Good Life Project - Why Generalists Beat Specialists | David Epstein

Episode Date: July 2, 2019

David Epstein (https://www.davidepstein.com/) is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Sports Gene and his new blockbuster book, Range (https://amzn.to/2K449m6), which makes a powerful, science-backed argument about success. Contrary to those who say "find your thing as early as possible, then focus on becoming the best at it," it turns out those who succeed at the highest levels and stay there longest do not specialize early or become world-class experts in one narrow domain. They actually do the exact opposite. They stay generalists for as long as possible. Early specializers often rise fast, then burn out, leaving those playing a longer, more generalized game to eventually lap them, rise higher and stay successful longer. We dive into the eye-opening research, along with Epstein's remarkable personal journey in today's conversation.-------------Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://sparketype.com/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend. Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

So maybe you're familiar with the quote 10,000 hour rule or the concept of deliberate practice, or maybe you've heard the advice that you've got to specialize as quickly as you can and just become completely and utterly amazing at one thing if you want to succeed in business and career and life. Well, my guest today, David Epstein, is the author of a really provocative new book called Range. And he's making a powerful research-backed argument that in fact, early specialization,

diving deep into one thing, may be the worst thing that you can do, at least for a lot of the areas of life that really matter. In fact, maybe breath, maybe range, maybe going wide intentionally and staying wide is the thing that will allow us to flourish the most. Really fascinating conversation. We talk about this idea, we go deep into some of the research, some of the big awakenings. We also explore his multifaceted career that ranges from environmental studies, living out in Arizona, to being in New York City, to being in the Arctic Circle, and living on a research vessel in the middle of the ocean.

Lots of really fun places that we stop. So excited to share this conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him. We need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight Risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever.

It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations,

iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. I came to Columbia. Okay. Thought I was going to study. Well, I didn't really know. I thought I was going to go to the Air Force Academy. Then I came to Columbia and I was like political science.

Wasn't really a fit for me. Went out and lived at the Biosphere 2 campus. And was like geology it is. And so I ended up majoring in geology and astronomy. Got a master's degree in environmental science. But decided that that kind of narrowing career path also wasn't for me. And so transition into journalism.

So what was it? Where were you? The geology was at Columbia or somewhere else then? Columbia, yeah, yeah. Geology and astronomy. And I had no idea that had sort of a substantial department there. Very famous department actually.

So they own an estate in Rockland County that was bequeathed to them. It's called the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. And it's a very prominent, in fact, a guy named Wally Broker, who actually cut from range, was probably the most decorated environmental scientist ever. And he worked at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. And among his many contributions, well, in 1975, he wrote a paper called Are We on the Cusp of a Pronounced Global Warming, I think. Wow. And that, in 1975, predicted with incredible accuracy, temperature, and carbon levels for the next like 30 years. Although he, he, he would say himself that he was lucky because he had some offsetting errors, but, and he discovered this thing called the great ocean conveyor where we thought the oceans were more sort of static tubs. But in fact, there's

this enormous exchange going on that keeps basically the tropics from continually heating up and the, and the poles from continually cooling down. And it's the shutting down of that conveyor belt that is, should be one of like the biggest concerns with climate change. But anyway, so he won the National Science Medal. And so he was a Columbia guy who was here and drew a lot of talent. Yeah. When you came out, I mean, because it's interesting, when you study something like that, I'm always curious about what you think you'll be doing afterwards. Yeah.

You know, I have gotten almost like linearly less goal directed since I was a high school student. Oh, no kidding. When I was in high school, I was going to go to the Air Force Academy. I was going to be an engineer. Did you come from a military family? No. It was just something that popped into your head. Yeah.

I mean, I even went to like a military aviation camp. I wanted to be an astronaut. I was going into space and, you know, be a test pilot and then an astronaut. And at the last second in high school, I sort of said, you know, I'm starting to not like taking orders as much and starting to develop some other interests, started to read a little fiction and said, maybe I should not get on such a narrow track. Obviously, you know, Columbia is a little different than the United States Air Force Academy. And so then I went in thinking I'm going to study political science. It wasn't really a thing for me.

And I was on the college track team. And an older, an upperclassman who was one of my training partners, who was a biomedical engineer, said, you got to go out. And like Columbia leases this campus out in the desert in Arizona where the Biosphere 2 is, you got to go out there. And I saw an opportunity to take a class so that I could have a lighter load during track season in college also and go out there. There were other factors. There were other factors. Yeah. And it was just this incredible experience. I mean, you go out there and, you know, I was used to cities and like life is spread out horizontally because it's clinging to whatever vein of water it can for survival. And so you literally see in a different way.

And I just fell in love with the place and said, whatever gets me more trips like this and teaches me about this ecosystem, that's what I'm doing. Yeah, explain for anyone who has no idea what this thing called the Biosphere 2 is, because this is very different than anything else anywhere. Paint the picture a little bit of what it's actually like. Yeah, so Biosphere 1 being Earth. Biosphere 2 was this project conceived by this group that said,

okay, we have a limited economic window to put a sustainable civilization on the moon or Mars or whatever. And so we're going to practice on Earth. This was all privately funded stuff. We're going to practice on Earth by building under kind of like a geodesic glass structure almost like a large greenhouse we're going to put small versions of every one of the different biomes on earth and and see if it can be self-sustaining so that we could put this on another planet you can live in and they locked people in there twice and it did not go well um because that my recollection is that that was shut down yeah i mean years ago they started running out of oxygen and all these things and then and then on

the second attempt so they had to actually pump in oxygen and all this kind of stuff so that it so it didn't that didn't work at all but after that it became well first it became a play actually wally broker also discovered what was the problem with the oxygen was which was that it was being taken up by certain these like artificial rocks that they had put in there basically. But it became interesting sort of for just a research, because you don't usually build something like that. And Columbia leased the campus around it. So like Biosphere 2 was not the attraction. When I went out there, it was the Sonoran Desert around it where all the revelations happened for me. Not inside that glass kind of goofy experiment.

Yeah, that's amazing. So you come back and then you go out. So how do you go from there and ending up in the Arctic Circle? That's a good question. So then I decided to study geology. And then I pick up also being out there, I start looking at seeing stars in a way I never had before and thinking, gosh, I wonder how we measure the distance and age of those. And I end up minoring in astronomy, just wondering about like how those sorts of measurements work. And I started grad school in that track, environmental science, you know, that's what I thought I was going to do. And so my grad research, I was living in the lower Arctic tundra in North in Alaska, studying the carbon cycle, basically, because that's an

area that's where there's permafrost, like, you know, a meter underground and there's all these locked up nutrients. And so even a little bit of melting as temperature changes there, it liberates a ton of nutrients and can really change things in a big way. And so I was, I was up there, yeah, doing my, doing my grad research. Yeah. I mean, it's got to be incredible. I mean, it's interesting too, right? Because you go from the Sonoran Desert to the Arctic Circle. Yeah. I mean, like profoundly different environments. Yeah.

