after the kids went to bed. I would write at night. You know, Grisham, he was both a lawyer and in the state legislature. writing on legal pads, you know, in between those two things.

So there's this nice element of like, well, you can actually just try it at the same time. And I don't know. Do you see a difference between leaving what you were doing the transition to something versus something ends? You're trying to decide what's next and a more natural place to make some changes. I do see a difference. And I will say, though, I curtailed my, at one point I was planning on going on to a PhD in science. So I sort of, I decided I at least wanted to finish to my master's. So I sort of proactively curtailed that as opposed to being finished and saying,

okay, now I'll go off in a different direction. But I do think there's a difference. I am assuming that he's doing fiction because he loves it. And so I wouldn't suggest not to do that. And again, I think there's pretty good evidence that having a hobby that's not exactly what you're doing at work improve self-affecacy. And so I think we need, you know, it can be really useful to have outlets like that. But I do think there are differences.

I do think there are differences in what you're talking about. But I'm loath to sort of say, well, drop that because I think you can pursue most of them. And the fact is I think for most people, they are filling up so much of their time with, what's a diplomatic way to put it. I don't know, like nonsensical stuff that's not useful for anything that we actually have quite a bit more time to have meaningful engagement. I mean, you know this as well as anyone, to have more meaningful engagement with more things if we just cut out all the like total useless nonsense.

I was just reading some study of people using social media and people were asked what value they put on social media, how much would they pay to be allowed to remain on social media for the subsequent month? And the typical answer was $0. And then those people went and spent like, you know, five hours a week or something on social media after saying $0. And then in kind of a companion study, people who really did value it and said they demanded, let's say it was something like an average of $100 in order to be allowed to have someone kick them off of social media for a month. So they took their $100. When the month was over, they were asked, would they go for a second month?

And at that point, they only demanded like $83. So, you know, they had going off it for a month had lowered the value they placed on it. So I actually think that we can be engaged seriously with more things if we cut out a bunch of the stuff that has like no value add whatsoever. Yeah. No. And you are you are preaching to a choir right now that knows this hymn. But I would say another thing, and this is relevant to Asher, but it's something I picked up. Another thing I picked up in your story, which I think is important.

important. When you decided to get serious, I want to write a book or an article on this particular condition that had afflicted your friend. You found someone who knew about the world, right? You got a mentor within journalism to help guide you and point you the way. And this is something I talk about sometimes. There seems to be like a procrastinatory instinct that can be subdued if your brain believes, okay, you know what you're doing. Like, okay, you actually understand this field. You know what would really be involved in writing this. You are on the right track. That makes a big difference. And people doing fiction writing on the side, I talk about this a lot on the podcast. They're often at great danger of basically avoiding any of the reality check part. You know,

okay, how does fiction write? If I want to publish a novel, like what would really be involved? Like, what would my skill have to be? How do you get there? What type of training do people do? What type of feedback do I do? How do I get an agent? A lot of fiction writers, aspiring fiction writers, just avoid that because they like the romanticism of just, you know, I read Stephen King on writing and I want to just like do my thousand words a day and it's kind of romantic. But without that mentorship, it's hard to make, not only, obviously it's hard to actually have results because you're probably dissipating a lot of energy, but it's hard to maintain motivation. So I want to flag that part in your story as one to the listeners. I think it's a really important piece to it.

Yeah. Sorry, no, go ahead. I mean, you're up to you. No, I was just going to say, I think that probably made, it's crucial what you did. And I don't want, I don't want that to be missed by people out there thinking about doing similar things. It reminds me of some research I touched on only very briefly in the sports gene that I hope to write about, you know, more someday. So the, you know, you mentioned like asking, looking for a mentor, right? There's a woman named Mariah Elfrey L. Frank Gemzer in the Netherlands who run these things called the Groning End talent studies. I apologize for anyone who's Dutch for my pronunciation there. That's how it would look to an American. And she looked at, she followed kids from age 12 in classrooms and

soccer teams and everything. Some of them went on to become pro soccer players. And what she found was, I mean, there were certain, say in the soccer field, there were certain physiological parameters. If you couldn't run seven meters a second, you weren't going to become an elite soccer player, period. But there were behavioral characteristics. Like you'd see in videos of the kids who would become future pros when they're 12, they're the ones going up to the coach and going like, why are we doing this drill again? I think I've already mastered this. I think I need to work on this other thing. And the coach is like, oh, God, can you just get back in line? But these are the kids that are taking accountability for their own learning, right? So called self-regulatory learning. And when I talked to

Mariah and I wanted to use some of her research for my own self-improvement, I sort of said, you know, I was kind of soliciting self-help advice from her. And she gave me these questions. And she said, ask yourself, like, get a journal, right? Ask yourself these questions. It was like four questions, you know, every month. And it's, you know, what skill am I trying to build? What do I think my strengths and weaknesses there are? Who do I need to help me figure that out and get to the next level?

