Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais - Author David Epstein on Sports Gene, Curiosity, Self-Discovery

Episode Date: November 1, 2017

This week’s conversation is with David Epstein.David is author of the New York Times bestseller The Sports Gene. He is a science writer and investigative reporter at ProPublica, and before that was a senior writer at Sports Illustrated, where he authored or co-authored a number of the magazine’s most highprofile pieces.Despite his success as a writer, David didn’t always know that was what he was meant to do.Prior to becoming a science writer, David was an 800-meter runner and University record holder at Columbia University, where he studied geology and astronomy. He lived and worked both on a seismic research vessel in the Pacific Ocean as well as in the Arctic as a science researcher.The trigger for David becoming an investigative reporter was the sudden collapse and death of a friend and teammate during a track competition. David was compelled to get to the bottom of what really happened that day and it led him on a much deeper journey: to understand the relationship between sport and gene.This conversation is about curiosity. It’s about having the courage to seek the truth. It’s about the commitment to share the truth with sensitivity.We get into the topic of self-discovery and how valuable “having space” can be when it comes to innovating and pushing boundaries.We learn about his writing process and how to tell a compelling story.David’s work ran contradictory to some of the findings of both Malcolm Gladwell and previous Finding Mastery guest, Dr. Anders Ericsson (episode #045 — brilliant), so this is something I was very curious to learn more about.We also get into the factors that are tied to race, and gender affecting performance in sport.I found this conversation to be deeply thought provoking and applicable to all, no matter your craft or interests. I hope this inspires you to continue down your path of self-discovery._________________Subscribe to our Youtube Channel for more powerful conversations at the intersection of high performance, leadership, and meaning: https://www.youtube.com/c/FindingMasteryGet exclusive discounts and support our amazing sponsors! Go to: https://findingmastery.com/sponsors/Subscribe to the Finding Mastery newsletter for weekly high performance insights: https://www.findingmastery.com/newsletter Download Dr. Mike's Morning Mindset Routine! https://www.findingmastery.com/morningmindsetFollow us on Instagram, LinkedIn, and X.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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cookie dough. And a few of our teammates here at Finding Mastery have been loving the fudge brownie and peanut butter. I know, Stuart, you're still listening here. So getting enough protein matters. And that can't be understated, not just for strength, but for energy and focus, recovery for longevity. And I love that David is making that easier. So if you're trying to hit your daily protein goals with something seamless, I'd love for you to go check them out. Get a free variety pack, a $25 value and 10% off for life when you head to davidprotein.com slash finding mastery. That's David, D-A-V-I-D, protein, P-R-O-T-E-I-N.com slash finding mastery. Okay. Now for this week's conversation, it's with David Epstein. So David, as many of you

might recognize his name, is an author of the New York Times bestseller, The Sports Gene. And he's a science writer, investigative reporter for ProPublica. And before that, he was a senior writer at Sports Illustrated, where he authored or co-authored a number of the magazine's most high profile pieces. Now, despite his success as a writer, David didn't always know that he wanted to do this work. And I love this part of the story because we get that question all the time. How do I know what my purpose and meaning is? Well, we have to go on a journey of self-discovery to figure that out.

So he squarely sits in the center of that. And prior to becoming a sports writer, David was an 800-meter runner and university record holder at Columbia University, where he studied geology and astronomy. That's pretty cool. So he had this great success, one getting into one of the world's best universities. And the second is that he, the thing that he was doing, he ended up holding a record. Pretty cool. Now he lived and worked both on a seismic research vessel. So he knows about going forward. And he was out in the middle of Pacific Ocean where he was writing and understanding science. So he understands how to get literally away to better understand. And the trigger for him to become an investigative reporter was all of a sudden one of his dear friends collapsed and died during a track competition. So that spun him in a

direction to want to understand, to get to the bottom of really what happened that day. And it led him to a much deeper journey to understand the relationship between sport and genes. Now, this conversation is about curiosity. It's about having the courage to seek truth. It's about the commitment to share the truth with sensitivity. And we get into the topic of self-discovery and how valuable having space, internal space, can be when it comes to innovating and pushing boundaries. So we learn about his writing process, which is important to me, and it's a compelling story as well.

And David's work ran contradictory to some of the findings of a former guest, Finding Mastery guest, Dr. Anders Eriksson. And that was, if you missed that, that's episode 45. It was brilliant. So this conversation was something that I was really curious to learn more about. We also get into the factors that are tied to race and gender affecting performance in sport. And I found this conversation to be really thought provoking and applicable to all, no matter what the craft or interest is for people. And I hope this conversation inspires you to continue down your path, your unique path of self-discovery. And with that, let's jump right into this conversation with David Epstein. What's up, David? Hey, Michael, thanks for having me.

Oh, yeah, this is gonna be great. I've enjoyed your book. I've enjoyed what you've contributed to the field. And I can't wait to get under the hood a little bit and understand why you're so interested in these questions about excellence and the genetic coding around it and the training that that leads to it as well so i i'm really looking forward to this so thank you for being part of it that's my pleasure i wanted to uh chat with you since i saw you you know give a talk specifically about the the red bull space jump i was very curious and love the talk so yeah yeah that was a fun i mean more than fun it was a wonderful meaningful career alteringing opportunity for me and

like life changing, you know, and not to be overdramatic, but it shifted so much about what I thought was possible. So yeah, very cool. So thank you for that. Okay, good. So okay, where do we start? I would love to know just for some context what it was like growing up. And really the begging question is what led you to the insights that you have now. So what was that? What did that journey look like for you? So I'd say writing about sort of skill acquisition, of course, the book I wrote was for me, I guess kind of the, you know, the dirty secret of that book was it was like a dozen or 15 of my own kind of deepest questions about the balance of nature and nurture in acquiring skills and just going and venturing off to see how I could satisfy myself with whatever information was available.

And that all came out of questions that had just accumulated while I was basically paying attention to the life and the sports around me. The first of which being that I grew up in this area with a lot of a large Jamaican immigrant population. And so track was really popular at my high school and we were really, really good, you know, having almost for three decades straight won our conference. And so I got interested in Jamaica and realized there's just a few more than 2 million people on that island started kind of saying, well, what the heck is going on over there? And I move up to run a little longer distance in college and I'm, I'm, I'm meeting these Kenyan runners and they're all telling me they're from basically the same spot in the Western Rift Valley. And they're from

the same minority tribe. And again, I'm kind of wondering, well, what the heck's going on over there? And that in combination with just things I saw, like the inability of major league baseball hitters to hit softball pitchers, just kept building up and building up and building up in my head until I had all these, this list of questions I wanted to investigate. Okay. So let's, let's go back to your high school. I mean, that's 30 years of winning conference. There's something significant there to pay attention to. And was it the type of people that were there? Was it the coaching? Was it the unique ecosystem that was created at the school? Like what was, if you're looking back now, what was so special about that long run of winning? I mean, I think one of the things, you know, I think especially in high school,

but really I think, you know, even up to the national level, when it comes to sports, marketing the sport is a great way to get good at the sport. And so it became incredibly, because we had this Jamaican community and in Jamaica, the like prime, I wouldn't even say prime sporting event, the prime entertainment event of the year is the national high school track and field championships, right? It's not, not pro. They, up until 2008, they weren't even big on pro, but you go to the national stadium in Kingston for the high school championships. It's like five days long and it's, you know, standing room only packed and all the Olympians. It's it's crazy. It's like the World Cup, basically.

And so I think these families that came with that tradition meant that it was very likely that in a large high school, you know, whatever, three to four thousand people, we were going to get a lot of our best athletes always coming out for this same sport. So some of it, I think, was just this tradition and zealousness for the sport that meant we'd have so huge teams of good athletes who were enthusiastic for the sport, whereas I think for a lot of schools, track was sort of training for another sport or sort of a fallback, where for us it was something that was really, that was really part of our DNA, so to speak. So why were so many Jamaicans attracted to your school or the community that you're in? What was going on there? That's a good question. I ended up sort of looking into that for some of my own writing,

and it turned out that in the 70s and 80s, there were people from – I grew up outside of Chicago, and there were people from northern suburbs who were going to Jamaica to vacation and actually were telling people that they sort of wanted help and nannies and things like that coming back to these northern suburbs. But those places were, you know, both segregated and very expensive. So they'd move like a little slightly farther south suburb and started settling in the place where I grew up that also happened to have, you know, a long running female African American mayor, and an established African American community. And so there was just this diaspora over like the 70s and 80s that brought like a lot of people in my age range to settle near us. Okay. And what was the town? In Evanston, just north of Chicago. Okay. All right. And then

in your book and your research, and I still want to go back to like family life, but in your book, I mean, you tackled some really sensitive topics. I mean, you took a look at the genetic functions and the genetic coding of men versus women and white versus black. And like you really tackled some difficult, challenging conversations and you did it eloquently and the sensitivity that you had matched the sensitivity of the question. And so was that a difficult thing to write or to figure out how to write? It was. And I appreciate you saying that. That's very gratifying to hear.