Were there things that were the same? Desert stuff. Right. That's what I'm curious about. I realized I love desert. So you don't think of the lower tundra as a desert because it's so lush and so green, but it is because it's so cool year round that there's very little atmospheric demand for water. So, so you don't get rain basically. And you have trees, but they're like three inches tall, you know? There's, I remember there's a road as you're going North, it's like the pipeline

service road where you pass this tree and there's a sign that says farthest North spruce tree in North America do not cut. So like the joke is everybody takes a picture of himself peeing on it or whatever. But yeah, but it's technically a desert. So it still has that. So even though it's lush on the ground, everything is so short that one in the summer when it's light all day, you can like hike 24 hours a day and see way off in the distance. And again, it had that life spread horizontally that I guess I realized I liked. Yeah, that's amazing. But I also like New York where life is spread vertically. It's nice to be kind of able to get a balance between the two different places. So how do you go from there then?

So you're sort of like starting this career, and it sounds like you're somebody who's driven by a wide-ranging and almost gripping sense of curiosity. curiosity? You know, I realized something happened to me in the reporting of range that had never happened before, which is I ended up becoming a subject in a study that I was interviewing the scientists about. And this is this study at Harvard called the Dark Horse Project. And it was looking for how do people find careers where they feel fulfilled, basically. It doesn't matter what they are. You know, the people included in the studies are sommeliers, midwives, you know, investors, whatever. And the common trait for those people, it turned out, the reason it's called the Dark Horse Project is because as the researchers were looking for these people, they would all come in and say, okay, don't tell people to do what I did because I zigged and zagged and kind of came in the side door. So I'm not a good example. And they

call it the Dark Horse means someone who comes out of nowhere. So all these people, so the project wasn't called the dark horse project until all these people started coming in and saying like, don't, don't tell people to do what I do. And one of their common traits was basically short-term planning where instead of saying, looking around and saying, this person's younger than me and has more than me, they say, here's who I am right now. Here are the skills I have. Here are the interests I have. Here are the opportunities in front of me. Here's what I'm going to take. And maybe a year from now I'll change because I will have learned something about myself

or learned something new. And I've realized that all the long-term goals I had when I was a teenager, none of those came to fruition because I learned the things about myself. And all these sort of short-term where I just adjust to my interests was much more fruitful for me. Yeah, it's so interesting, right?

Because it's almost like the idea of, it's like the Buddhist idea of holding everything lightly. It's where, but I think, I feel like culturally, so much of the emphasis is on the exact opposite. And that's really, it's part of what you write about also, where it's like this, in some domains of life, long-termism I think is really good. But in other domains, it locks you into a set of blinders

and effort where you may well get it, it locks you into a set of blinders and effort where you may well get it, but you may ignore so much other grace and possibility along the way. And also, I mean, one of the reasons I liked that idea that I wrote about called the end of history illusion. I mean, I'm not the first person to write about that, but this psychology finding that we all realize

we have changed a lot in the past, but then we say like we're pretty much finished now. And at every stage of life, we underestimate the change. We say there's been a lot of change in the past, but underestimate the amount of change going forward. Even though change does slow down at a certain point when you get older, we still continue to underestimate it. So this leads to some really funny results. Like when people are asked how much they would pay to see their favorite band now, 10 years from now, their favorite band today, 10 years from now, the average answer is $129. And when they're asked how much they would pay to see their favorite band now, 10 years from now, their favorite band today, 10 years from now, the average answer is $129. And when they're asked how much they would pay to see their favorite band from 10 years ago today, the average answer

is $80, right? Because you underestimate how much your taste will change. But like, if you're setting ironclad, there's nothing wrong with having long-term goals, but I think it's dangerous to make them before sort of a period of experimentation. And, you know, setting those long-term goals is often because of the end of history illusion and the way the world changes is trying to make predictions for a person you don't yet know in a world you can't yet conceive. So I think it's usually luck if you're able to do that from too far out. Yeah, I tend to agree with that. I mean, it's sort of, it sounds like similar to what Dan Gilbert wrote back in Stumbling on Happiness about effective forecasting, you know, and its

relationship to happiness. You know, we think 20 years down the road, if we do X and accomplish X and we are X, that we will be, you know, Y level of happiness. And I remember his research showed that we'll actually get a more accurate answer about our own personal happiness, finding a stranger who's 20 years down the road, living that similar scenario and asking them how they feel, then we'll actually feel ourselves when we get there. Because we're so disconnected from what that's going to be like. But we think that we're actually really connected. We know ourselves. Yeah. No, I mean, no surprise, Dan Gilbert was one of the co-authors of the original End of History Illusion paper. Right. And, you know, I think that goes to one of my favorite ideas. I don't want to take a left turn here, but I think this is related.

One of the quotes that stuck with me was from this woman, Herminia Ibarra, who also studies career changes. And what she said is, we learn who we are in practice, not in theory. And what she meant is that there's all these personality quizzes and career gurus who sort of say, make you feel like you can introspect and just know like what your happiness will be or what you'll be successful at. But in fact, that insight is constrained by your roster of previous experiences and you actually need to try stuff and then reflect on it. And that is how you get to know yourself. And, and so I think that that sort of shows up in those, you know, that, that we don't have that insight until we do things and see how we are. I look at this almost like a cycling process. You know, it's like engage with these different things

and also engage in life. You know, and this is some of the stuff you write about and are an advocate for, like continually run experiments. Yeah. You know, get every data point you can, take the assessments if you want and keep living and trying and exploring. Because like you said, they're only a reflection

of your personal experience up to that point in life. Right. I mean, all the stuff that I ended up doing and all the projects that have ended up being important to me, I basically didn't know existed when I was like setting my original long-term goals when I was younger, you know? So there's no way I could have set them anyway. Right. All right. So how do we go from the Arctic Circle then to being on a research vessel that was priorly a target of a pirate attack? Yeah. So those went in the reverse. I was on the research vessel first. The research vessel, so I did some lab work for my senior thesis in college. And again, this was at the Lamont

Dory Earth Observatory. And so it's this big collection of labs. And while I was there, I learned some computer systems that were used on the boat. And I saw a job ad like on a board and I needed, I wanted like a summer job and I'd never been out to sea. So it seemed cool. And so I was already internal. Like I didn't even have to apply, you know, you just kind of said like, I'll do it. And so I go on this ship that was basically zigzagging over a tectonic plate boundary off the Pacific Northwest to image like volcanoes down there ostensibly for earthquake prediction and things like that. But I shared, we had these bunk beds and, but you're usually alone in your room because your bunk mate works when you're not, like you have shifts. And

then you share a bathroom and connected the guy who I shared the bathroom with, who was there, the other connection was the cook for the boat. And he was telling me and eventually showed me the article, how he had been a lookout the previous year when they were off the coast of Somalia. And he said, he saw something on the horizon, told the captain, like, captain, there's a boat on the horizon. That's what he's looking out for. And the captain said, don't worry, don't worry about it. And then he starts to see them spread out because I guess the pirate ships come in, pirate boats come in single file. So they're hard to see. And then they start to spread out. And he says, captain, like, there's more of them. Captain, don't worry,

don't worry. And then they get closer and one of them fires like a rocket at the ship that I was on the RVU-ing. And it splashes down short. Because what they want to do is scare you into stopping, apparently. And then the captain's like, now we got to get out of here. And they fired some machine gun fire off of, so there were some, you could see like some notches in one of the containers on the ship. And so the ship eventually had to ditch what's called the streamer, which is six kilometer long tube that trails behind the boat

that carries these hydrophones. So you bounce sound waves off the floor and it catches them at all these different spots. And that's how you make the image. So they had to drop that. Fortunately, it has a GPS beacon so they could go back later and they just ran away. And apparently the pirates

don't really want to have to chase you. They want you to stop. They want you to be scared and to stop. Right, they're cool if you just stop and surrender. Yeah, yeah. Good thing you're in the Pacific Northwest and not back in that space. Yeah, yeah, that was no problem.