And I was like, well, but why would I answer those every month? They're going to basically be the same. And the fact is I almost never answered them quite the same way because you realize you're learning stuff if you if you reflect on it she said the one word she had was reflection if she had even one word from her all of her research it would be that you you want to have that some formal process of reflection some people do it intuitively but most don't and when you have it what it spurs you to do is to realize when you're like not taking not learning from what you're doing and taking obvious steps for improvement and so you know I think to some degree some of that came a bit

natural to me where like when I worked the daily news, okay, great, I'm awesome at, I know how to track people down all in person on the streets, no phone, no documents. Then my next job, I sort of looked for one where there would be none of that and it would be all phone and all documents. So you're sort of assembling the toolbox. And I really formalized that for myself when I came across her work in thinking about who to seek out, you know, and sort of what steps to take. So I'm a lot more formally reflective, I would say, when it comes. to, you know, seeing how to connect skills and that. Yeah, anyway, I'm being digress.

Well, no, that's, that's actually fascinating. So clarify again, what is this exact reflective questionnaire? So you said, what am I already good at? What do I need work on? And who is it that can help me make the best progress on it? What exactly was that self-reflective questionnaire? Yeah, I could, I mean, so it would be, I could actually probably pull up her, her questions she sent me. but they essentially amounted to, you know, what am I trying to do?

What skill am I trying to build? What in that, am I already good at? Where do I think I'm strong and where do I think I'm weak? How can I figure out or who can help me figure out whether I'm correct about my strengths and weaknesses? And then who can help me, you know, what do I need to do to improve and who can help me do that? What people do I need to help me do that? And how can I engage those people, basically?

So there's always the person aspect there is interesting. So like that that is a part of the questionnaire is not just what I can do, but who can help me. Totally. And I think that's important. And I think the one thing I will add to that, though, is, you know, obviously I get, and I'm sure you get a lot asked for help with things. And I get that a lot, but it's often jumping way ahead, right? It's often like, can you introduce me to your agent, you know, as opposed to some that's more skill related that I think would be would be more useful you know right right like

how do I get my writing to a level that whatever it's above a threshold in which it's feasible to publish a book yeah yeah and when I approach people I try to have done my homework on them like the the guy who I asked to sort of become a mentor when I was getting into journalism do my homework on him think about things that I can add to him you know so it's not just a one way relationship because again one of her questions was how can I get, how can I get these people to help me? And I think that goes beyond just asking. I think it's thinking about how can you make it a positive experience for them also. Right. So this is very interesting. So I'm going to now apply this to a, there's another question I had here from Tom that was asking, what's your take on whether you should work to improve your

strengths or your weaknesses? But it sounds like if you applied this approach, there's not a strengths, weakness is binary. It's this particular skill where I need it to be or not. And so you're taking skills that are not where you need them to be and you improve it. That could be a skill, if I'm understanding this correctly, a skill that you're identifying, I need to get this even farther to get where I want to get. You might be at a skill level there that everyone would say that's a strength of yours. You're really good at that.

And so it seems like the strength weakness binary is not that useful, at least in this framework. It's just where are you trying to get what skills are not where they need to be to get you there? Whether or not you would call it a strength or weakness, I guess, is it seems like it's maybe needlessly confusing, actually, if you're thinking about skill improvement through that framework. I think so. And I just pulled up while we were waiting the very first. I tweaked these over time as I talked to Mariah, but I just pulled up the first time she ever sent me some suggested questions if you want me to read those. Yeah. I'm an email.

Okay. So she said, what's your goal? So these were questions that just the first time I asked, she sent and said, answer these at least every month. What's your goal? Has to be as clear as possible, but it doesn't need to be realistic at this point already. Dreaming is allowed at this point. Do you have any idea of what's needed to perform at the level you aim for? How do you make sure that you get, and you're supposed to phrase says, how do I make sure?

How do I make sure that I get an even better idea of what's needed to perform at that level? How am I going to arrange that? Who are the people I need to reach that goal? and how can I make sure that they'll help me to reach that personal goal? Am I sure I want to reach the goal and why? Those were the original set of questions that she said. And there's a hard question sometimes too. And maybe that's part of it.