It wasn't only difficult, it was also frightening. I mean, I will say I was, you know, my whole transition from being a scientist to writing was because one of those Jamaican guys was one of my closest friends actually dropped dead at the end of a race. And I got interested in genetics through that and these sorts of things that I was quite confident, you know, in my own beliefs and ethics. So I wasn't worried about myself. But it's obviously once something's out there, those questions affect people in ways that I know I can't anticipate, you know, because I haven't lived their lives. And that's a scary thing. At the same time, at one point when I was thinking about not writing some of the things I was finding, there was a scientist who told me,

who was studying the impacts of particular dietary supplementation on people with different ethnic ancestry, and found that there were differences, and decided not to publish it, because this person was worried that this would somehow lead to the idea that they were supporting innate intellectual differences. So when I heard that and I said, so you have information that could be useful to people about dietary supplementation and because of this thing to which it is in no way legitimately linked, like you're not publishing it, I said, I don't want to, I don't want to hide things that I'm learning here. And having done reporting on healthcare,

I already felt that there were some real adverse outcomes or abominations, even because so many of our medical standards are based only on like white European males. And then we apply them to everyone because we pretend there are no genetic differences and that can have some really bad unintended consequences and so i i just felt like i didn't want to hide anything i was learning and that you know i would just approach it in as heartfelt a way as i possibly could okay so it was your curiosity for the truth but then your commitment to share that truth with sensitivity yeah i think so was that your approach going in because i mean you're you tackled something that's difficult and like so with i'm trying to sort out right now like how was it that you were able to do that thing and stay with

it because it is easy to turn to it's called locked door analysis right like when we go and do some research it's easy for some people to lock the door and then make some stuff up or alter or ignore pieces of information that are important, which is obviously scientifically and ethically corrupt. But you certainly didn't do that. I think I appreciate that. do is be very sort of telegraph going from one question to the next in the writing, like try to anticipate what questions would people have, people would have and make pretty transparent my succession of questions, you know, not to like write them out like a Q and a, but to, to sort of open up my own thinking and say like, kind of some of this stuff we don't have perfect answers for. We just walk to the ledge and kind of show you what's known so far. I'm going to open up my thought process and you can kind of come along with me

and see that I'm not trying to say I know everything about this. I'm just investigating what's there. And here's the question. I bet you have it too. And here's what I've found about it. So I find that kind of opening up your thought process, a book length project allows you to do that in a way that I think a lot of other formats don't because you have to be tighter and a little less digressive. Okay. So now this is even more interesting about family for me is if we wind it back just a little bit, I'm hearing conviction and commitment as well as some courage to share the truth that you're finding and along with some curiosity. And then, so what was family like life? What was family life like that supported those attributes that you've developed? Well, I would say, speaking of my parents, very permissive. I was always my own sort of harshest

critic. So I think if anything, they were kind of trying to, to dial that back to some degree, but also, you know, one thing that I appreciate in retrospect much more is my parents would often like develop an interest in things I got interested in. I don't know if they were even interested in those things or I think they were, I think they were genuinely interested in stuff I was interested in. And so would sort of, um, develop a little bit of their own independent interest in that, you know, whether it's noticing articles about a topic that I'm interested in. And the more I think about it, the more I think that's actually a wonderful way to signal the validity of someone's interests, showing that you got interested in this thing.

I'm independently interested in it, too, and doing my own reading about it. And maybe I even found something I can send to you. And the more I think about it, the more they were, they're very subtle. I'm louder and a more of a knucklehead than either of my parents for sure. But, you know, I always felt like my interests were supported and certainly not prescribed, which I guess in some ways can go wrong depending on what it is you get interested in. But that's a really cool insight. Yeah. That one of the ways that your parents showed support and love is you were interested in something that so they would just become interested in it because they're interested in you. This is a funny anecdote.

So I would start signing up like as early. I was a very early adopter of all the direct to consumer genetics companies. And I don't I don't recommend them, but I wanted to learn how how they worked and see what their interfaces were and how they were trying to translate probabilistic information to people, et cetera. And so I would sign up for lots of them. And one day on one of them, 23 and me and all of those, 23 is the big one. Yeah. There's a whole bunch of, a whole bunch of other ones. And on one of them, one day, you know, they'll tell you like, Oh, a second cousin would like to make contact or third cousin. And you know, you can acknowledge or not. And usually I just kind of ignored that. And then one day I get one that says like a potential father would like to make contact. And I'm like, what? You know, are you kidding me? Seriously. And so

I started looking at the information and it's like, you know, my, this, my haplotype is certain part of my DNA is like identical to this person. I'm like, well, what's going on? And, you know, of course, I find out my father had decided to independently sign up for this thing, because I got him interested in this topic. And I'm like, Oh, okay, huge. But you know, he didn't even tell me ahead of time, I just get this like, alert inbox thing. It's like potential father identified. Like, Oh, gosh, you know, so. Okay, so that that's like, kind of how your parents engaged with you on a regular basis, being interested in the things you're interested in. Yeah, and also, you know, again, like my parents are very soft-spoken about the things they do. And so it was really only when I became an adult that I – it's mind-bgling to me now to think for how many years I like

didn't even really know what they were doing. Like somehow as a kid, I guess you just don't, like, I'm super curious about people's jobs. I, I, I questioned people to death about exactly how they went from one thing to the next. Cause I'm really curious how people do that. And I didn't do it with my own parents. And I look back at it and they deal with, they're both lawyers and they deal with people with mental health issues or families who have people with mental health issues. And I realize I'm looking back at it, like a lot of what they do is deal sensitively with people about the most difficult, you know, most embarrassing in many cases, things that are going on in their lives. And I try to think about that sometimes when I'm addressing issues that I know will

impact people emotionally in ways that I can sympathize with, but maybe I can't empathize with. Okay. All right. And then, so growing up, was it easy? Was it hard? And I'm going to ask about what are some of the challenges, but what was it like growing up was it easy was it hard you know and i'm gonna ask about what are some of the challenges but what was it like growing up by far i was always the hardest on myself i guess i still like work on that and you're talking about just self-critique yeah whatever it was whether it was in sports whether it was in academics whatever like i was a little and a little bit of a scrapper when i was a kid you know so I'd sometimes get into scrapes at school and things like that and I would like you know even up in high school like midterm grades get a mailed home and I would like always intercept them right so I don't think my parents never said anything but I wonder if they realized like that they were never getting

that stuff but yeah it was much more like them sort of pulling back sort of pulling back on me then they were they were as uh uh roger federer's parents have been described they were pulley not not pushy okay and then where would where did that self-critique come from for you i don't know okay so that and that's perfectly fine like was there something underneath it like you're afraid of something or why would and maybe you can't answer it for yourself or, but maybe you've got a thought about why people are hard on themselves. Yeah. I, I, you know, I wish I knew, I just have always had this feeling that, you know, that I should be able to, to do things. Like if somebody, even, even if there's something I think

I can't do, if somebody tells me, you know, if I catch implicitly, if somebody thinks I can't do something, I'm kind of like, I can do that. You know, I don't know. I don't know where that comes from. I feel like I've always had that. And even sometimes like manifesting in bad ways, like a certain kind of tenacity where, you know, even when I was a little kid, it's totally embarrassing. but I remember I must have been like kindergarten or first grade or something and getting a little fight with like one of my, you know, good friends, which whatever kids, kids do that. The part that stands out to me is that like he calmed down and that they had to like escort me home because like, if anybody

like let me go, I was like running back that, you know, so I think I was, I don't know. I just had maybe had some natural hotheadedness or whatever. And I think, you know, I've gotten much more docile and reasonable and kind of able to, um, think about things in a much more rational way than when I was a little kid. But as far as I know, I've sort of always had that. And it's, it's more of an issue about realizing when you're going into a mode that isn't productive for yourself, basically. Sounds like it's a good thing you found running. Running was great.

I mean, sports, I played in high school. I played football, basketball, baseball various times and then running. But running for me is the one that became a skill for life, really, where it's more than what I do for, you know, because I'm not competing the way I used to anymore. But, you know, a way to not, I'm not competing the way I used to anymore, but you know, a way to be outside. I find it meditative. If I get stuck in something I'm working on, sometimes I find it's a way to change, I guess, my mental state and things will come to me to, to go running with other people as a social, like it became really a, is right after I stopped competing, you know, right after I stopped being competitive,

I, I kind of went cold Turkey on running for a little while because I was competing, you know, right after I stopped being competitive, I kind of went cold turkey on running for a little while because I was like, I'm never going to feel in shape again, basically, and started doing other stuff just for exercise. But then after a couple of years, I realized actually, I actually love running for running, not just the competition aspect of it. And so now it's pretty much indispensable. So people and events tend to influence our path. And is there a person or an event that most influenced you looking back at your career as an investigative writer, or scientific writer, however you capture, you know, the the essence of what you're doing? But is there is there an event or a person that captured that for you?

Yeah, well, there's sort of two separate, I mean, the first thing, so, you know, immediately when somebody starts asking me about like the pivotal moment of my professional life, again, it was so this, this good friend of mine who was one of the top 800 meter runners of his age in the country who dropped dead after a race in high school. And I started to get curious about how that could happen and eventually asked his parents. I don't know why it took me like a while to work up to it. I felt nervous about it, asking his parents what happened. And they said, you know, well, heart attack.