Like we came back in Docton, like, you know. Right, right. So Newport, Oregon. I got the timeline better now. So like there and then out of college, then in the Arctic Circle. But you're still focused on the research side of things. Yeah.

What flips the switch to sort of like the more journalistic writer fire in you? You know, I'd always loved writing, first of all. And I realized in science, it was actually one of the ways that I was standing out was with writing skills from other scientists. But the full transition was sort of the result of a not very happy story, which was I was a competitive runner and one of my training partners and close friends dropped dead at the end of a race. A guy who was like a,

one of the top ranked people in the country in his age group. So, you know, was gonna be the first in his family to go to college, Jamaican immigrants, all these things. And I wondered, you know, my local paper said, oh, heart attack. And I was kind of like, what does that even mean for a young guy

who's this healthy heart attack? Eventually I asked his family, took me a while to like, for whatever reason to sort of, journalism has made me a lot less shy. And at the time I was pretty shy. So I waited a while, even though I knew his family and asked what happened. They didn't really know, but they signed a waiver allowing me to gather up his medical records. And so I went around doing that. Long story short,

realized that he had died from this single genetic mutation that causes a disease, was misdiagnosed in kind of a dangerous way. It's almost always the case. By far the most common cause of athletes dropping dead when you hear of that when they're young. And this was sort of in my head for a while and I was thinking and wanting to do something about it and it just stuck with me. And eventually I realized like as my scientific work was getting more narrow and I was wondering about like my impact on the world and whether that's what I want to do myself. You know, what I really want to do is combine my interests in sports and science and write about sudden cardiac death in athletes for a popular audience, not for people like me

who are like reading journals. And so then sort of my medium-term goal became to do that for Sports Illustrated. And I realized I had to get off the science tracking and try to get into journalism. Got it. And that eventually leads you to SI, but not before landing at the overnight crime desk at New York Daily News. Yeah. What was that like? Even before that, I was a fact checker for the personal ads at the now defunct New York Press. Oh, no kidding. And man, when people have a very, this was like Twitter before Twitter.

When you have to describe what it is you're looking for in a partner in, you know, a hundred characters, you have to be very explicit. So these are like the personals that I was checking, things like that. But yeah, then the Daily News. So I applied for an internship, got rejected because I didn't really have much journalism experience. Although I had been taking classes at Columbia and freelancing for a tiny paper called The Villager downtown. And then they got back to me and said, basically basically come on over if you can work, if you're starting from midnight, because the guy who was doing that is retiring.

I had to get trained on that because that's actually a tricky job because you're the only person in the office. So I got trained on it by a guy named Kerry Burke, who is still at the New York Daily News. And boy, was that a baptism by fire into journalism. On the good side, you probably couldn't mess up too bad because the morning reporters who are more experienced

could pick up a story because there weren't many people working at night, so you weren't gonna like lose out too much. On the other hand, nothing happy that's going in the New York Daily News happens between midnight and 10 a.m., as you might imagine. But boy, did I learn to appreciate the organism that this city is, right?

Because I'd been mostly Manhattan-centric before, and doing that overnight crime beat, you're very rarely targeting Manhattan. And you learn how to track people down without the internet and get, you know, documents and things. So it was an absolutely fantastic boot camp of an education for starting out in journalism. Yeah. Was that in the back of your mind? Was this still a step in the direction of Sports Illustrated? It was for me for sure, because I had such, I had so little of a foothold in journalism at all that you have to get clips. That was like the coin of the realm. Like you have to get some articles and if it's for a big

publication, that's better. And so for sure it was for me because almost, almost any stable, regular journalism work would have been a step in the right direction for me at that point because I had done so little. And at a larger publication in New York where it could be a little more visible to, you know, Sports Illustrated's in New York, definitely a step in the right direction. Although it wasn't going to be, I wasn't on the sports section, so it wasn't going to be like I was going to go straight to. Right, right. You eventually landed Sports Illustrated. Yeah. And from what I remember, pretty soon after being there, you break a giant story.

Yeah, pretty soon. I started as a temp fact checker. Oh, no kidding. It turned out that my background in science and crime reporting became the thing that set me apart from the other people there. So instead of being 40th in line to try to be the next NFL beat reporter, I was the only dude who was there coming in for science stuff and crime stuff. And, and, you know, when I really sort of, um, shot up the hierarchy or whatever there, whatever you want to call it, um, was I co-wrote the story that outed Alex Rodriguez, the Yankees third baseman for steroid use. And that was obviously a productive clip for me. Yeah. I mean, got a little bit of attention. Yeah. It would have been, you know,

that might've been a better time for me to be living in Boston than in New York, but. Depends who you talk to. Depends what borough in New York. Right. That's right. Back in the day, there were a lot of mixed feelings going on there. It would have been better to be living in Queens. Right. So you're hanging out and you're, there were a lot of mixed feelings going on. It would have been better to be living in Queens. Right. So you're hanging out. You're writing at Sports Illustrated. You've got this thing which kind of breaks you into the public, the mainstream consciousness. And you also, like you said, you're a lifetime runner.

Sounds like you've always had a longstanding fascination with sports. Lifetime runner since like late teens. Yeah, because I did baseball, basketball, football first. So I did the same sampling I described like Roger Federer doing and things like that. So somebody who's been sort of like the wide stroke of athletics and sports, but it's been a part of you and who you are for basically your entire life. You end up writing a book called The Sports Gene like is, raises a lot of eyebrows, caused some controversy. Is it, was it right around there also when you first ended up in kind of like a sparring

with somebody who's now becoming a friend, Malcolm Gladwell? Yeah, that's right. That's exactly right. I thought this project, and by the way, it was again, my friend's death that also got me interested in genetics, right? Because I started reading some genetics papers

and so that sort of in some ways led to the sports gene. But yes, I thought books were like purely passion project. So I was like, I'm doing this on the side and then it'll come out and I'll just go back to my normal life. I didn't expect it to like take on a life of its own. In fact, I was leaving Sports Illustrated two weeks after the book came out, which turned out to be crazy because it started kind of consuming my life for a little while. But yeah, it put me into this sort of public conflict with Mike Malcolm Gladwell because I was criticizing not only the way that he had written about the 10,000 hour rule, but really the underlying research, which I thought was very shoddy and ill understood and didn't include certain statistics that were necessary to

understand those papers. And so the first time we ever met was at this thing called the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference that happens every year. It's co-founded by the general manager of the Houston Rockets, who was an MIT guy. And we were put in this sort of debate, you can see on YouTube, 10,000 hours versus the sports gene, right? Even though like we have some common ground. And it was there that, you know, he's very clever and I didn't want to get embarrassed. So I was freaking out a little and I decided I better do a lot of homework and try to anticipate his arguments. And I knew he would have to say that early specialization is the way to go in sports because of the 10,000 hour rule, because I had

written Tiger Woods. So I just looked at the data and said, okay, if that's, let's see what it looks like. In fact, what scientists see in basically every sport, jury's out about golf, but is that athletes who go on to become elite have this so-called sampling period where they play a variety of sports, they gain a breadth of general skills, they learn about their abilities, they learn about their interests,

and they delay specializing until later than peers who plateau at lower levels. And so when we came off the stage, he sort of went, and so I described Roger Federer that way versus Tiger Woods the other way. And he said, you know what you got me on was that Roger versus Tiger thing. You should write about that.