You know, I ran this, I had this course a while ago with my friend Scott Young. It was helping people in their careers. It's called Top Performer. But a big part of this course, actually it turned out that like the thing that the students really needed help with was figuring out essentially those type of questions. How do I actually figure out what I need? And what do I need to do to get there? Who can tell me? And we had the students basically acting like journalists. They actually had to go out and basically do reporting on their field to even figure out these questions. And so would you say this

framework you're talking about here is a at least partial solution to how do you deal with getting better in a Hogarthian wicked learning environment? Like this. This is the type of exercise you have to do to figure out how to thrive in that type of environment, which defines the environment of most people's workplace. I mean, I think you hit it on the head in the sense that the goal is, and I just heard from Robin Hogarth, and he's got another book out, by the way, that I encourage people to check out. But that it is an attempt, you can't reduce a wicked, you know, again, there's a spectrum, but you can't reduce the most wicked learning. learning environments to the most kind ones. You know, research is not going to be like cancer research isn't going to become golf tomorrow, but it is an attempt to make wicked learning environments more kind by setting up feedback systems,

setting up reflection, setting up feedback that is, you know, not delayed all the time, having reference points that you can look back at and see if you're moving. So I think this very much is an attempt to shift our, existence in the wicked world to just make it a little bit more kind by by imposing some systems that even if they're imperfect they're a huge huge step up from just purely kind of going with your intuition I think right and it's all relative like this is something we talk about often on here is you can if you set up a training system of this type you can compare it to golf and say man this is much worse than you know Tiger Woods is swing coach or something it's it's so much more ambiguous

and I'm not getting that type of that clear feedback. There's no motion caption cameras that tell me, you know, I'm two inches out of alignment. But if you compare it to the guy next to you who's doing none of this, like relative to them, you are going to move up much quicker. That's one of the points I often think as optimistic about the wicked nature of the learning environments of most knowledge work is that almost no one is actually trying to do any type of systematic training. And yeah.

So I say like, look, if you're not like, if you're not really, you're in a world of golf where like no one trained, they just sort of went out and played sometimes. Even if you weren't naturally that good at golf, you could probably get your tour card. And that basically explains proverbially a lot of knowledge work right now. I mean, at least I hope that's true. That's my optimistic take I give people. That sounds like you might be in some agreement there. Definitely.

I mean, I think there's a lot of low-hanging fruit. And I think one of the reasons it stays hanging is because it's a little mushyer, you know, than golf. and that maybe like doing these sorts of things seems soft or weird or like a waste of time. But I really don't think it is. And I think Mariah's research shows that, for one, not just hers. But even to the question of that last one that's, am I sure I want to reach this goal and why? Even that changed for me. Like there were things early on that I was putting it, I want to write for this or that place.

And over time, that morphed into actually I want autonomy. I want work autonomy. And I care less about exactly where I'm doing that. And I think I would have just been more on autopilot. Like most people are just on autopilot, right, except for maybe the early part of their career where they're sort of having to adjust to something new and they're motivated by just like having a job or being in the work world for the first time. But then I think we kind of settle into that just, you know, swinging your driver at the

driving range kind of practice. And you know, sometimes when you do this exercise, it's not just that the answer's change. I've experienced this in my own life. sometimes you get the answers and say, oh, yeah, I don't think I want to do that. But that's really useful. I'll be personal. I went through this exercise within my academic career. And I, because I have some journalistic background, I was basically pulling apart the answers to this question as applied to what's required to be one of the top thinkers in my particular theoretical computer science

niche, right? Like one of the top five in terms of just the papers you publish and how influential they are and the difficulty of the open problems you solve. And I basically got an answer to the question, you know, okay, this is what it would take and here's how you would need to do it. And here's who you would need to work with. And I basically came away with that answer concluding I don't think I want to do that. But that was very useful actually, right? I mean, it turns out that you basically have to, the number of hours involved is crazy. And the amount of time you have to spend reading, it all came down to reading other people's papers, which is incredibly difficult in mathematical disciplines because you're trying to, you're trying to understand proofs and you

only have bits of the proof. So you have to kind of solve bits of the proof on the fly. It's very hard. And you have to do it all the time. And, you know, it's an eight hour a day, six day a week type endeavor, but that was very useful too, you know, because then you face like, what's the dragon here? What's the reality? Like, what would it actually take? And sometimes you get that, you get that answer and you say, okay, I know I don't want to do that, but that is useful as well. Totally. I mean, I haven't, I've yet to have a job that was what I thought it would be before I actually started doing it. And so I think that's, that's really useful. And that most of the goals people tend to have are sort of more like the ones of I want to get an agent than like,

you know, I want to do the stuff that will make it inevitable that I'll get an agent. Yeah. So, yeah, no, I totally do. And I'm curious your, you know, I think, I think about, I'm, I know, I can't remember. One of you blurb the other's book, Adam Alter, who's who would also run with Gladwell and I sometimes, you know, he wrote irresistible about behavior. Yeah, yeah, I know Adam, yeah. And wonderful guy.