And I realized something just cued my brain that I didn't. I was now studying science. I didn't even know what that meant, really. And they ended up signing a waiver, allowing me to gather up his medical records. And I did that. And, you know, it turned out that he had this textbook case of this disease that's caused by a single genetic mutation. And, you know, I was often, I kept thinking about this over time. And I was off like in geology grad school, I was like living in a tent in the Arctic, and just realized,

I want to merge my interest in science and writing to write about sudden cardiac death in athletes for the not people like me who spend their disposable income on you know new scientists or whatever but for a popular audience I want to do it for sports illustrated because I grew up reading that and it took me a couple years so I first had to get into journalism at all it took me a couple years to wind my way to that but indeed my you know first feature article sports illustrated was sudden cardiac death and athletes and And then I kind of became their science writer. So it's really that event. I often think about the balance of sort of long term goal setting versus situational decision making. And for me, in that case, it was something that happened. And the way I reacted to

it, there's nobody gave it several years after his death, and nobody had given an explanation. And so I think the way I reacted made a big difference for my career. I'm glad you're bringing that up because the way you responded to it is interesting. Because some people could go into grief and feel sad. And that would be healthy. And some people could get pissed off. And that would be their best response. And then you got curious.

And so that curiosity led you to ask for permission. But, you know, and to actually think about it and to write about it and then set some, what you just described, some longer term goals about what you might want to do with this information. And then, so if we wind back and pull out just one thread is that you said you were nervous to ask their parents or his parents. So how did you work through that nervousness? And I'll tell you why

I'm asking this small question, because I hope it can illuminate a later question for me, which is, you know, you've written a wildly popular book, The Sports Gene. And, you know, there's some sort of anxiousness about putting thoughts on paper for the world to see, especially in light of what we just talked about, that you have very sensitive matter that you're talking about, or some of it's sensitive. So I want to see if we could just highlight that one thread about how you dealt with that nervousness, maybe because that translates on how you were dealt with some nervousness about putting thoughts down on paper for the world to observe. Yeah, you know, I even remember I had a whole bunch of, when I was in college and grad school, I had a, I had like a bunch of earrings and all this stuff.

I was doing my college runner thing. I remember – Because that's what all college runners do, right? They put a bunch of earrings on. You know, it's the tattoos or the piercings, one or the other pretty much. All right. Good. So I remember when I was going to go talk to my friend's mother.

And I'd been good friends with him, so it wasn't like I hadn't met her before. But after he died, I wasn't at his place anymore. I remember taking all that stuff, all the earrings and things out, and I never again put them in because I guess I felt like I wanted to establish some kind of more formal footing or seriousness of tone when I went to talk to her. And I decided that, you know, whatever. So in many ways, this my friend, his name was Kevin. It kind of represented the best of the community I grew up in to me. You know, he's a Jamaican immigrant. He was going to be the first in his family to go to college. You know, he was a great student. He wanted to study computer science.

He was a great student. He wanted to study computer science. He was a great athlete. And so I think in some ways his death curtailed a story that I wanted to see play out about the archetype of my community that I grew, I want to at least share it with my community. And I felt like if I went to her with that motivation, you know, and already knowing her personally, that maybe she would appreciate that. And other than that, I tried to just play out in my head the worst case scenario, and it didn't seem that bad, you know? Okay, so that was that was the work that you did. You played it out, but you knew that there was some respect that you wanted to have. So you altered some of the things that felt disrespectful or edgy or whatever. But I think that what I'm hearing at the center of it is that you had something bigger than yourself that you wanted to explore. And that was the, that was the idea of courage as opposed to getting through the fear. It's like, it was, it sounds like you instilled some courage.

And I've seen that over and over again. And I wonder if that, that theme has been true for you. If you connect to something bigger than you, somehow we muster up enough inner experience or inner dialogue to be able to go for it. Yeah. I mean, there was definitely, you know, I think you're, maybe you're teaching me about it, you know, with more insight than I have about it right now. But it was, it was definitely not just my own

curiosity. I felt like a little bit offended that the answer the community was left with, because when that happens, you know, it's not that one life is more valuable than another, but it leaves kind of a psychic scar on a community. And there were all these efforts right after it, you know, to raise money and to build like this, like a Japanese garden at our school and all these things and things sort of petered out, you know, the farther away it got from his death. And I sort of felt like, what's going to come of it? Not, you know, and nothing, nothing brings him back or anything like that. But we can't just make this a what a tragedy, like, I think the community should get some answer or

other that's a little more detailed. And so I already had the idea. It wasn't just my personal curiosity. So I do think it helped to make it seem like it wasn't like just my prying. Yeah, right, right. Feels like it was for the local community, right? The psychic scar to heal some of the psychic scar to find some some answers, to tell that story. Is that, and this doesn't have to be a yes, but is that the same thread that led you to be able to write this book? That was absolutely true for the case of my friend. But then it went, as I started researching a little bit, then I realized I wanted to go way beyond just my local community. There you go. Because it turned out that this was more common than I thought that,

you know, it leaves this, like there there's a, when someone who seems the picture of health drops dead, it leaves this kind of fear. And if we don't know anything about it, then nobody knows how they can react to that in a productive way. And so I pretty quickly realized that I wanted it to be much bigger than that. Um, and that in fact we could, we could at no cost save some lives, you know, not, not all of these, but some lives. And so then I started to feel like there was really, again, not to say that he didn't die in vain, but something that could at least something productive that could come out of it and somebody else would be saved. And a lot has changed since he died. So I hope I contributed to that a little bit.

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Okay. So what have been some of the main findings that you did find through your investigation and that you revealed through Sports Gene? But for folks who haven't read it yet, what are some of the big rocks and big containers that you played with i would say some of the some some of the surprise for me were that certain things that i thought would be completely innate basically like the reaction speed it takes to hit a major league basketball turn out not to be at all to be completely learned perceptual skills. And that other things that I thought would be completely volitional, you know, a strong drive to be physically active turned out

to have a lot of research on genetic mechanisms that make people more likely not to do that. So there was sort of, my intuition was really challenged in every direction. And one of the things I sort of walked away with also was, you know, just like we've learned in medical genetics, like maybe, you know, you need to take three Tylenol and I only need one because you have different genes involved in the metabolism than I do. It looks like the same for, you know, the medicine that is training. Really part of the drive, especially as you get better and better and better and farther along in the learning curve is learning enough about yourself that you can kind of tailor your learning environment, basically. And it was interesting because

when I was thinking about finding mastery and sort of thinking about what trying to make explicit to myself what I think mastery even means, to me, some component of it is getting to that stage where you have enough insight into yourself that you can start to dictate this sort of iterative trial and error where you find the individual environment that, you know, will help you to proceed to optimal outcomes for your completely unique genotype and psychology and environment. And there's guy, J.M. Tanner, who has a quote that I love that I stuck in my book. He was the world's expert, the eminent expert in body growth and development, was also a world-class athlete himself. And it's basically, everyone has a different genotype, therefore for optimal

development, everyone should have a different environment. And I'm interested in genes, so I like the quote, but you could sub in anything for genotype there, right? Everyone has different proclivities. Everyone has different resources to draw on. Everyone has different supports, whatever it is. Therefore, for optimal development, everyone should have a different environment. And that doesn't mean that wildly different, right? But no two people have lived the same life. individualizing your learning environment was a message that really came through to me as I researched the book and that I think is a is a is a critical part of my definition of mastery to the

extent that you differentiate it from you know just having performed excellently or achievement I guess okay so if I if I try to restate your definition just for conceptual reasons is I think you said when you have such awareness or insight about your uniqueness that you can begin to customize your environment. Is that close or did I, did I miss it? No, no, I think that is. And there's, I always think about this, you know, Sir Roger Bannister, who was the first man to break four minutes in the mile. Most people don't know he stopped, he stopped running at 25 and became a world famous neurologist. He won the lifetime achievement award from the American Academy of minutes in the mile, most people don't know he stopped running at 25 and became a world-famous neurologist. He won the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Academy of Neurology.