And I sort of filed it away in the back of my head. But we became running buddies and we'd talk about it on our own time. And it sort of came back to my head a few years later when I had some other experiences. Yeah, it's kind of funny that you guys became running, but he's also sort of like considering the start of the relationship. This adversarial thing with the spotlights on you.

Yeah, but it was great because he was super open. We were invited back, and this is also on YouTube, just in March. And this time he says at the end of the clip, you know, I've changed my mind. I think I conflated two things. The idea that you need a lot of practice with the idea that the best way, the way to become the best at X is to do only X, starting as early as possible. So, I mean, I think we both ended up learning some things from each other and he could have, like, who was I at that time, first time author, like he very easily could

have been antagonistic, I think, but I think was interested in a productive discussion. I mean, also, I think it says a lot about Malcolm's orientation towards not wanting to take a position and defend it, but rather just trying to discover the truth. Yeah. No, I mean, I was very surprised, to be honest, because my interactions with some other writers who i think sort of piggybacked on his book outliers and wrote their own 10 000 hours books was not as productive i would say mayday mayday we've been compromised the pilot's a hitman i knew you were gonna be fun on january 24th tell me how to fly this thing mark walberg you know what the difference between The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever,

making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, I mean, so let's dive into this a little bit more Charge time and actual results will vary. Let's, I mean, so let's dive into this a little bit more because this ends up turning into the central thesis and sort of like the starting point for your new book, Range. So you brought up this sort of like two different ideas, two different models really, like the Roger model and the Tiger model. Deconstruct that a little bit more so somebody who doesn't know who these two names are associated with so tiger woods you know arguably the best golfer um ever uh maybe probably the most famous modern development story so he was he walked early his father gave him a putter at seven months just as a toy not trying to make him a golfer just gave to him he dragged it around his little circular baby walker. By 10 months, he could already like demonstrate a swing.

Tiger started swinging. Two years old, he goes on national television and shows off his driving and putting, you know, in front of Bob Hope and suddenly, right? Like, and this is, you know, before there were 10 million like clips of everything online. So this becomes, this kicks off this early specialization in this cottage industry. You know, fast forward, he becomes, you know, I mean, by four, he's like hustling people. And, you know, by, as a teenager,

he's famous. And by 21, he's the best golfer in the world. And that became the core of a massive industry of early specialization, not just in sports first, but then extrapolated to other areas. Roger Federer, on the other hand, the greatest tennis player ever, traveled a very different path. He played like everything when he was a kid. I mean, he skateboarded, he wrestled, he skied, he played handball, he played badminton, he played soccer, he played basketball, etc. Mother was a tennis coach. Refused to coach him because he wouldn't return balls normally, so unstructured kind of play. When he got bumped up a level, when the coaches wanted to bump him up a level, he declined because he just liked talking to his friends about pro wrestling after practice.

In fact, when he got good enough to get interviewed by a local paper and they asked him, if you ever become a pro, you know, what would you buy with your first paycheck? And he says a Mercedes. His mother was appalled and asked the reporter if she could see the or listen to the interview tape. The reporter obliges. And it turns out he actually said Mercedes in a Swiss German accent. He just wanted more CDs. So then she's like, okay. So he wasn't thinking of these grandiose goals.

Specializes, you know, years after peers were already working with, like, nutritionists and sports psychologists. And obviously it turned out okay. And my question was, which of these models is the norm? And it turned out that in almost every sport, the Roger model is the norm. So when you have somebody who rises up to be world-class great in a particular domain, and later in life too, like they're not as in the teenage. They're not peaking when they're very young, but they're peaking and sustaining elite level performance well into their middle years. That the Raja model tends to be the more prevalent one, but yet that's like the mythology that we always hear is not that. Like anyone who probably knows, you know, those two names probably knows that, you know,

like Roger, you know, he's the most incredible tennis player in history. Tigers, you know, arguably one of them. And now recently back again, the greatest golfers. But they probably have no idea what Roger's backstory is in terms of his development. But everybody knows, like the TV clips, everyone knows the legend of how Tiger... Why do we love to tell the Tiger story but not the Roger story? I think it's incredibly dramatic. Well, I think there's a couple reasons.

One, as Gladwell said, those kinds of videos of kids are like human cat videos of little prodigies, right? It's compelling. It's very dramatic. Also, it gives kind of a tidy prescription, right? Like just start this as early as possible. Like sampling is not as tidy of a process. But I think it gets to this idea that it to me is one of the main themes of range, which is it is deeply counterintuitive that getting what looks like a head start could possibly be not the best thing for long-term development, right? So this idea that maybe

you shouldn't specialize as early as possible, not just because like, you know, maybe it's not good for your personal development, but because it might actually hinder how good you are eventually at that thing in which you're getting a head start in. I just think that's a deeply, deeply counterintuitive idea. And so we're not so inclined to go like, look at what the science says about that. I mean, it's like even super famous, like Tom Brady, the most famous football player in the world, even the average Patriots fan doesn't know that he was drafted into baseball before football, right? It's like totally unknown. I think it's both counterintuitive and like the Roger story is less dramatic by a long shot and doesn't give as easy of a prescription. Yeah. I wonder if also we just, we want to tell ourselves that if we latch onto that thing and

we start early and we put in our 10,000 hours and we all know the 10,000 hours is a complete, yeah. It's not to say that practice isn't important. That's controversial. Really, really important. But the idea that, you know, that if we just, it gives us a formula. Yeah, that's right. You know, rather than, no, we should futz around. We should try a whole bunch of different things.

We should experiment. And who knows, maybe they'll come together at some point. Yeah. Like to give us a cross- section of skills and abilities and interests and preferences that allow us to then later in life specialize in an interesting way and sort of go more deeply into it. Yeah, that actually reminds me of this quote that I loved by the Spanish Nobel Laureate

and the father of modern neuroscience, Santiago Ramon y Cajal, where he says, he's describing, he's not talking about athletes, obviously, he's talking about like innovative scientists. And he notes that they have lots of very broad interests. And so oftentimes when they were in school, they seemed like they were off task and things like that. And he says, this is really close to the quote. It's something like, to him who observes them from afar, they appear to be dissipating their energies

when in fact they're strengthening and channeling them. And so it's all these different things sort of feed into what Howard Gruber calls the network of enterprise, where these things end up informing each other, but you can't always tell exactly how that's going to work from the outset. So if you're too narrow, then you preclude those possibilities. And it's interesting that when you bring up the idea of something where it's based more on cognitive excellence or creative excellence versus some sort of more physically oriented domain, which is much more linear, I know. So, you know, you shared the Roger and the Tiger model, right? One is specialize early and just intense deliberate practice and that. The others do a whole bunch of different things. And eventually maybe you get to that place where you focus more on one thing. So deliberate practice, this phrase deliberate practice that has come up a number of times now is sort of like at the center of this to a certain extent. I've actually had Anders Ericsson on the