And one of the things, if I looked at his, just because maybe I'm going off on a tangent here, but you mentioned journalism. And obviously, you like he are, a professor and an expert, but also take a journalistic approach to certain things. His first book, Drunk Tank Pink, was good, summary of research, but irresistible was where he decided, I think he was almost in some ways hindered like a lot of academics are by their own feeling of expertise in their area of competence because they don't go, out and ask other people who might be attacking related problems because they have so much expertise that they'll just write what they know. And his second book, he went out and used his expertise, but also became a reporter. And that book, to me, is like another level from his first

one. And you do that too, right? So it's interesting to hear how the sort of journalistic inclination has helped your career personally, because I think it's, I've noticed with a lot of academic experts, sometimes I think they can be hindered by their expertise because they stop they stopped looking outside of it, even if the answer they're looking for might be outside of it. I mean, that's what made an opportunity for me with the sports team is that all these people doing work that bore on the same question didn't know who one another were and weren't looking at the next trench over. So it was left for someone like me to say, hey, you guys are all kind of revolving around the same question. Well, there's definitely an uncanny valley between, you know, when you have

academics who are writing public-facing books. And if the public-facing book is too close, it's too close to their professional feel. It's a very difficult position sometimes because they cannot escape the notion of this is going to be scrutinized by my academic peers. And they're saying, this is not rigorous. And you are not successfully showing off the sophistication of your understanding of the various competing frameworks at play here. And it's very uncomfortable. But if you get beyond that valley, and I think Adam did when he got all the way out to irresistible, because he had not actually worked on the psychology of addiction that was new for him. Though he had a background in psychology.

Again, he's a great range case study, by the way. But when you get past that uncanny valley, you're right, it is like it's free. And so in my case, one of my big advantages is that I was a professional writer before I was a professional academic. And so, you know, I signed my first book contract when I was an undergraduate. it. I was like 20 just turned 21. So I was writing kind of to pay the bills, you know, sort of like, you know, the grad student who plays in a band, you know, plays in the jazz quintet on the weekends to make some extra money. Like that's how I paid for, you know, that's how I, you know, made money because the PhD stipend is so, so small is I wrote book. So I was a writer before I became

an academic. And so that was a great, uh, freeing thing for me. Because I just, I, I saw them a separate magistrate. So I didn't care. I was like, what, my theoretical computer science colleagues could care less about what I'm writing over here. It has nothing to do with them. They're not going to come and say, huh, you're missing out so-and-so's theorem or this is whatever, right? And that was really freeing. But in a kind of typical range style fashion, now way into my career, you know, it turns out I'm at an institution that has this huge initiative on technology and society. And now I'm a senior professor there and my writing has moved back towards to cover topics that have to do with technologies and their impact on culture and their impact on society. And it all has come back

together. And now suddenly it's, oh, yeah, I'm a technologist who also writes about the impact tech on society. And I'm on, you know, like a paid sabbatical starting in December that Georgetown has sent me on to just write about the type of stuff I've been writing about. So it is officially integrated into this other part of my life. But it started completely separate. And that was crucial because I could just write without worrying about, you know, what they were going to say. And then in the world of writing, it was a superpower because you know the pressure probably, right, David, that you can't have advice. And you can't be too pragmatic because, I don't know, I get this sense in a lot of writers of like people aren't going to think you're smart. You know,

like that's not smart writing. You can't give advice. That's like, you know, dumb writing. But I didn't care about that because I was at MIT at the time doing math. So I already think I'm smart. So I don't need I don't need my writing to convince people I'm smart. And so the whole thing worked out great. So I could mix. This is a great range case study. So I could mix advice with more smarter journalistic stuff because I didn't care. I wasn't trying to convince people I was smart with my writing. I was already overly self-confident about that. And then the whole thing ended up with conciliance down the line. And so I don't know, that's a long digression. But basically, yes, I agree. I don't even remember what the original point was, Adam writing about a topic outside of his research was good. So that's a long way of spelling, yes. But I think that also addressed one of the earlier questions, you know, where we got to talking a little bit about, it's kind of hard to foresee exactly how things might come together. But I think something, it seems like it's emerging that we really agree on is that there are approaches to the things you're doing that are vastly superior to what most people are doing on their autopilot. And it's hard to predict exactly how those things might come together.