And he had this quote, I had the privilege of becoming friends with him, and he had a quote in the 50s where he said like the integration, the complex integration of heart, lungs, and muscle, and mind that the body executes is far in advance of the physiologist's ability to analyze them. And I asked him 50 years later if he felt the same way. And he said, absolutely. You know, we know more about the physiology, but this integration is so individual and so complex that only the person doing it, the whole organism, is like the only detector of what's going on, right? So I think at a certain level, the reductionist knowledge, the whole organism, is like the only detector of what's going on, right? So I think at a certain level, the reductionist knowledge, which is important to have and know

what's out there, doesn't, you know, get you further along the learning path anymore. If it did, then we'd, you know, just bring all the athletes into the lab. So that's why I think this part of the art of the great coaches pull off is sort of being a partner who walks hand in hand with the athlete on a journey that has to be a a partner who walks hand in hand with the athlete on a journey that has to be a lot of self-discovery for the athletes. They figure out what's best for them. I 1000% agree with that thought. And then self-discovery, you, you seem to have a way about yourself. That's pretty sensitive, uh, pretty aware, thoughtful, if you will. And obviously articulate because you're getting

clarity of your words when you put them on paper. So the way you even speak, the choice of your words is very articulate. What are your insights about the path of discovery? Like what have you found to be important in that journey or even habits or practices that are important for people to grow, to figure some stuff out. So for me, I think about that both with respect to my writing life, my previous life in science, and my athletic life in sports. So since I was fortunate to go from being a walk-on to a university record holder, and one of the great benefits of being a walk-on was that I didn't have to worry about scoring at all. You know, nobody cared what I was doing for the first year or two. And so I pretty much trial and error

myself because I was allowed to not be on varsity and nobody ever, it didn't matter. And so that really turned out to be a gift where I was able to experiment with different types of training because nobody was relying on me to travel with the team or score at meets and to start to home in on the kind of things that worked for me. The problem is if you need results right now, in some cases, what makes the best right now might not be the thing that teaches you the most about what will give you the best long-term development. And that's a balance that we're always all making all the time is, you know, how critical is it for me to, you know, do my best in this next race versus my sort of longer-term trajectory. So I'm a big fan of having some time for that trial and error, although I know it's hard to be patient when it comes to that kind of performance. In other areas of my life, I like this principle.

I don't know if I pronounced his name right, but Max Delbruck, a so narrow or so strictly patterned based on what's something that somebody else has already done that they eliminate the kind of mental digressions that can lead to some of the greatest discoveries. And I say this like surrounded by books and papers all over my floors, much of which will be research that goes nowhere other than I find it interesting, right? So I do have, I do have a bad habit of getting lost in a rabbit hole and coming up later and saying, like, I was never going to do anything with that no matter what. So how did I go down this rabbit hole? But if you don't sometimes, and I think you really limit the scope, you know, you kind of enter your own version of the social media filter bubble, basically voluntarily, where you're, you're implicitly screening out a lot of things you could be exposed to. And for my book, my book proposal, or so little resemblance to the book I produced, because I was guessing at the answers, I was going to find the questions and turned out I was wrong about a lot of stuff. And as I started kind of pulling these threads,

you know, it took me in places that I didn't expect. And I think that's a luxury to be able to follow that. But I think we have to make, try to make some time for those digressions. Like there was just before he passed away last year, Oliver Smithies, a Nobel prize winning chemist who discovered gel electrophoresis anyway. Um, I called him, I want to get to the story, but what is that? What is gel electrophoresis? It's basically a method of isolating proteins or DNA in a gel so that you can analyze them. And it was really hard before that. You had to use these sloppy materials to individually try to find molecules in DNA, and it was just a disaster. So it basically allowed people to, to do protein and DNA analysis

at, you know, like took it out of like the stone age in terms of scientific techniques. So I called him, he was 90 years old. He passed away just recently. I call him on a Saturday morning and he's in his lab, 90 years old. And you know, I didn't, I thought I was calling him at home and he said, no, no, always Saturday morning experiments are like the most important thing I do. And I said, well, why set, you know, why Saturday? Why not Wednesday morning experiments? He said, because there's other people around on Saturday morning, nobody's on the equipment and you don't have to like think about, I have to measure things really accurately because everyone else is around and you have to conform to a certain discipline. So he said, you always have to take notes. He said, you can't, you have to record what you're doing, but you can be a little sloppier. You don you have to conform to certain disciplines so he said you always have to take notes he said you can't you have to record what you're doing but you can be a little sloppier

you don't have to met you can do the back outside the you know back of the envelope type stuff and not measure things as well or move things around and i find that freedom is where he explores he shared some of his old notebooks with me and from one of his Saturday morning experience experiments is where he kind of had a, a revelation that started him down the path to, to the Nobel prize, which was, he was doing, you know, he was trying to find something more solid to isolate proteins in and remembered that when he had helped his mother with his father's laundry, when he was a kid, that they use the starch and he was supposed to dispose of it. And if he let it get cool, then it would solidify he went like hmm maybe that and so he goes and like raids the janitor's closet because it's like

saturday there's nobody around and you can see on the notebook page it says very promising in big letters you know and that was like the first page that led to the nobel prize and so i thought it was interesting that going in on a day that feels less structured in some way gave him this mental freedom to explore. And it's a luxury to be able to have that. And I've been very fortunate to be allowed to kind of do that mentally when I go on stories because of the places I've worked. And in some cases, I've come back to an editor editor and say what I thought was there isn't there. Can I have some extra time to go somewhere else? And sometimes the answer is yes and sometimes it's no.

But fortunately, in enough cases, that's been the case. So going back to the first insight, you shared three of them, right? And the first insight you just had was about the tradeoff between how getting the job done now might not be the greatest decision for the long-term arc. I'm going to 1,000% again nod my head like, yeah, I feel that myself. I see that with athletes all the time and performers. And there are time demands that we have to do to fit into the demands of this upcoming outcome, I should say, can get in the way of creativity and long-term development. So how do you balance that for yourself? Yeah, that's such a tricky question because if you're putting things off forever, then it was no use at all.

So making that balance, I mean, at least in my writing career, so it was easy. I think back on it and people say, well, at the time, I thought, gosh, it's so hard to be a walk-on, like nobody cares about you, you have no resources, you know, you're not traveling with the team. At the same time, it was so easy to self-experiment a little bit. And so it was actually easy for me there. As a writer, I think it was actually easy for me there. Um, as a writer, I think it was always important for me to have, uh, projects outside of my assignments to feel like I was working on something in the background. I mean, my first job, because I had to take any job I could get in journalism coming from not journalism was as the guy who starts at midnight

and goes to the morning at the New York daily news, right? Like nothing happy that's going in the New York daily news happens to be midnight and 10 a.m., I assure you. But it was a step. And I was thinking about sudden cardiac death and athletes on my own time. And so I had this other thing in the background because I kind of felt like, for me, it was these larger projects that were going to be the things I thought about in my career that were going to be the touchstones. And so I always needed one of those going. And I think that shows to the degree that I went into Sports Illustrated as a temp fact checker and left as a senior writer not that long later. And I left right as my book was coming out, which is an objectively ridiculous thing to do. Like I had a book about sports coming out and leaving Sports Illustrated. But when those big projects come to a close, I feel like I need to find another one.

Like just doing the next story, even for a wonderful place like Sports Illustrated, was never enough to keep me with sustained interest, basically. I love that you're talking about this because I've wrestled with this myself. And there's this part of me that says I should just freaking full-on commit to the one project I'm doing, which there is a high level of commitment, but not to the exclusion of projects in the wings. And those projects in the wings are always things that seem exciting and big and whatever. And I often think about, are they red herrings? Are they distractions? Are they, you know, is it an ADD? Is it an overambitious mindset? And I love how you're framing it. The insight that you have is like, no, no, no. Those things like give me the space to be able to be a little bit more permissive in the way that I'm doing the project that I'm doing, instead of it being rigid and constrictive, that it's the only thing that I have to do.

It's the only thing I'm going to do. And it's got to be quote unquote, perfect. Yeah, no, for sure. I mean, you know, many times in my career, I've thought of like, me as the professional, I think of very differently than I guess, you know, the public face of me, because I'm associated with whatever brand I happen to be writing for, obviously, understandably and reasonably. But for me, I'm kind of thinking like, oh, I'm doing this other stuff out here. And that's, that's what I think of as like my career in some way. So I think having multiple tracks going can be pretty useful. You know, David, I wonder, I bet that this is more common than we think.

And I can think of right now, well, there's one that comes to mind, one athlete that comes to mind. If you took his hobby away, he'd be a wreck. And, you know, and that hobby is almost bigger than the thing that he does. And the thing that he does, he's top four in the world at his thing. So, and I could probably go down the list and pick many of them i bet i bet that this thought is not unfamiliar and there's probably some research around it i'm not familiar with but that could be a really cool thing to highlight or articulate i'm going to start paying attention more to to it for sure based on what what you brought up here that's so interesting to hear you say that because just reading a book about a scientist who decided to study other creativity and other scientists. And I

haven't gotten through it all yet. So I'm not sure how it's going to factor into his conclusion. But one of the things I've noticed is that they, so far, they all seem to have like very serious hobbies. And so I don't know, I haven't finished it yet. So maybe maybe I'm just practicing that confirmation bias, but I have been noticing that so far. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Cozy Earth. Over the years, I've learned that recovery doesn't just happen when we sleep.

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Head to calderalab.com slash finding mastery and use the code finding mastery at checkout for 20% off your first order. That's calderalab, C-A-L-D-E-R-L-A-B.com slash finding mastery. All right. So you snuck in there early in the conversation about your time in the Arctic. So you went to the Arctic Circle and what did you learn? So I was there doing, I was a grad student at at columbia and i learned first that i thought it was like one of the most beautiful places on earth so we gotta rewind columbia top five universities seven university in the world like how do you how does one get to columbia

uh plenty of knuckleheads there like anywhere else it seems like college admissions have gotten so competitive now like i'm not even that old but I bet I wouldn't get in now. Yeah, I don't know. Apply early admission. So I had wanted to go to the Air Force Academy like forever because I wanted to be an astronaut. And I was pursuing that. I was a little concerned about it because I was like just on the border of the eyesight requirements for pilots. And so if I got worse,

I, I could be in trouble. I thought like hopefully in the future they would accept laser corrective surgery, which they do now, but at the time they didn't. And I was kind of, uh,

starting to be a little more thoughtful as a guy myself. And so I kind of backed out of that at the last minute thinking that actually I needed a little less prescribed path, uh, in the coming years. You pulled yourself out of that path. Yeah. I mean, I had a little less prescribed path in the coming years. You pulled yourself out of that path? Yeah. I mean, I had started the application process, gotten the congressional recommendation lined up.