podcast who was, you know, one of the originators of the research that so many people have pointed to now around this term of deliberate practice. And he also sat here and said, well, no, it actually was never 10,000 hours. It was some variety. It's like, yes, it's a lot of hours and it's practiced in a very deliberate way, which very often is not fun. In fact, it's grueling. But the extension that you're making, I think the leap that you're making, which is interesting, is that you're not saying that that doesn't work as a concept. What you're saying is that in very particular limited domains, which you call kind domains, that may not be my term, by the way, just take credit for it. So that may be really, it may work, but in more, you know, quote, wicked domains, which seems like it's more of like 90% of life,

not necessarily in the model. Yeah, that's right. So kind domain, these are terms coined by psychologist Robin Hogarth. Kind domains being domains where all the information is clear. Often people wait for each other to take turns. Next steps are very clear. Feedback comes automatically, immediately, and is always accurate. So like golf. The other end of the spectrum, the wicked domains are some information is not clear, human behavior is involved, people may not wait for each other to take turns, rules aren't static, feedback may or may not be

available all the time, it may be delayed, it may be partial, it may be inaccurate. So one of the examples I love that Hogarth pointed to is this, I'm thinking about it because we're here in New York, is this famous New York City physician who became renowned for his ability to examine patients who had no symptoms and predict accurately they would get typhoid over and over. And he became very famous for this. He would do it by palpating their tongue with his hands, you know, feeling around their tongue over and over again, he predicted right. And one of his colleagues later said he was a more productive carrier of typhoid than even typhoid Mary using just his hands.

So he was giving the people typhoid. And so his predictions were always right, right? So this is the epitome of a wicked domain where being the feedback is teaching you the exact wrong lesson. So most domains are not also not that wicked. But most of us are doing, playing, you know, even tennis, all sports are still on the kinder, like they are constrained by rules and have repetitive patterns. So Robin Hogarth said, you know, in the wider world, we're not even playing tennis. We're playing Martian tennis. Like people are doing stuff, but nobody's told you the rules. It's up to you to deduce them and they can change at any moment. And so for that kind of world, I think that the classic finding, breadth of training predicts breadth of

transfer. The broader your training experiences are, the more able you are to apply that knowledge and skills to situations you've never seen before, that's what transfer means, is a much better paradigm for the wicked world of cognitive skills. Yeah, and the wicked world is pretty much the world we live in. I mean, when you think about business, when you think about medicine, when you think about art, these are not sort of like things that exist

in a well-defined constrained box where you do X and you can get an answer and immediately sort of like analyze it and go slightly to the left, slightly to the right. We just don't, you know, like these are highly gray, constantly moving things where the level of constraint and feedback and adjustment that you need for it to be, quote, valid deliberate practice just isn't there. Yeah.

And repetitiveness, right? Like the original definition of deliberate practice was get feedback from like the world class person and do the same thing or something very similar over and over again and and one of the reasons I brought up sort of AI in the first chapter was because you can sort of see how this works with AI on a certain spectrum where we have chess which in many ways was considered this like embodiment of the human intellect but actually is incredibly constrained has a huge database of previous games is based on repetitive patterns and therefore very easy for you know relatively easy

for computers to win at then you know you know, in the middle of the spectrum, maybe say self-driving cars where a lot of progress has been made, but there are incredible challenges. And now the main, you know, people are talking about maybe we just need sort of areas of a city with constrained rules where those cars can work. So driving is very rule bound, but there's still some uncertainty. And then the far end of the spectrum is like medical research where IBM Watson is such a flop that some of the researchers I was talking to were worried it would like damage the reputation of AI and healthcare. So as one of the oncologists I talked to said, the reason Watson destroyed at Jeopardy and failed in medical research is because we know the answers to Jeopardy, right? So those things are already known

and it's just doing the same thing over and over, but that's not how, you know, sort of our most important challenges work. Yeah. And I mean, it also argues that those areas where somebody can become world-class great through this process is sort of like fairly constrained deliberate practice are also the ones that are most easily automatable and or AI-able. Yeah. Because, which also means that, you know, if your living and livelihood is based on that, or if a central part of your identity is based on that, you're more at risk than anybody else. Yeah, for sure.

And I think when we look at the deliberate practice literature, most of the types of experts that they focus on are experts whose expertise is based on pattern recognition, usually. And computers are real good at pattern recognition and recurring patterns like in chess. So that's not a zero-sum game you want to be playing with computers, I don't think, because you'll lose. Yeah. But, I mean, here's what's interesting to me about that also right um so why do you like why do millions of people love to watch the best athletes the best musicians the

best artists the best performers in the world is it because the output like what they deliver in that moment where they need to actually step up is astonishing. It's so much, you're just, it's breathtaking. Like, is it the fact that the actual performance is that good? Or is it the knowledge that a human being is actually doing it that makes it feel that way? Like if you went and you watched a series of robots play the most incredible game and take the most incredible basketball shots or play the most perfect piece on a violin, you know, equal to if not as beautiful as a human being would play it, would you as somebody who receives this feel the same way?

Would it move you the same way? That is a great question. And I think a deep question about what it is we want out of our society in many ways. And I do think that it's not just the level of performance because elite athletes weren't as good sometime in the past, but people still sort of adored them the same way. But to look at chess again,

the free app on your phone could beat the best chess player in the world now. But we still have human chess tournaments because we want to see the humans and talk to them after and see how they perform under pressure and those sorts of things. So those are areas where automation is way better. Computers are way better than humans.

And yet there's still work for humans because it's this sort of, it's a performance, basically. better. Computers are way better than humans. And yet there's still work for humans because it's this sort of, it's a performance basically. So if you're still, if you're in, if you're in kind of a performance, I think that's sort of a, maybe in some ways, a protected niche in some ways, because I do think we still want to see humans. And also I think sports are, one of the problems I have. And so after the sports gene, I got asked to a lot of conferences to talk about like stuff that I, like things I didn't even know existed. It was like, what, take these lessons from sports and

tell us like how this applies to our business or whatever. And this was an area of the world. I just didn't know that was a thing, these like conferences and stuff. And there is some validity to that because people that are interested in performance don't care if it's like a chef or a pilot. They just want to know how do you approach your challenges. But sports are zero sum and repetitive in a way that most endeavors are not. So I started to think like I shouldn't take this too far because I think it's wrong. You know, like the idea, I look at it like our government now and the idea that we have a, this mindset of zero summons, I think is an incredible problem. And so I'm very wary of extrapolating from sports in the

way that I was asked to. And that was sort of something that was on my mind as I was writing this book, which I titled the original proposal, Roger versus Tiger. And it was going to be like, when should you be a Roger? And when should you be a Tiger? But fairly early in the book, I say, yeah, but now we even have to move past tennis because sports are all on the kind end of the spectrum, you know, sort of no matter what. Yeah. Medicine, God willing, is not a zero-sum game.

Yeah, yeah. We all win. Like if it's done well, if it's done right, it's off the field. And there are areas in medicine, because that comes up in the book. And when I was at ProPublica, the small investigative outfit where I was recently, I was reporting about some of the perverse effects of medical specialization, which got me interested in that.