But I think if you're reflective about that and sort of approach it in a meaningful way, there's a lot higher chance they're going to come together in a useful way. That freeing, that issue of your working identity and being made to feel free, I mean, that's a big deal, right? That's really interesting. Yeah, social pressures and cultural pressures are, yeah, they're interesting, especially in academia, you know. But it's the same as journalism.

It's weird. If you're purely in journalism, I think they have very similar pressures about who are you as a writer and how sophisticated are you and how smart are you and how important are you. And academics have the exact same issues just within their disciplines. And those are powerful forces. I think it really has a suppressive effect in nonfiction writing, just like it does in academia while you get much more specialization. There's an interesting cultural aspect to a suppressive effect on like innovation or what people

are willing to what people are willing to try. At least I observed that. I mean, I don't know what you see. You're on the, you're on the journalist side of it. But, you know, cultures are strong. I guess that's not a, that's not an original statement. But cultures can be strong. It's, and it's, but it's interesting. You mentioned that too. Because I've, one thing I have struggled with is like when I, at Sports Illustrated, I did a bunch of investigative stuff. And then, you know, at ProPublica, it's like very strong identity there as an investigative reporter. And sort of over time, sometimes I was pulling up identity anchors, you know, this is the first time I haven't had a day job in journalism in a long time. And that feels difficult, but some of those swerves, like my sort of, something that freed me

was, again, working at a tabloid, right? And so there I went from having been in science grad school where you tell everyone, you know, and everyone feels you're smart. So there's like a lot of validation. And then I'm the crime reporter at night for a tabloid. And then not so much, right? And then not so much, right? But I think I found that very freeing because what I did notice with a lot of other science writers is they kind of want to be scientists, I think, or at least culturally be scientists. And so they will, I'm okay asking questions because when I'm interviewing a scientist, it's in service of the reader. And even though I don't necessarily love it, I will ask stupid questions a bunch and with the faith that when they see what I produce, that they'll get it. And I think having been an overnight crime reporter tabloid knocked my identity down so far from, you know,

being a grad student at Columbia in the sciences, that it lifted a lot of the burden of feeling like I have to prove to a scientist. I'm interviewing that, that I'm a smart science person also kind of. Oh, that's interesting. So that's a science reporting thing. Yeah. The like, okay, when I interview you, that's interesting.

I'll tell you this, though, having been interviewed, if what you do is math, reporters don't try. That's something where people are happy to be like, I don't nothing about it. So that's interesting. So you're saying if it's like genetics or something where, you know, you have some expertise. And I'm really good science writers too, right? Like if they're like, you know, a lot of journalists, I think probably going to journalism because they were good at writing and terrible at math. But even like really good, you know, like in science, in popular science public,

I'll read it and I'll be like, there's a basic question here that I really want to answer. I don't know why it's not answered. Either the writer doesn't know what other people won't understand or they probably just didn't want to ask it, you know, because they sort of want to be like a scientist. And I see that, I see that a lot. And I'm talking about like good science writers, so not just. That's interesting. Yeah. Yeah, that's interesting. Well, here, we're running a little long in time here, but based on off of a question I saw here, how many papers would you estimate scientific papers you had to read to produce a book like range? How many? Well, for both of my books, the first year of the reporting, I try to get through

about 10 a day every day for the year, and I don't make it every day, but I make it most days. But by getting through it, I don't mean I'm reading every word. Like, first I'll, you know, I'm not going to go straight through and read the whole method section, because first I'm going to try to figure out is this interesting and relevant before I do like any evaluation for rig? If you go to the result, like in the abstract, so you, okay, is there a result here that might be worth understanding? Is that where you would start? Yeah, abstract. And then I'll, you know, read the introduction because a lot of times that will also have citations that kind of lay some of the background conceptual work that they're either

responding to, you know, in trying to refute or supporting. And then I'll skim down a little lower and, you know, maybe I'll look at some of the methods, but look at the conclusions. And first I'll go through a lot of papers and you start to get a sense of the names in the field. And that kind of make what I call now a master thought list where basically as things start to orbit around a certain question or interest of mine, I'll take a graph or a stat or a quote or something from a paper and I'll put it on the document and I'll put the citation so that I can keep track of it. And as they start coalescing, I'll move them into what I call tags, you know, and which is, a certain topic. Like for the sports gene, it might have been a specific gene.