I was taking the physical tests, all that stuff. So I was significantly down the line when I decided that I wasn't 100% sure. When I looked at the courses of study, I was like, well, if I'm not going to be a pilot, then if I weren't that, then it wouldn't be my first choice of places to go. And I wasn't sure if I was going to be able to be a pilot. Okay, so when you care about, I'm trying to learn how you do this. So you've got other hobbies and projects that are kind of in the background. You're curious and you think about things that are bigger than yourself. And that gives some courage to be able to make the background. You're curious and you think about things that are bigger than yourself. And that gives some courage to be able to make the commitments. And then you, it seems like you

give yourself space, another way of giving yourself space when you have a goal that if it doesn't work out, you've got some sort of backup plans. Does that, is that fair to say from the Air Force piece here? Yeah. I mean, I think that's that I think you're making me sound a little more coherent, or I think of it as being like, my brain split in two sometimes. I remember talking to, you know, college counselor, for example, at high school, and who's, well, what do you want to do? Well, I'm going to go to the Air Force Academy and major in aerospace engineering, or if I don't, then I'd like to go, you know, to Columbia or somewhere and major in creative writing. And they're kind of like, what?

Like, first, would you like to go math, science or writing? And I was like, well, you know, now I realize, like, I did both. You know, now I do write about math and science. It wasn't so crazy. And you can kind of combine them, which was a huge help because, you know, at Sports Illustrated, how many people are waiting in line to be the next senior NFL writer? And it's not like there was a lineage of science writers, but if you can make it work, then you're only competing on your own ground, right? So there's like no, you manufacture your own turf and don't have to worry about anybody else. And so I

think I've kind of always had this, these two tracks of two tracks of my brain, and I'm really fortunate that I've been able to some degree to combine them in my actual work, the writing. And I do do – so I've taken online fiction writing classes, and I do that because I think you have a tendency to kind of plateau once you get pretty good at a certain kind of writing. And so I still, on a weekly basis, I'm reading journal articles and I'm doing a little creative writing and things like that. So I still seem to be bifurcated in my head that way. Yeah. There's something about space that I think that is noticeable, how you create space to go for it. And then so, okay, back to the Arctic Circle. So you're up there, it's the most beautiful place. And then you realized... First, I already started asking myself, am I the type of person who wants to spend my whole life learning one or two things new to the world? Or am I the type of person who wants to spend much shorter chunks of time learning things new to me and finding interesting ways to translate them or combine them?

And the answer was becoming increasingly clear that I was the latter. better. You know, maybe that would have been different if I'd known things like sports science, you know, but we were also talking about a physical science that's dealing with mostly inanimate objects. And so I had started just writing almost stream of consciousness, my own thoughts about what I had learned about sudden cardiac death in athletes and my friend, because I find that I think with my fingers in many cases. So I have some regular email partners who really have to tolerate a lot of me thinking out loud on email. And, you know, you kind of find who those people are that are willing to tolerate that kind of thing. And that helped me just realize that if I didn't give that a go, I was like never going to be happy about it, that I had to at least give that a try to do the sudden cardiac death and

athletes and that I would finish my master's out and and then try to go that route so what happens to you when you're on a long distance run or you're in a remote place and you have an idea but you think with your fingers what what happened like how do you capture that insight do you rehearse it over and over and again till you're done with the run oh my gosh you have no idea how many times I've had some insight that's like this is great i only have to remember this one thing until the end of the run and it's so gone i know by the time i get to the end that's why i'm asking it happens i have the same process and so now i've started i use mnemonics um if i have to like i'll i'll start you know creating some little story and like very odd imagery in my head and to hold on to some

small thing because it's amazing how thoroughly you can lose something long distance run. So yeah, I try to try to come up with little mnemonics and then put them down as quickly as I can. Like at home. Are you familiar? What's it called? Like building the house or Einstein's house? So I can't remember. I can't remember. Memory castle Memory Castle. Yeah, Memory Castle. Stuff like that. Yeah, okay. Alright, how about this? Is there a word or phrase that captures what you understand most? What I understand most? Wow, that's an interesting question. What I understand most?

A lot of things are going through my head now what I personally understand most you know there's a phrase that I think about a lot but I still grapple with so I'm not sure if I necessarily understand it the most but a phrase I think about all the time is one written by a philosopher I really like named Bernard Suits. And actually, it's kind of relevant to sports and games where he was trying to, I guess there had been this argument among philosophers about whether you could come up with any single descriptor that united sports and games that ran through all of them. And what he came up with, and they said no, and he said yes. And there's this brilliant parable book. He came up with the phrase, the voluntary acceptance of unnecessary obstacles. And I love that phrase, because when you think about sports, right, it's just basically a bunch of silly contrived rules that we add a lot of meaning to. But then again, that's kind of a microcosm of

everything that we do, right? It's like, well, I guess if you're somewhat of an existentialist the way I am, then that's a microcosm. You're here, add meaning. And I tend to think about that with everything I'm doing. When I come to writing, I think maybe the typical person who hasn't done a lot of writing spends like 90% of their time crafting nice sentences and 10% of time thinking about structure and order. And where, you know, like some masters of structure, I'd say like someone like Wes Craven is the opposite, where there's like, could have been a lot more thought into the dialogue, but the structure, brilliant. Someone who can keep you coming back from commercial break with not very good material is a structural master in my mind. But I think about that because all of these things, like even doing a long writing project, basically the question is what problem, what hidden phenomenon, what linkage of ideas did you fabricate into a challenge that you're ready to address? Right. And if the question is so obvious that it isn't some voluntary challenge that you made up to take on, then I think it's probably not a big project. And so I think as I've increasingly become more mature as a writer, I've realized that it's those sort of the more thought you're putting into creating the challenge

in the first place, as opposed to addressing an obvious question, the more valuable the project is or the more stimulating the project is to me. And so I don't know if I understand that the most, but I think it's really overlooked by the vast majority of people who are writing this area. Certainly not everybody, but a lot of people. Do you have a personal philosophy that guides you? A personal philosophy? Professionally or in life in general?

Either way, yeah. I think I certainly have tenets about certain things that I do, but I don't know that I have a personal philosophy that I would, would easily articulate. You know, I have positions on things and principles that I apply to the things I do, but I actually think I'm a little, I change my mind about things a lot. Um, and when I look at maybe the way we deal with politicians or whoever that changed their minds, I actually really think it's heartening. One thing I've, I've loved about the discussions I've had with Malcolm Gladwell is deal with politicians or whoever that change their minds. I actually really think it's heartening. One thing I've loved about the discussions I've had with Malcolm Gladwell is he is an incredibly open-minded guy and I think truly enjoys civil discussion about ideas.

And when it comes to certain points, will alter his mental model. And I respect that so much. And I feel like I'm still in a place where I'm learning a lot about life in the world. And so trying to always examine my assumptions and be incredibly open-minded and kind of red team my own ideas. I don't know if that red team phrase, you know, it's like setting up a, I think originally from the military, like a group to try to like foil your plan. So that's one thing I always try to do with whatever questions I'm dealing with is red team my own ideas to try to rip down my own ideas. So I do think that it is and this I guess is part of a personal philosophy that I apply both to my personal life and to my work, which is I think it is our duty to attempt to falsify our own ideas. And I approach all my projects with that and my interactions. I try to use that in

my interactions with other people as well, because you bring assumptions and ideas to anyone you meet. And I think it's on us to attempt to see if those are falsifiable, basically. And I certainly do the same thing with my journalism. Okay. Are you a cynic, a skeptic, optimist, pessimist? What are those words? They're not all orthogonal, but how do you talk about or think about those words for you? is often directly proportional to how recent my last investigative project was. And so I will find myself getting kind of cynical when I dive into certain projects where you're doing the project because things weren't going how they were supposed to, or people weren't doing things they were supposed to. So I find that I need to kind of balance myself, you know, balance myself out. Like yesterday, you know, I'd, I'd finished a investigative story that,

that I was happy with a little while ago. And, but being happy with the project usually means like you're upset with some area of humanity. Um, and then yesterday I was on a regional selection committee for the Pat Tillman foundation scholars, um, you know, Pat Tillman, the football player and army veteran, and will fund, you know, people's college and grad school, or whatever kind of educational programs they're doing. And reading through those applications, it's like, you feel like you're being like warmed by the universe, you know, because you just see the things these people are doing, the experiences they've had, the things they care about. And so I've found that I am certainly susceptible to becoming a cynic if I don't proactively also seek out things that I find like really encouraging and people that I find really encouraging. So I think if I were left to

my own devices totally and not like actively seeking out things that really hearten me, I would become more cynical than I want to be. Okay. And then when you think about optimism and pessimism, do you have a relationship with either of those words? Yeah. You know, I think maybe, maybe my wife in some ways would say sometimes I'm pessimistic because when I start, I, I, I do battle when I start a project with this flood of all the reasons it's not going to work coming into my head. And the bigger the project, the more that comes in, which is interesting. Because if somebody else tells me a reason why it's not going to work, even if it's the same reason that's in my own head, I like suddenly start thinking of reasons that that's not true.