But at the same time, and I do include this in the book because we need specialists. I'm not saying we don't need specialists. I think we, as Freeman Dyson put it, for a healthy ecosystem, we need both frogs and birds, you know, the ones who are on the ground with the details and the ones who are high above connecting things. The problem is we're only incentivizing the frogs. That's what he felt. So in medicine, specialized surgeons have fewer complications and not even, even if you control for the number of repetitions they've done of the surgery, they still have fewer repetitions. So something about being specialized on top of just experience makes for better surgical procedures. At the same time, they are the most likely to use the procedures when they don't actually help. So you get this sort of double edged sword where you have people who've gotten really good at something, but I think you need

to pair that with someone who has a broader view and trying to figure out if this procedure that the specialist is extremely good at should even be done in the first place, basically. Yeah, well, it's like if you have a hammer, all the world is a nail. And I mean, it also ties in with this idea of siloing. You know, when you have a world of specialists that are so hyper-focused on their one domain

and you're extraordinary at it, you may be the best in the world at it, but if if that person comes in it's like well this could be right you if you're everyone starts siloing and not realizing that they're actually 10 better solutions that are out there already yeah but you know nobody's talking to each other um we're all specialists and without that role of a generalist as a leader or a somebody sort of like has a broad stroke of what's going on in general

and can cross-reference things, you could have really, really good outcomes when they are the exact outcome that's needed. Right. Exactly. And then really bad misses. Or, you know, like surgery when surgery isn't needed. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's why early in the book I'm psyched to study

that's now been repeated, that if you are checked into a hospital with a cardiac emergency of certain variety, you are less likely to die if you're checked in during a national cardiology conference. Because the specialist cardiologists are away and you will not get the procedures that may be ineffective or dangerous and are not really indicated, which is kind of extraordinary. And that's not to say we don't need those specialists, but that's a problem, right? And one of the cardiologists who wrote the editorial about that in the scientific journal said like,

"'Me and my colleagues would often joke "'that our cardiology conferences were the safest place "'for someone to have a heart problem.' "'And this study kind of turns that on its head.'" So I think while specialization has been beneficial and inevitable, trying to make everyone a specialist has actually had some serious perverse outcomes. Yeah. The biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping.

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Y'all need a pilot? Flight Risk. One of the things I wanted to ask you about also in this idea of taking time, running experiments, but then eventually working really, really hard to get good at something. You know, a word that has been a big part of the public lexicon around success and performance for, I guess, close to a decade now is grit. Angela Duckworth, the original researcher, so much that's gone on around it now. You have some feelings around grit. I do. And before I share those, can I say that I'm – because, okay, the grit survey awards half its points for perseverance, resilience, and half its points for consistency of interests.

And so, ostensibly, you're punished for changing interests and sometimes not finishing a project. Angela Duckworth's most recent newsletter came out two days ago, and it says, this summer should be for sampling. And some article about her newsletter says, Angela Duckworth is saying, take a generous approach. And I'm like, wait, what? Something tells me this might not be a coincidence

with my book coming out and getting some attention because boy, does that seem to run directly contrary to a psychological construct that punishes you for changing interests sometimes. But what I think it really exposes is that grit was always a cross-sectional measure. And all the studies were done on people like, people in the US Military Academy

who are trying to get through the rigorous six-week orientation, right? Their goal is set for them and it's six weeks long. So resilience and not changing your interest for those six weeks, like great. But life isn't a six-week orientation program that you've been highly preselected for. So I think there are a lot of ways

that that research has been extrapolated that are inappropriate. And many of them, I didn't invent. I just took some of them straight from those researchers' papers, but I think they've been lost in translation to the public and have been interpreted to mean that changing course of direction, changing work, changing interests is a negative. But in fact, like you look at research and see, I just saw like LinkedIn did research on a half million members, found that one of the best predictors of who would become an executive was the number of different job functions they'd worked across within an industry. You know, I cite research in range that comic book creators, their performance was predicted

not by years of experience, but by the number of different genres they had worked in. Technological creators, it was the number of different technological domains they had worked across. And so all of these things that, you know, are not compatible with getting docked points for doing the same thing or consistency of interest don't seem to fit with grit. And so I think it's, I think the answer is grit has always just been like a point measure. It's not a stable trait. And I think that's very clear. As one of the Dark Horse researchers said, you should think of if you get fit, it will look like grit, right? Like if you get someone in a spot that's the right spot for them, they're going to work hard and it's going to look like grit. And so we should be focused on that match quality, right? That the term economists use for the degree of fit between your interests and abilities and what you do, which is very important for your motivation and performance.

Once you, if you improve your match quality, you will therefore have more grit. It's not the reverse. It doesn't work in reverse. Yeah. It was always interesting to me that, that it seemed like from the very beginning, grit was referred to as a trait,

yet described as a state. Yeah. And I could never quite bring those two together. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's a good point, right? The idea of being, is this something that is like inherent to an individual? It's not really changeable. Or is it a function of the situation? They happen to be in context dependent. And for me, the evidence suggests it's, you know, that there's always some of each, but that it is much more productively conceived as the latter. I remember when I was a college athlete, there were runners who were the most competitive people I've ever seen on the track and didn't have a competitive bone in their body in the classroom and vice versa.

So did they have grit or did they not have grit? Well, it's context dependent. So I think we should consider more about getting in the right context. And the other thing I describe in the book, I guess, is this restriction of range problem with grit, which is the famous studies like the U.S. Military Academy use populations that are very highly preselected. So in the U.S. Military Academy, they selected cadets based on what's called whole candidate score, which is like a conglomeration of test scores and athleticism and leadership experience, stuff like that. And grit turned out to be a better predictor of who would survive the six week orientation

than was whole candidate score. Whole candidate score was a better predictor of how they actually did in the military academy. But the fact is when you've pre-selected, when you've taken all of humanity and pre-selected based on whole candidate score, a tiny portion of the whole curve of humanity, you've basically truncated an axis so that anything else you measure is going to look more important than it really is. So I liken this to doing a study of what causes basketball skill in the NBA using only, you know, centers in your sample, concluding therefore that like only practice causes them to be good at basketball, not practice plus being seven feet tall because you've squashed all the variation in height. And in fact, I've actually done this analysis in some years.

So there's a very high positive correlation between height in the American population and points scored in the NBA. But if you restrict your range, your subject range to only players already in the NBA, that correlation often becomes negative. So you would give parents the advice to have shorter kids for them to score more points in the NBA

if you're not cognizant of how restriction of range works. And so I think that's a very important caveat to Angela Duckworth's work that she and her co-authors mentioned in their own studies to their credit. But I think, you know, it's been, I mean, like school systems and companies started testing for grit as if it's this stable characteristic that's, you know, now it's like one more dimension of evaluation that I think is not productive. Yeah. And I was always curious also because both the state trait sort of like distinction and also I could never quite figure out. And I actually asked her and I asked, I've asked a number of other people sort of like in that research domain, how do you get it if you don't quote have it? Yeah.

And there was never a clear answer, you know, because. Yeah, yeah, no. I mean, I think some of her research, I think, I obviously shouldn't speak for her, but I think some of it now is this question of, well, can you build grit, right? Whereas my view would be like, I mean, think of kids, right,

who maybe aren't paying that much attention to school and yet can absolutely practice their face off when it's some video game they like, right? And because, and so if we think that's great or not, it has to do with whether we think their pursuit is a value, not whether they are actually willing to put in time. And so I think we should be much more focused on helping people find the situation where, where grit emerges. Yeah. And so great. And neither of us are knocking or bashing, like the work around grit is really important.

And it has given us so much, created a really important and powerful conversation. And I'm also happy to see it being explored and evolving in a lot of interesting ways. But to your point that you just made, the idea of when I was a kid, I had a friend who never showed up in high school, had no interest academically. You could not get him to open a book.