And the tag is just literally on like a word document or pages document where I'm writing words that I think I would search if I want to search for that category. Okay. And then as as different tags kind of coalesce around something, I move those toward one another and it becomes a little bit of like a storyboard. Are you just technically speaking? So you have a tag like in a document, a page and word. You're pasting under it like a category of papers, like the names of the paper.

papers? Or you're taking quotes from the papers? What's the actual? And just to give credit, this is all inspired by a question from Nariana, who was asking me how I read academic papers. I'm saying, no, no, don't ask me. David is the academic paper like reading machine. He's world class at it. So I'm, I just redirected that towards you. But anyways, yeah, so technically speaking, elaborate this. You have tags. What's going on here? So let's say that one for, like in chapter four of range, I wrote about desirable difficulties, right? Things that make learning slower and more frustrating, but deeper and more flexible. And so that could be a tag, desirable difficulties. But maybe at first it would have just been learning or math learning or something like that.

And so I would have started taking some quote that I really liked or the stat from the paper. I just copy it, paste whatever that salient point is under the tag of, say, desirable difficulties. And then I'll put like in a comment bubble or something, the citation of the paper so I can always get back to it. And I'll just- Do you have an internal indexing system or do you actually have citations? What do you actually use to reference the paper internally? It is, well, I'll, lately I've been using Scrivener. And so I'll have a document in Scrivener and I'll just use the sort of the notes bar on the side. So I'll hit like a, you can just make a citation, like there's a footnote function basically or an N-note function.

And I can just see them running on the side. But how do you reference, when you reference the paper, you're actually like writing a citation for it? or do you like number them or, you know, do you have a shorthand? Oh, yeah. No, when I'm doing it in my research phase, because I don't want to slow down that much, I will put like whatever, something that's in the title of the file of the paper I will have downloaded so that the prompt I have will then I'll use to search it on my own computer, basically. Yeah.

And just as an aside for the readers, this is what, like, when it comes time for me to send off my in-notes for someone else to edit them, what I'm basically doing is taking like, name. dot PDF, name. PDF, and going and looking up those files, all right, what was the actual name of the paper? Because of friction reduction. So anyway, okay, so this is great. So you have tags and then you have quotes or stats under the tags. And those are comment bubbled or noted in scrivener the actual papers they come from. And you're saying the tags evolve. And that's actually part of how you're capturing your knowledge evolving or sharpening on the topic. Yeah, yeah. And And in a lot of that, I mean, for range, that document became like 60,000 words or something like that. And a lot of it I don't end up using, but I start to realize that some of these interests are, you know, starting to fall around certain topics or are apropos of certain particular questions. And by the way, I use spotlight like crazy. So when I'm naming these files, I not only put like the real name of a paper, the author, but also something that I think I would search if I were just going to try to find it again. So that master thoughtless becomes sort of my own.

index to ideas. And then it morphs into a storyboard as I start shuffling the different tags toward ones that are sort of more like one another, if that makes sense. How do you track your cue of papers to read? And like, so what you have for you say, they just stored somewhere on your computer. The relevant stuff is in your documents. But ideal, when I'm reading for research like this, you keep coming across new papers. What's your method for basically building a queue of what to get to? I don't. I wouldn't say I have a great one. Although a lot of times when I'm doing that master thought list, I'll take something from one document and I'll note another paper that it like referenced under that and I'll put the link to it or whatever it is or somewhere that I would have to search to find it. And so then when I sort of circle back around to that idea, I already have like a reading list there basically. But I don't have a perfect system for that. I mean, frankly, I early on cast a pretty broad net and go down. some rabbit holes that turned out not to be very fruitful.