If somebody tells me I can't do something, I'm like, in general, I'm like, wait, hold on now. Who are you to tell me that? So it does light a fire for me. It's not that, and it's not that I have a disdain for them. But as soon as people challenge me, I feel like this, there's this almost bite or fight back, which I don't know. I don't really love that about myself, but it certainly has helped in many ways to do some difficult work. I definitely have that reaction, but I think it's also shown me that I'm not being objective about myself when I'm thinking about all the reasons this project isn't going to work. If I were talking to one of my friends about the same project, I would be giving them different advice than I'm giving myself.

More supportive? More supportive, yep. Yeah, okay. And so I think I've – but I'm able to get through that. Like that's the initial flood and I kind of know that comes now. And then I just focus down to a much more granular level, stop thinking about the project as the whole start to finish and start being like take a step tomorrow and take a step the next day. That really helped me when I was competitive runner too. I used to make these goals that was like, I'm going to run X time, right? When you get past the finish line, either you did or you didn't. And that goal

doesn't really help you. Goals that are much more like, I'm going to move at this point. I'm going to track this runner. Like those are actionable goals that you can make toward the progress. And so, so I think I then start making these sort of goals of whether it's a page or a chapter or a certain area, as opposed to looking at the whole thing in its grand scale, and then it gets much better. Do you write the introduction first for books or articles? Or do you write the pieces, the facts, and the stories first or the principles first? Like how do you organize your chapters or your book? That's a great question because it's not the same. It's never quite the

same process twice. And some of the best writing advice I was ever given came from a writer named Kevin Coyne. And I had been editing some video for a friend who had carpal tunnel syndrome. And so he was telling me what to do and I was doing the editing. And when you edit video, you have all this material and you chop it up into small chunks and everything between the chunks hits the cutting room floor. And so for each chunk, you've set an in point and an out point for the clip.

And then all you do is arrange them in a certain order. And the skill is putting those every out point so that it leads to the next in point. So that's what I meant with like Wes Craven's, his out point to a commercial has to be compelling enough to get you to the next in point. And then that in point has to propel you through. And so I'm always thinking about that in terms of film cutting, like what's the in and out point for this section that comes in with some kind

of strong question or whatever it is. And that gets me out in a way that's going to propel someone to the next section. So I start to think about organizing it in that way, like the, like cutting film, because you have all your reporting and all your string, and then you get it down to these chunks there, whether that's a quote or a fact or a study, it's a usable thing. And then it's just about shuffling and arranging them. Do you have like lots of notes or lots of pages and then you're going to cut and paste them together? Like, what does that, what does that look like for you? Yeah. I have, I have a handwritten digital all over the stuff.

I actually keep something I call a master thought list that's, I'll start writing down just like facts and it helps me keep my citations in order, you know, where it came from, or maybe I'll even put a link in or whatever it is or the name of the file on my computer, you know, or third book, the blue one on the second shelf or whatever it is, or the name of the file on my computer, you know, or third book, the blue one on the second shelf, or whatever it is. And as those start kind of coalescing around a certain idea, I'll make a tag. So it'll be a themed tag, like whatever it is, you know, MC1R gene tag. And so

then I start grouping the like stuff under that tag, and then start moving like tags near each other that I think might transition to each other. And so I start doing that on that master thought list, basically, where it's stuff that was salient to me. Of course, sometimes it gets unwieldy, like, you know, many tens of thousands of words, and then it can be a little tricky to deal with. So then I start actually like laying it out on the floor and looking at it. Which program do you use? Right now I'm just doing it in Pages, in Mac Pages. I know I should use Scrivener, for goodness sake.

But, yeah, I'm stuck in my old way at the moment, but I think I might try to transition to Scrivener. Okay, cool. Have you tried XMind by chance? No, I haven't tried XMind. What's XMind? It's a, what's it, like a mind map. It's a nice little, you know, visual to group ideas together. It's not quite as clean as what you're talking about, but it's a nice creative mind mapping piece of software that's pretty intuitive.

Yeah, that'd be great. I mean, because organization is a challenge with a big writing project. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, okay, good. What are the things that have helped you create something that has been noticed or disruptive in the field of sports science? Or just basically to be a good writer. What is the crown jewel for you? Is it deep attention deep focus when i mentioned that my book ended up being totally different from

my proposal i was a year into it when i realized the stuff i'm finding points to things very different than what i thought there was in my proposal and for a while it was all these disparate pieces and there was a point at which i guess i had marinated in the information long enough that it really started to come into view where I said, this is different than what I thought it was going to be. And I don't know where the point is that that phase transition happens, where you've immersed yourself in the material enough. But again, I think that's an outgrowth of partly. So I had these ideas in my proposal and I said, well, what would I, what would I look for if I was going to falsify this idea? Because then I'll know the arguments against it, if they're weak or strong. So I went about that

in the most rigorous way I could possibly think of and diving farther down every rabbit hole than I really needed to. I'd wake up in the middle of the night being like, this is the other citation I need to get. Or I'd go to the library at Columbia at the time, because I was still living in New York and had an alumni reading card. And there's four computers in that entire library that are simultaneously logged into every journal the university has access to. So you can go to the citations and it'll be hyperlinked and you can go straight to the other article. And I would just not leave a question when I felt like I had cherry picked enough evidence to have something to write about. And so I've even noticed this about some of my constant conversation partners on email, is that I can kind of exhaust them. Because if they're

willing to answer my questions, it's basically never going to end until they cut it off. So I think one thing I really have going for myself is a really deep curiosity once I get on a question. And sometimes that can be annoying because I'll be reading something and I want the answer to a certain question that I know is irrelevant to what I should be doing right now. But it will nag me if I don't like kind of pursue it. And, you know, and maybe I know I'll probably forget whatever the answer is anyway. But it just bothers me to know it's out there and I'm going to live my life without pursue it. And, you know, and maybe I know I'll probably forget whatever the answer is anyway, but, but it just bothers me to know it's out there and I'm going to live my life without knowing it. So I think I have sort of a dog of curiosity. Okay. With that curiosity, you found something that one of your friends, you kind of blew up one of the ideas that he popularized. And so Anders Ericsson did the original research on what, what Malcolm Gladwell

has popularized as called the 10,000-hour rule. And I think that those two aren't seeing eye to eye on the original research. But that notwithstanding, you took both of those ideas and said, no, no, no, genes. Remember, there's a genetic code here that's going to predispose excellence. Even those who work hard that don't have the right genetic coding aren't going to be world class. So if I have that right, I don't want to butcher your 270 pages or whatever it was of insight. But how did you deal with your relationship with Malcolm Gladwell when, I don't know if you know Anders or not, how did you deal with that tension? Didn't have a relationship with Malcolm at the time. That all, that all came afterward. However, once, you know, I realized I was going to write some of this stuff, I was,

I was worried about how he would, uh, you know, how he would receive it. Although honestly, I didn't think it would get on. I thought it probably wouldn't get onto his radar. I thought like my mother was going to buy a dozen copies and like she'd invite me to her book club and that would be the end of it. Seriously? Yeah. I totally would have left out the section about altitude genetics that was like pretty in the weeds if I had thought it was going to become like a popular book. Because when I went around to publishers, some of them were like, well, are you going to come down nature or nurture? You know, I said, well, I think it's at least going to be a degree of mix. I don't know how much. And I went with the

publisher I went with because they didn't try to force me to pick one, uh, when they were interviewing me. But I think it left me with the impression that if I didn't do that, it was not like a, going to be something for popular consumption basically. Um, and again, it's so, so yeah, so I didn't, I didn't think about that. It was, it was out once I started thinking about that. And, you know, I put in whatever 30 or 40 pages of citations to try to justify myself. And I felt like, you know, someone like Anders Ericsson is no stranger to civil debate. And I think he's interested, you know, and I respect him. And, you know, I had organized a panel at

the American College of Sports Medicine with him before, before the book came out anyway. And so, you know, I tried to treat the, the work with respect, but also, you know, and I don't mind like when people, I guess I have some tolerance for debate. And when people challenge me, I think if they're not doing it personally, but are genuinely interested in the ideas, I think that's great. Like, I know there are things I'm wrong about. I don't know what they are. That's the problem. Yeah, that's well said.