The reason was because he was cutting to stay in his bedroom and play guitar 12 to 18 hours a day. He couldn't get enough of it. So by the time he graduated high school, he was a virtuoso and he never wanted to stop doing this thing. One of my fascinations with things like deliberate practice, things like grit, things like X hours to get to Y place is actually is the deeper intrinsic thing that drives somebody to work on a level. So like this guy, yes, he ended up, he specialized early, not because anyone told him to specialize early, but because he picked up something, he did something to him, and he never wanted to put it down for the rest of his life. And that's a really important point because if you find your thing, that's great, right? And so the way we've told the Tiger Woods and like Mozart and another one's stories, I think is wrong. So Tiger Woods, both of those guys' fathers responded to the kid's display of interest and prowess that was very unusual. Tiger Woods in 2000 said, my father has never asked me to play golf. Never once. It's the child's desire to play that matters, not the parent's interest in having them play.

Mozart's father, I was going through letters. I actually cut this from the book. I had to cut like 15,000 words. I found these letters where young Mozart, you know, musicians are coming to the house and his father's playing with them. Young Mozart's like, let me play violin too. And his father's like, you haven't had any lessons. Like, go away. You can't play. He's like, yes, I can.

Mozart starts crying. So one of the other musicians who wrote the letter says, I went off the other room to play with him. And his father hears like an excellent, you know, playing and comes in and starts like crying. And they start applauding for Mozart because he had figured out how to play with totally irregular hand positioning, just goofing around. And the letter I remember says, Wolfgang was emboldened by our applause to insist that he could play the first violin also. And it was his father who responded to his display. And so I don't mean to, you know, I'm a new father and I'm not going to, I don't mean, I'm not going to force my kid to specialize any more than I'm going to force them to diversify. Like I'm going to try to expose

them to a lot of stuff, help them reflect on those experiences. But if they find their thing and it's them driven, like I'm not going to say, no, sorry, you have to, you have to diversify. Yeah. I think that's such an important lesson because especially like you're a new dad, I'm a dad. And I think a lot of parents are, we hear so much coming at us about what is the appropriate way to help your kid find their thing, you know, and cultivate it. And this idea of, you know, like basically just giving them, you know, I've always seen my job is to give them space and to just create the invitations to try as many different things as possible, hoping that they'll just randomly stumble upon something or two things or three things where like, I just want to do more of this. Yeah. And you increase those chances, obviously, by exposing them to more things. way, like speaking of the grit section of range, we're right about the military when they have a very up or out structure normally. And to get high potential officers to stay, they started throwing money at people because they were like hemorrhaging high potential officers as the knowledge economy

grew and people wanted to go off and try other work. And that was a waste of a half billion taxpayer dollars because the people who were going to stay stayed and took the money and people were going to go left anyway. What they've started to have more success with is this program called talent-based branching, where instead of saying, this is your career path, get started, you know, up or out, I say, here's an array of career paths. Let's try one first. We'll pair you with a coach who's going to help you reflect on the experience. See, were you motivated? Are your abilities a good fit for this? And then we'll try another one, another one, and we'll zigzag until we find one that's a good fit for you. So I think I'd much rather take like the talent-based branching approach to my kid.

And my main role will be to help them reflect on those experience, you know, facilitate opportunities to try different things and help them reflect on it. Because I do think the reflection is an important component that doesn't just happen on its own. Yeah. So it's almost like prompting that or enabling that or planting the seeds, that that's an important part of the process. Yeah, yeah. In my last book, one of the, because I also write about important kinds of practice in my other book, not just genetics, and one section is about self-regulatory learners.

So some of the athletes who get off plateaus and keep getting better are self-regulatory learners, where they're not just doing what the coach is telling them, but they're saying like, what is this working on? Like, what are my weaknesses? You know, they're kind of like probing themselves. And they end up evaluating themselves more closely to how like external evaluators do in terms of their abilities over time. And when I asked the woman who led that research, these were people who went on to become like professionals in a variety of things she did it in academic areas in sports what's the one where her name is mariah elfring gemser what's the one word you know the most important thing for all these self-regulatory learners reflection that's the most important thing because they learn about themselves more

rapidly than other people do yeah i i wonder how that is getting affected by technology these days and perpetual connection. I think not good because I was just talking about this with someone because I find even myself, like if I go on a trip and have an interesting experience, I can fill my mental downtime with reloading stuff on my phone. Right. Very easily. So I took Twitter off my phone because that means I see it. Because I did find myself starting to reload it just out of boredom. Like when I was working on my book, I was zoned in on that. And so I wasn't really checking it anyway.

But then when I was sort of done with that. And I think that is not so good. Because I have found interesting things on Twitter. But I don't really learn about myself on Twitter very much. So I want to preserve that reflection time. And I think we very consciously have to try to do that because, you know, there's technology companies that are wielding everything we know in behavioral psychology to make sure that, like, we don't have our own reflection time, basically. A friend of mine, Scott Belsky, who built a big company years ago, once said, I think he wrote an article about it, actually, he's like,

the shower is sort of like the last bastion of moment where you can reflect. And now not even, I think now there's so many devices you can bring into the bathroom with you where if it's constantly upload and download and never space to reflect and synthesize and integrate. And if that reflective time is so critical in our ability to actually grow and evolve,

it's like what, yes, technology is giving something to us. We're not gonna deny that. But I'm always wondering at what cost in terms of our own human experience. Yeah, no, I agree. And I thought it was interesting this, I feel like range is what cost in terms of our own human experience. Yeah, no, I agree. And I thought it was interesting this, I feel like range is sort of in some ways similar to this project by a guy named Shane Parrish,

who's, I don't know if you know him, but he's doing this very similar in a way. I mean, they're not similar in their content at all, but conceptually this idea of how your diversity of mental models basically helps you. I think he was inspired by Charlie Munger about this. You know, helps you analyze the world because you need to have many

instead of just seeing through one lens. And I was corresponding with him a little and reading about him. And I guess he like coaches executives and stuff or advises them. And one of his like main pieces of advice seems to be like, stop doing all that stuff that you're normally doing for like two hours a day and like just go read some stuff and think. And so basically to like step out of those raging waters and chill for a little bit.

And that's your competitive advantage that you can do that when other people can't. So have you ever read a book called Daily Rituals? Oh, yeah. Well, I like flip through and I'll look at a person. I wouldn't say I have like a Reddit cover to cover, but I'll go look at like Murakami and Darwin. It's all of these really, you know, like legendary level creators and stuff like this. And one of the consistent patterns across so many of them

is either our daily walks or daily naps, or oftentimes it's both. So much walking. So much. It's amazing. And I was like, what purpose is this serving that you see it so consistently against people who are operating at these extraordinary levels in life?