So I wish I had a better system for deciding exactly what I'm going to read. But like when I was living in New York, I had an alumni reading card for the Columbia Library, and I would go in, there were four computers in the library that were logged into every journal that the university owned at the time. So, and hyperlinked in citations, you could go into a paper. And if a citation piqued your interest, you could just go right into the citations, that one and fly off to that paper. So I'd go in there with a thumb drive from the time the library open to the time it closed and I could get like a hundred papers on that thumb drive and then I'd be

reading those for a week or something like that. Yeah. So yeah. Yeah. Now do you collect anecdotes and stories, anecdotes, I should say, and stories. Is that simultaneous? Like you collect those and you capture them under tags or is that an entirely separate process? And does that require the same level of organization or is it just, okay, I really understand this particular topic. And then I'm just thinking what's a good story and I've heard about Tiger and Federer or something, how different is how you track that narrative, those narrative elements that also go into these books. I mean, I read widely and a lot just in general. So I sort of, once I start getting interested in the topic, I have my mind open for stories. But to be quite honest, and this is, a lot of stories come out of

reading those papers because they'll be referenced in passing or something like that. And so it'll, I'll just then say, like, I'm going to go follow up on that story. right? So an academic author might just reference something because they think it's interesting or as someone else said or for what example or whatever. And so a lot of the stories actually I'll see some seed in an academic paper and then I'll just go follow up and report it out. That's a lot of not all of them, but a lot of them come from that. Yeah. And you said it takes you about you do this for about a year before you feel like you know the fields enough to write with confidence about them. With my first book, I didn't plan it so systematically, but what happened was I wrote an article in Sports Illustrated. That led to the book proposal. And I got so deep into certain rabbit holes because frankly, I realized that the article in Sports Illustrated, which won a society professional journalist award, by the way, was misleading in certain ways because, because. It was titled why 10,000 hours is the key. Was that the?

It was not totally like that. And partly it was because it passed the fact-checking because, like, people with PhDs were telling the fact-checkers things were right. And then when I really dove into those papers realized that not only did their data not prove the things they were saying, even the initial setup of the study couldn't have proved the things they were saying no matter what happened, no, no, what data came out of it. What was the claims? I maybe don't want to say, but. Oh, no, no, not at all. I mean, nobody really calls me on this, but I've cited my own article as having been. been wrong.

But there would be claims, say, about, say that you would compare two groups, like two groups of people with, you know, sprinters and normal people, and you would do a genome-wide association study and see that there were like no genetic differences that popped up or something like that. And they would say, well, therefore, this proves that there's like no differences in physiology. And it turns out that if you do, you know, let's take my friend who passed away as an example. His condition is caused by a single gene mutation. That the gene mutation was found that caused that condition in the late 90s. And scientists said, great, now we can screen everybody for

this condition. Then they found a few more. Last time I checked there were about 1,430. Individual mutations, any one of which can cause that condition. Two-thirds of them have only been identified in a single family. And so you could have thousands of people with the same disease in a study, all with the same disease, none of them having or few of them having the same causative mutations. And you wouldn't want to conclude, well, this isn't genetically caused because we're not seeing a common genetic cause.

So there were things like that that I realized. I was told that absence of evidence equaled evidence of absence, and it was just a misunderstanding of how genetic studies should. work basically. Yeah, interesting. That's interesting. And you didn't really, by the way, you didn't really get in, you didn't really get in that much trouble for the sports teams, right? Even though, aren't those, are those dicey waters? Like, you're, because you're talking about genetics and people talk about essentialism and people get, you know, there's a lot of blank slatism and such like that. It seems like it wasn't really an issue you had to deal with. And I'm wondering

if that's just because it was very rigorous. It was so obviously well researched and written. And also so obviously just coming from a point of I'm curious about this, you know. But am I wrong in that? Were you worried? Was that a dicey proposition, that topic? I was, I was worried. I was worried. Yeah.

I mean, you know, I grew up like in a community with a lot of Jamaican immigrants. I wasn't, you know, I felt sort of, you know, I had plenty of friends who whose personal identities were represented in the book. that I could have read it to see if they think I was saying anything inappropriate. But no, it's totally, totally, I was worried, especially because there were, you know, there were some people I interviewed who sort of said, you don't want to write about this. Like, believe me, you don't want to write about this. But I felt, I felt like it was important to write about some of it. And the reason it's dicey, well, first of all, it was a huge surprise to me that I got more

criticism over the 10,000 hours rule than writing about, like, race and sex and gender. but there you know i came to feel that if i didn't write about some of the issues of race and ethnicity that there was actually there's actually something important to do there that it's dicey because people um because of the old idea that like athleticism and IQ are on a biological teeter-totter and so that if you say if some people are talented uh physically therefore it means they are not smart and the fact is that is not the idea that that flowed from scientific research is nonsense.