Okay. So here's like a real kind of in the weeds question. Why – based on your understanding, why are female action sport athletes – let's use both surfing and halfpipe. Okay. So why are they not able to get out of the lip at the same velocity and the same altitude and height as their male counterparts when science would suggest that it's not like a power to weight ratio that is the key? You know, so what are your thoughts about when science says there should be no difference because the women in the half pipe are a bit lighter but strong enough to go, let's say, three, four, five feet out of the lip and men are going double that. And it's not the can tell some of the limitations of physiology and science at the moment, because there's, there are emergent phenomena in the human body that we,

that are very difficult to study, especially when you start comparing people at the elite level, where like the margin of error in a lot of the science we do, you know, like all the guys on the, the starting line of the Olympic 100 meter final and physiologists, if you, if you blinded them to who they were, they wouldn't be able to pick those guys apart, right? I don't know the correct term nowadays. I don't know if I'm supposed to say African-American or black, but I know they're not all from Africa. So why on the starting line? I don't know if you're going to be able to answer the female question there. Why are most of them black on the starting line?

What have you found out there? Listen, that's a sensitive question. why are most of them black on the starting line? Like what, what, what have you found out there? And I don't, I don't like, listen, that's a sensitive question, but when I look at it over and over again, that's like predominantly that race. Yeah. And I haven't,

I should say, I haven't reported it out for Rio, but prior to Rio, every finalist in the Olympic 100, since the U S boycotted in 1980, you know, whether their homeland had been, um,

great Britain or Portugal or Jamaica or Canada or the U 1980, you know, whether their homeland had been Great Britain or Portugal or Jamaica or Canada or the U.S., you know, had their ancestry from a particular area in the west coast of Africa, right? So part of the problem, I think, when people think of this in the U.S. is when you think of black athletes being good at running, you're like, well, do you mean these people who have ancestry on one side of the continent who are overrepresented in power and explosion sports or these people on the other side of the continent who could not be more physiologically different you know who are overrepresented in the endurance sports and

i think i think no doubt that part of this becomes a self-perpetuating cycle like any phenomenon in sports you know once it gets going it's a positive feedback of their role models for a particular group and you know the the signal that you think you can do it and then it becomes you know this kind of sort of um like stereotype threat type um of idea but you know in in in the book and and i wish i had like a perfect answer for this because this was one of the areas again in the in the sports gene where I really opened up my own question process because I was like, we're not going to get a clean answer here. So let me just put on the table what questions I'm asking and then try to answer them. and have, on average, a little less capacity to generate energy using oxygen, sort of the slower, more endurant energy generation pathways.

That's not controversial. If you're not from Kenya, you're saying? Right. So the people of West African descent from the areas from which we wrenched people from their homes and brought them to the United States. And then do I have this part of the story right? That those that were brought over in the slave race or slave trade, those that were unwieldy and aggressive, they were taken to Jamaica. Yeah, there were groups of people who were considered, at least that's what, you you know some of the records up behind show they were taking jamaica in particular part of jamaica where you know there was like hard to uh escape

from some supposedly warrior type uh people were were sent yeah stronger bigger faster whatever yeah okay yeah and that was interesting because when i went to the island and i was told the sort of folklore of all of the you know all the sprinters are maroons, these sort of warrior people, because a lot of them grew up right near that area. Then the genetic evidence didn't support that. But so I was, you know, it would have been neat if it did. And so it's kind of like a little bit of a fizzle in the book where it's like, isn't this story wonderful? And yeah, OK. But the story was still cool for itself.

So, again, so people of West African ancestry are very much underrepresented in the endurance sports. And not only that, but based on medical standards that have been created from all, you know, white people of European ancestry, they look anemic because they have lower hemoglobin. So they're not, they're not having health effects. They just have a naturally lower set point for hemoglobin that seems to be the result of adaptations to malaria or malarial protection from West Africa. And in the book, I present evidence that's not dispositive, but that I think is very interesting, that that might have caused a slight shift to physiological mechanisms that allow more energy production in the absence of oxygen, which is the kind that you want for sprinting and jumping. And again, we're not talking about big shifts, but when you're only looking for, you know, the eight or however many fastest people in the world, maybe that causes an over-representation. That said, the ubiquity, I think, also has something to do with sprinters from other

places just stop trying, because it doesn't mean that that physiology doesn't exist in other places, right? It's like, I think we can all agree that pygmy populations will probably be underrepresented in the NBA because the average adult male height is five feet. And yet we've had Muggsy Bogues in the NBA. That doesn't mean that populations of people who are barely over five feet are going to achieve equal representation in the NBA. But it certainly means it's possible. And so I think part of the danger of this information is people take it as this, like, oh, well that means I, you know, I can't do it or none of these people can do it. Like, so you know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well said. Okay. And then, so go back to the females not being able to kind of get the altitude out of

the lip or whether it's in surfing or snowboarding? Without knowing the specific physiology around that, I would be curious about the rate of power generation, if that makes a difference, because men are often able to generate power faster, which is actually why sometimes in the starting blocks for sprinters, you see the women look like they have slightly slower reaction times to the gun, even though when women are tested not on blocks for reaction time, their reaction times look the same. But because they don't, those blocks are picking up, they start at a certain level of force, and the women don't apply it quite as quickly, even though it's a level of force that's way within their capability. But I remember I would come across some kind of curious studies like in speed skating where researchers would be

a little confused where they'd say like the power differences between men and women that they're applying to the ice and in their lower body they exist but they're not nearly as big as the race performance differences so what's going on here and what they started to realize was that men were able to hold a certain position a lot longer than women were and more accurately sort of because subtle differences in their musculature and their skeletal makeup. And so my guess would be that there's another, something else going on like that. That's kind of more of an emergent property of, of the way things are set up and less, less able to be reduced to just power to weight. Okay. You know, you're, you're jogging my memory about a study. I think it was like way back in

65. It might've been Harvard. I'll reference this better for you later. But where there was a difference between black athletes and white athletes and they were looking for genetic differences. Did you come across the study or is this is like something that I need to go look up? I mean, I came across a lot of studies like that. I don't remember what the particular thing they were looking for. I think this was one of the first studies about Achilles heel length. Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah. And so what did you find there? You know, so one, there's been a lot of spurious stuff done in that area in the past. At the same time, not specific to African-Americans, but anyone whose long-term ancestry is at very low latitude will tend to have longer limbs compared to their body size, which is the case for not just humans, other animals as well. So like one of the simple ways you can tell an African elephant from an Asian elephant is the African elephant has those long, flat, flappy ears. And that's like their limb, because the idea is to increase the surface area compared to volume to let heat out. So it's like the same thing with, you know, like an old radiator, you can see the coils, the purpose is to increase surface area to volume to let heat out. And so people with low

latitude ancestry will tend to have longer limbs. And if you have longer legs, you know, like a guy taller than me is in most cases on average going to have a longer Achilles tendon than I am. So, you know, that, that is true that people, people who have longer legs will have longer Achilles tendons. And if you, if you match up someone low latitude ancestry who will have darker skin because it protects them from equatorial sunlight with someone of the same height from you know scandinavian ancestry on average the person who has their ancestry lower latitude is going to have longer legs and thus longer achilles tendon cool insight okay last little insight on this sport piece here is what do you see there's two two embedded questions what do you see for the future of sport? And then

what do you see for, or what have you come to understand to be advantageous practices for kids? Like, what do we do there? So for the future of sport, I think there are, I think we're getting to a point where there are a lot of serious social questions that sport can bring out that we need to ask. Like, you know, as sort of the world's winner-take-all market has developed, like, I remember I read these studies when I was thinking about in sports where like, you know, in 100 years ago, there were 3,000 tenors, singers, you know, opera singers in Iowa who were supported because people would go to the regional competition. And then the three tenors and the CD were invented. And now everybody could have a ticket to like the best three performers.

So all the rewards for the very best accumulated at the very top. And in some ways, that's great. And in other ways, it meant a lot of people went from being participants to being purely spectators. And we've seen that in a big way in sports. And so I really wonder as the gap between the elite performers, as the elite performers become sort of more alien from the rest of the population in so many ways, what does that mean about the things of greatest value that we think about in sports? And I think those questions are going to continue to be asked and up to the point where we're asking, like, what's the difference between human achievement and technological and scientific achievement and and should we draw the should we draw those lines and how do we draw them right like when are you when are you circumventing

those voluntarily accepted obstacles in a way that we deem to be unfair basically i think that the rate that technology is moving whether that's like crisper you know with gene editing or or whatever it is we should be talking about those questions frankly now. One, because I think they're interesting and sports is a great lens for those that are applicable to the rest of life. But I think we're going to keep going in that direction. And I think along with that, we'll see a rise of certain other types of sports, whether that's CrossFit games or, you know, like mud racing and obstacle racing. And I think one of the reasons there's this massive growth in some of those obstacle racing areas is because it's awesome to do a marathon and things like that. But also people get so far away from the people at the front. And what they want to value is having finished something great. And so I think these obstacle races where it's like less about timing and really about the obstacle of can you finish will become more and more popular as participatory sports, as elite sports kind of goes off on this more sort of lonely trajectory in some ways.