Yeah, that's super interesting. Does running do that for you? It does. Well, so here's the thing. When I get stuck in writing, because one of my main challenges and was a very formidable challenge with this book was organization of information, how to structure it. Because it's an amorphous issue, how general, you know, how broad or specialized to be. And, but it's an issue that's important to everyone. And so my feeling was, well, we're having all of these conversations just on intuition. Let me at least try to bring some

concrete things to it. So those, those conversations are more productive, but I'm not the final word on it. And so how can I organize this in a way where it feels like an escalating understanding or examination of this question, not just like a bunch of magazine articles stapled together. And so that presented a lot of structural challenge and I would get stuck and I would go out on a run and like solutions would pop to my head, but never for the structural problem that I was actually went on the run for. I don't know what's going on in the brain, but it would be some other thing that I was stuck on that I had left, and then the answer would pop in,

not the thing that I was actually targeting. So I'm not sure what's going on there, but something happens. Yeah, it's amazing. I think there's something about physical movement that it does something to your brain in the way it processes. You brought up Murakami also.

Same with his book, What I Think About When I Think About Running. Yeah, yeah. And I remember reading that and him describing, it was not just the sort of psychological, emotional, cognitive process, but also the fact that, you know, for him, the act of writing a book was physically grueling.

And it was like, he needed to train his body physically to be able to sustain the act of creation in a completely different domain. Yeah, that's super, it's really interesting. And he became like an ultra runner. Right. Yeah, so he says that it takes endurance daily, you know, and discipline.

And I definitely get that. It is, you have to be okay, like spending a lot of time alone. And so I sort of feel that, I feel that way too. I'm not as rigid in my actual patterns as he is, but I do agree that you need a certain type of endurance. to touch on it before we start to wrap up is this idea of completely like doing this thing, getting good at it, digging it, and then completely stepping away from it. Sometimes for weeks, but sometimes for years, and then coming back and how so many people think that something like that basically, oh, that's the end of it. But in fact, it can be the beginning of

entirely next order potential. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that gets a little to that idea of the network of enterprise where Howard Gruber, the psychologist who studies creativity, used that phrase because what he noticed in creative achievers was they would do stuff like that. They would drill into something really hard and then kind of leave it and go off and do something else. And what he observed was that apparently in the long run, this was not like wasted dead ends. I mean, it wasn't a dead end.

They were still productive, but it wasn't just like totally, okay, moving on now. That's what it was for a while, but they would circle back and start combining things and they would all end up informing each other. So that's why I liked his concept of network of enterprise, because he saw that these things weren't just, so they are totally separate in a way, but they end up informing each other. So nothing's really wasted. Like experiences aren't wasted if you are careful to learn something and look for opportunities to merge domains. And there look for opportunities to merge

domains. And there are more opportunities to do that than ever. There's more, as Arturo Casadevall, one of the scientists in the last chapter says, we have everyone walking around with all the knowledge of humanity on their phone and nobody knows how to integrate it, right? So this, the rise of specialists and the increasing availability of knowledge has made more opportunities for people who want to combine experiences and combine domains. And so I think that's an important thing to keep in mind. Yeah, which is interesting to me also because I think a lot of times you get contrary career advice like do not take a breath away. Right.

Because you'll lose your track, you'll lose your position, you'll lose your chops. Yeah. And you'll never be able to come back. And that doesn't always have support. The best career move I ever made probably was after I co-wrote with Selena Roberts, that story about Alex Rodriguez. And so then I get a little high profile and I'm a staff writer at Sports Illustrated. And I applied for an internship at a then startup called ProPublica that does, you know, that we mentioned that does investigative journalism. And the internship coordinator called me and was like, do you realize what you're

applying for? You know, and I went to Sports Illustrated because I felt like my learning curve was kind of plateauing there because there wasn't much investigative work going on. That's what I was interested in. So I sort of told them, like, I'm going to go do this for development. I would love it if my job were here when I came back, you know? So not long after that story, I go to ProPublica and then like first day, you know, I'm scanning documents for another reporter all the way down the totem pole, you know, intern paycheck, learned a ton, go back and suddenly I'm way more valuable. So then I really started producing because I had all these new skills that I brought into the sports world. And then I really, you know, so quickly I went up to senior

writer and then started getting these other job offers. So it was taking that time, you know, going all the way down the totem pole from staff writer at a national magazine to intern at a startup, both financially, which I didn't even think about at the time, and career development wise became one of the best things I ever did. And then years later, I went back and worked for ProPublica full time, farther up the masthead. But the thing is, how would I ever give someone the advice to do that? You know? Like when I was at Sports Illustrated and aspiring sports writers would ask, you know, what should I do if I want to work at Sports Illustrated or ESPN? Should I major in journalism or English? And my first instinct would be to say journalism.

And my second instinct would be to say English. And then my third instinct would be, I studied geology and astronomy. I have no idea, right? But my first instinct was still very much to say, you know, the closest one and then the next closest one. Yeah, follow that path, right? Yeah, it's amazing. How do you give people advice to experiment?

That's much harder advice to give. I think it is also, you know, I'm a huge fan of, this was also another really interesting pattern that we saw daily rituals, which is that many of these world-class performers, they had a innocuous day job and they did the thing that they became known for on a global scale on the side, just on the side. But I think, you know, I wonder if the fact that they had that main thing allowed them to play and experiment with probably a dozen other things before they landed on this one thing that they went deep into. And I wonder oftentimes if interesting career advice is do the thing you need, especially in the early days, to make you okay in the world. But make sure that you have a committed process of experimentation on the side so you can keep going out and exploring and trying and finding those other things.

Yeah. I mean, that's what most of us have to do, too, because, like, we have to pay rent or mortgage or whatever. But I'd say, like, you kind of just, like, summarized a lot of Herminie Barra's work where she looks at career transitions where people will have a thing and by some – usually by some way that they couldn't have planned. So this is this, some of this research called the strength of weak ties, where like your new jobs often come not from the people you know, because they're sort of similar and you already know that they come from things that you didn't foresee in the fringes of your network. Usually these people would meet someone at a dinner party or go to one meeting of something they didn't think they were interested in, but somehow they go there and they start getting interested and they start slowly ramping up their involvement while they have

their day job. And, you know, as it gets more and more serious, they start to say like, maybe I should actually transition to that. Their friends start saying like, no, just keep it as a hobby. Like you don't want to leave. And eventually a lot of them do transition to it, but it's in this slow process of experimentation. And one of the things she talks about is it's slow because it's not just a change of jobs, a change of identity and your identity doesn't change in one fell swoop. It changes by these series of small experiments that you set up. Yeah. So agree with that. Marcus Buckingham and the research crew at ADP have a new study out on engagement and they looked at the experience of most overall engagement, who's most fulfilled, most satisfied on a day-to-day basis.

Full-timers, people who piece together a range of freelancers or somebody who has a good enough full-time job and then something they really enjoy doing on the side. It was the third option that was the highest level of overall fulfillment. It's really interesting and it reminds me of that that work about right like that nationally recognized scientists have many more hobbies than than other scientists and the general public you know whatever glass blowing acting music playing richard freiman and painting yeah and then nobel laureates have many more than them yeah so interesting it feels like a good place for us to come full circle so if i offer the phrase to live a good life, what comes up for you? Following my curiosity, autonomy over my time. I think my regnant values are competence and autonomy. Like I want to feel competent at the things I'm doing and work toward those things.

And I want to use my time the way I want to use it much more than I want any objects or money. Thank you. Thank you. to use my time the way I want to use it much more than I want any objects or money. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening. And thanks also to our fantastic sponsors who help make this show possible. You can check them out in the links we have included in today's show notes. And while you're at it, if you've ever asked yourself, what should I do with my life? We have created a really cool online assessment that will help you discover the source code for the work that you're here to do. You can find it at sparkotype.com.

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