Okay, there were, that didn't develop until black athletes became associated with athleticism. So Hitler, you know, we wanted to have the Nazi Olympics. The goal is to show we are the strongest of mind and of body. And then Jesse Owens came in and reigned on that parade. And so it was just a marketing trick to say like, well, oh, yeah, closer to animals, that's why. And so it was always just,

you know, bigotry. It was never like anyone saying, oh, these are the scientific results, therefore we should be racist, right? It was always the bigotry leading the way. And so I thought it was important to point that out. And sometimes denial of genetics having any meaning had done really harmful things. And so I made sure to point that out in the book, like when the World Health Organization used European norms to say, all right, we need to bring iron supplementation to certain parts of Africa where there's a lot of malaria, or there's a lot of anemia, sorry. Right. And then that was done.

And suddenly lots of kids started dying from malaria because it turned out that what looked like anemia was actually an adaptation to malaria. And so then they had to reverse course. And a lot of people got killed because they said, oh, well, we can just use European physiology norms for these other people. And so I did kind of take pains to point out the history of some of those ideas and why I think, engaging with the topics is important. And it didn't read at all.

There was a sense of really good science reporting on something that just intuitively made a lot of sense. I mean, basically my summary of that book is like there's hardware and software involved in elite athletic performance, right? And so there's certain types of hardware you might need if you're going to do something on an elite level. And then there's also software. There's like training involved. I love the example of who was it that couldn't hit the softball.

Yeah, well, a bunch of major league hitters, but like Albert Poohulls was a Albert Poohalls. Yeah, who can hit, yeah, a 300 hitter. And he couldn't hit a softball because he had so, the software, there's a lot of software training involved in hitting a fastball that's very specific to how the ball moves and at the speeds it comes or whatever. And, you know, I think it's really, that's like a really useful, common-sensical way of approaching it. It's like, yeah, like some people have the lungs or whatever.

You know, I remember this from rowing crew at the college level. Like, there is hardware. There's certain lung things. And then there's also like training and understanding things and skills. And it kind of varies depending on the, depending on the thing, depending on the sport. You know, high jumping, maybe you don't need a ton of software. You have a, you have a better technique and a good leg for it. Like that was his name that did the flop. You know, that's one thing. But if you're going to hit a fastball, you're going to have to see a lot of fastballs too. I mean, I thought that there were sort of two extreme poles. There were people who felt that only, that genetics didn't matter at all, like only nurture mattered, and there were people that felt that nature and nurture mattered.

And I only, I thought one of those turned out to seem more extreme to me after going through the research than the other. But I have to say, I think it helped that I got book reviews and science and nature sort of out of the gate that didn't, you know, that were, that were positive. I think that helped. Well, I think that all comes back to the underlying thing is that it's an incredibly well-researched book and it gets the science right. And so you get the reviews in nature, you get the reviews in science because those scientists or science writers, I don't know who wrote the

reviews, they pick up like, yeah, this is well done. Which, so, you know, that goes back to my book, right? So good they can't ignore you. Be so good and good things happen. Just write a really good book and don't worry about the rest. But, well, speaking of books and finding time to write, I know we've gone a little over here, but this has been great that you're able to to join it because, again, I don't know how many times I have to tell my listeners on the podcast, well, let's reference David Epstein on that. And then I do my best impression. So this was really useful. Here's my summary of the first part of the conversation is I know that's where the questions often are. You tell me if you have this right or wrong, but basically you want to be

very comfortable and very good at and very disciplined about and focused on not getting stagnant, picking up new skills, learning new skills, getting good at learning new skills, perhaps using like Maria's type questionnaires to figure out really critically how to get better, treat that very seriously. But on the flip side, you would say, don't get too obsessed about what exactly is the right skill or what exactly am I going to be doing 15 years for now. Or what exactly is how is this path going to work out? Am I already too late to be on that path?

And so that's my summary for the listeners. You can tell me if I have it right or wrong. take skill building really seriously, but don't take particular stories about your skills too seriously. I think that's an excellent summary. And to merge it with some of your work, you know, I took Twitter off my phone after reading some of your work. Amen.

And again, I think people will find they have more time than they think to do some of these things if they pay attention to what really is just chaff in their daily life. I love it. Well, David, thank you very much. And thank you for helping to help us figure out how to move past 10,000 hours and actually get into the nuanced but interesting details of getting good at things. It's totally a pleasure. I love engaging, you know, hope that we make the discussions a little bit, these important discussions a little more interesting and productive. All right, there we have it. Thank you to David Epstein for joining us for this episode. I think it went great. Thank you, of course, also to everyone who submitted their questions.

And thank you to our sponsor, Magic Spoon. I'll be back later this week with a Habit Tuned up mini episode. And until then, as always, stay deep.