Okay. And then for kids, what are some of your thoughts for the next generation here? I worry a lot about the trend toward early hyper-specialization toward the – and I'm planning to do some writing about this – toward the Tiger Woods model where I think in golf maybe it works. It's very, very early. He was unusual in a lot of ways. But golf is not necessarily a good model of a lot of other things people want to do inside and outside of sports. And the, what the aggregate data says is actually the typical elite performer has a range of breadth of experience early on where they use how to, they learn how to use their body. They learn what sports they like. And it's almost like they're becoming bilingual and thus becoming like more able to learn another language later, but they're doing it with perceptual skill and so i think this well-intentioned drive to train kids like pros

um by to give them an early advantage by doing that really ends up teaching them constrained skills gives them an illusory advantage where it's like teaching a kid to walk early but all the other kids are going to learn to walk so it's going to cease to be an advantage so it's like teaching a kid to walk early, but all the other kids are going to learn to walk. So it's going to cease to be an advantage. So it's really a catch up. So you see this fade out of advantage and ends up constraining them. Uh, and so I think with good intentions, you know, we might end up making really good 10 year olds, but are sometimes ruining some of the best 20 year olds. And I think that's why we're finding like Jean Cote at Queens university keeps finding that there's increasing and increasing, increasingly higher odds ratios of kids, of top pro athletes coming from these smaller towns, even in sports

like basketball, which we used to associate with big city teams, because those are the places where the youth teams aren't so competitive that the kids can actually have some sport diversity early on. They don't have to specialize in baseball to make the 12-year-old team. And so they can develop in a way that's more appropriate. I was talking to Ian Yates, who has been a performance director for various sports in the UK, I think cycling most recently. And he said the problem he has now is his parents come in and say, I want my kid who is 13 or whatever doing what Chris Froome is doing right now. Instead of saying they whatever, doing what Chris Froome is doing right now,

instead of saying they want them doing what Chris Froome was doing when he was 13, which was very different in developing this sort of range of other skills. God, what a great insight. That's a really cool insight, David. Not mine. That was Ian's. Yeah, I know. Thank you for sharing. That's a really cool insight. But so I think it's good intentions. It goes back to that point of how do you balance long-term and short-term. It's really hard to not prescribe somebody what to do and feeling like you're giving them a head start. And yet, the fade-out of those constrained skill head starts is pretty well documented in a lot of areas. Okay. So now let's go one step deeper into the weeds here about genetic mutations, if you will. And I don't know if you remember the research or if you went into the weeds here with epigenetics and such, but the ACE mutations and ACTN3, did you take a look at some of that stuff yeah so with are you interested in in

or are concerned about you know looking at ac actn3 and all the variations there for elite sprinters and outputs and even the the i think there's one for acl predictors like acl ruptures i can't remember what that coding was but Yeah, those are the collagen genes for acupuncture. The injury ones I'm not so worried about because I think some of the research is actually better. And so long as they are – well, I'm going to qualify that in a sec. But if they are used for the purposes of giving the athlete more knowledge that might make them better for injury prevention, I think that's great. If they're being used for, you know, like not selecting a player or something like that, that concerns me both philosophically, but also because we have a tendency, and I think the NFL combine in some ways is case in point here, of making things important because we can

measure them, not measuring them because they're important. And somehow when you give somebody this genetic information, like you could give someone information about one gene in a tendon, that's way less information than holistically examining this tendon, which teaches you about the person's genes and their environment and their training. And so I think there's an, because this reductionist stuff is kind of sexy sometimes, that we put more emphasis on it than we should. But if it's used in the right way, I actually think some of that's legitimate. But for ACTN3 and ACE, ACTN3 is the most commonly, the gene, the most commonly marketed in these kind of direct-to-consumer and direct-to-athlete tests. And it codes for a protein found only in fast-twitch muscle fibers. So if you don't have at least one of the so-called

sprint versions, you're not going to be an Olympic 100-meter runner. You can tell that a lot better with a stopwatch. But the real kind of implicit deception there is, aside from... So in 23andMe the ACTN3 gene last time I checked has their four star research confidence rating which means like they're very confident of it but what that really means is that it's replicated like the science is replicated what the people that I look at on the message boards in there take that to mean is that it's important it's not that important it accounts for a tiny amount of variance in people at a very high level. It's not important. It's like, so making it, so some of these companies that say, we'll tell your kid what version they have, and you can decide to send them to endurance or to sprint and power type sports.

It's like, if someone gave you a puzzle, we don't even know how many pieces the puzzle has. Hundreds, thousands, we don't know, not to mention the environmental aspects of it, gave you one piece that said, without this piece, you can't finish the puzzle, but make a decision without any of the other pieces. That's what giving someone the ACTN3 gene is. It's giving them less than 1% of a puzzle with an unknown number of pieces, but because they get that information, they make a decision on it. So from a research standpoint, I think it's very interesting. But I think its actual predictive value, the only thing it can predict is that, like, you know, if you don't have a particular version, then you're probably not going to be in the Olympic 100-meter final. But it's certainly not the best way to test that capacity anyway.

So I'm concerned about how that's being translated very much. Okay. All right. Brilliant. Thank you for answering that. Okay. So I'd love if you could answer just a couple kind of quick hits here. Pressure comes from? Well, for me, it comes from worrying about the people, what the people you're writing about are going to think about it. But mostly internally. I try to pretend sometimes like those people are no longer alive just to get through it. Okay, success is? Autonomy.

Autonomy and freedom to pursue your own interests and projects. It all comes down to? Exploration. I think whether that's in terms of learning about yourself or continuing to find projects that are going to motivate you or just the humility that comes with realizing you're still always far away from having it figured out um whether that's in your your personal or professional i think we should all

have a little more mind toward exploration and trial and error and everything that we do okay and then if you were to score one to ten on these two functions external rewards ten being high like i'm i'm about it money car fame whatever whatever and then internal rewards ten being high like i'm i'm about it money car fame whatever whatever and then internal rewards tend being high like the way it feels to to grow and learn how do you score those two those two skills for me personally yeah for you for the external rewards to the extent that having the autonomy to pursue the projects that I want and make a living doing that, that's very important to me. But I need no more things than I have right now. So I'd say a four because I want to be able to make a living indeed.

And I want to be able to live near a park I can run in. And, you know, being able to make a living doing what I want is allows me to do that. But I wouldn't mind if I didn't have any more things ever than I have right now. So four on external and then a what on internal? A nine. I mean, you have to live with yourself every day, you know, and like, and I've found I like I and I think think i think i can i think i can justify that i'm being honest about that because if i look at the way my career has changed i went from a newspaper with a large name to a startup that didn't have an office i went from being a senior writer sports illustrated to uh another startup that people didn't recognize so

and always with the feeling that what i was doing that day was much more important than the name of the place I was doing it for. So I think I can legitimately say at least that I kind of followed that to, you know, going from Sports Illustrated to a place where you have to tell people what, you know, what the publication is that you're working at is an interesting experience. And I've done that twice. And so that's, yeah, so I've always been concerned about what I'm doing and how I feel about it. And am I done that twice. And so that's, yeah, so I've always been concerned about what I'm doing and how I feel about it. And am I interested? I seem to have a very low tolerance for jobs that I find uninteresting, I guess, which is why I always need those side projects. Brilliant. David, thank you. I think usually the question about mastery comes at the end, but

we've already addressed that. And is there anything else you wanted to talk about the concept of or articulate the concept of mastery? No, only, and we already mentioned this, but only the fact that I think I have seen, and I've been around people who have had a very good result in something, you know,

have been a world champion maybe even, but I would not say that they have achieved mastery. So, you know, I know this is partly my personal semantics, but I just think there are differences because sometimes, you know, one of the things I also learned in doing my research for the book is sometimes people can be really good at things without having the level of control or insight or even self-knowledge that I associate with mastery. Very cool. Okay. Where can people find out more about you? Where can they get the book? Where can they follow along for your next book, which we didn't talk about, but like, where, where can we,

where can we track on that? You know, I'm always, I'm on Twitter at David Epstein, even though there's a ton of us, somehow I got the Twitter handle for at David Epstein, who's also apparently a Boston weatherman. So I get a lot of questions about Boston weather on Twitter. And I'm always happy to answer them wrongly. And the sports gene dot com, you know, the books around. And I think I'm going to start working on another one soon. So, you know, if you'll you'll have me back in however long a time that is for now, probably a while.

Are you are you active on Twitter? I am, yeah. Okay, so it's David, E-P-S-T-E-I-N. Yep, just at David Epstein. Perfect. And then, yeah, love to have you back. So seriously, thank you for your time. Thank you for sharing and lending your expertise on how you think about yourself and the world

and people in it and the craft and your insights from your research. And I know there's going to be lots of questions that come from you on social. So thank you in advance for taking those. And for those of us who are still listening, thank you for being part of the community. Take a quick minute, head over to iTunes, subscribe if you haven't done to the podcast, read a review if you've been part of it and enjoyed it. And we're also going to take, David, some of your insights and put them on another podcast that we have. It's just minute, it's called minutes on mastery. So it's insights and pearls of wisdom under two minutes, under three minutes, actually. So I just want to thank you. And you can hit me up on social

at Michael Gervais and Instagram is finding mastery. So David, thank you. Appreciate it. It's a pleasure. Thanks for having me. Those are some very challenging questions. I feel like I'll be thinking about a couple of them for the rest of the day, but I appreciate that. Good. All right. Perfect. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. We'll talk soon. All right. Thanks, Michael. Take care. All right. Thank you so much for diving into another episode of Finding Mastery with us. Our team loves creating this podcast and sharing these conversations with you.

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