Modern Wisdom - #084 - David Epstein - Specialisation Is For Insects

Episode Date: July 1, 2019

David Epstein is a New York Times Best Selling Author and Investigative Journalist. Specialising early and hard is a frequent piece of advice I hear given to people asking for advice on how to become great at things. Mastery and the 10,000 Hour Rule suggests to niche down as early as you can and then capitalise from there. Today David provides us with an alternative point of view and explains how generalists can triumph in a specialised world. Life advice galore, I loved this episode and I'm really looking forward to sitting down with David again soon. Extra Stuff:  Buy David's Book Range - https://amzn.to/2ZQ8oFO Follow David on Twitter - https://twitter.com/DavidEpstein Naval on Joe Rogan - https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/1309-naval-ravikant/id360084272?i=1000440636786 Check out everything I recommend from books to products and help support the podcast at no extra cost to you by shopping through this link - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Howdy friends, welcome back to the Modern Wisdom Podcast and welcome to another New York Times best-selling author. I am very happy to welcome to the show David Epstein talking about his brand new book, Range, why generalists triumph in a specialized world. Needing down early and hard is a tactic which I've been told to do many times and you may have been as well. The 20th century and the proliferation of scientific management methods from Henry Ford and the like push people towards believing that specialisation was the key towards mastery and professional development and personal development as well as suppose. Today David Officer Sun alternative point of view which very interestingly aligns with a lot that Naval Ravacant said on the recent Jururogan podcast. If you haven't listened

to that yet, after you've completed me and David, I suggest that you go and listen to it. We reference it a lot. It's in the show notes below and it is absolutely fantastic, probably my favourite podcast of 2019. Obviously, except for the one that I did with Rory Sutherland. But for now, please welcome Mr David Epstein. Oh yeah, PS, I wanted to say thank you very much to everyone who continues to support us by sharing the episodes. This project literally is just me and a couple of mates and video guide Dean sat in his room editing shitloads of videos. The fact that we are pissing all over big dick UK podcasters with play counts, guests

and exposure is a testament to the fact that I send a lot of emails to people and I can slide into DMs pretty well, but also a testament to the fact that you continue to share and support the podcast. So thanks a lot. The sole goal that I have for this podcast is to continue reaching more and more people and getting cooler and cooler guests as the years progress. So anything that you can do to help

by sharing or recommending to a friend, given us a rate and an iTunes, whatever it might be, is all that I need. Makes me very happy. Thank you again. is all that I need. Makes me very happy. Thank you again. I'm joined by David Epstein all the way from the opposite side of the Atlantic and we're talking about range today. How are you David?

I'm well, thanks for having me. You're all over the place at the moment, right? You're a busy guy. Yes, I'm quite asking him, I'm getting sick a little bit of my own voice. Oh, yeah. Yeah, well, thankfully for the listeners, I don't think that they will be. So we're going to dig into your new book today, Range,

right, talking about generalists and specialists. Yeah, absolutely. Why did you write the book first off? You know, it sort of came, the genesis of it came in sort of two parts. One of which was, I wrote a book before this called the sports gene about genetics and athleticism. And I, as, well, as Malcolm Gladwell would say, I devoted several pages to criticizing his work.

That's how he puts it. To basically criticizing the science underlying the 10,000 hour rule. And so we got invited to this conference here called the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, founded by the General Manager of the Houston Rockets. And we were invited there to debate, 10,000 hours versus the sports gene. And so it's on YouTube, you can see it.

Oh, wow. And he's very clever. And I didn't want to get embarrassed. So I did my homework, tried to anticipate what he would argue, and thinking, all right, well, he's got to argue for early specialization. It's kind of implicit in some of the things he's written. And so I went and looked at at science of athletic development and saw that, in fact, in most

sports and in most places of the world, athletes who go on to become elite have a so-called sampling period where they play a variety of sports. They gain these broad general skills. They learn about their interests and abilities. And they actually delay specializing until later than peers who plateau at lower levels. And I sort of brought that up in the debate. And he said, you know what you kind of got me on was that thing.

You should write more about that. And I sort of filed it away in the back of my head and didn't think about it much more for more than a year. And then I was doing some work with a foundation here, giving a talk to some military veterans who'd been given scholarships by this foundation called the Pat Tillman Foundation to aid them in new career trajectories.

And I talked a little bit about late specialization in sports. And since they weren't athletes, I sort of tacked down a little bit of research about the work world. And they were so enthusiastic about it because they were all career changing, and they'd been told they were behind and all these things, that it was like, you know, they just wanted more and more and more, and they all wanted to follow up and keep in touch. And I sort of said, these people have had these incredible experiences, you know, some former Navy SEALs and all this kind of stuff. And they're being told like that

they're behind, you know, instead of how they can wield those experiences. And so I sort of thought, all right, there's there's something worth doing here. Yeah. So how did the debate with Malcolm Go? Did you draw? Was it to, did you used to draw? How do you think it went? You know, first of all, I think we have more common ground than 10,000 hours versus the sports gene to be quite honest. And we were, so it's on YouTube, people can see that, but we had a, we were invited back in March to the same conference. And we went again, and this time it was, it wasn't framed as a debate, just as a discussion. And at, at this one's on YouTube, too, and in many 54, he says, you know, I, I now feel

a little differently. I think I've conflated two ideas. The idea that you need a lot of practice to become good with the idea that in order to become good at X, you should do only X and only X starting as early as possible. And I think one of those is true and the other is not. And I think I conflated them. So now my idea is a little different. And I thought that was, you know, a great way to sort of update the mental model. And Emmy's a super open-minded guy that we both learned things from our discussions. And that was our recent discussion and that's sort of where he's at on it. So, I mean, if you've managed to change Malcolm Gladwell's mind and he's somewhere on the book,

right? Like, like, under... Yeah, he gave the book. He gave the world's greatest blur by I think. It says something like, you know, for reasons I can't explain, David makes me enjoy the experience of being told everything I thought about something was wrong or something like that. Which of course, everything he thought about it isn't wrong, but you know, what he's saying. Yeah, I get it, man. That's a big accolade from a very, very well-respected guy in that field. So moving on to the book itself, where does it begin? Where do we start with range?

Yeah, so because it's sort of, one of the seeds of its genesis was in the sports world, that's kind of where it begins. Because when we were having that first debate, we sort of talked about this, what we kind of framed because the Roger versus Tiger problem. So everyone knows the Tiger Wood story, but maybe they don't know it,

but you've absorbed the gist of it probably, which is that he specialized very, very young. His father gave him a putter when he was seven months old and he dragged it around his little baby walker, not trying to make him into a golfer, but just like giving him something to play with. Yeah. And, but he was very physically precocious.

And by 10 months, he was imitating a swing. He'd seen his father practicing. And two years old, this is also on YouTube, two years old. He's on a national television show showing off his golf swing in front of Bob Hope, who's sort of a famous television personality here. At three, his father, at this point realizes that there's something very unusual.

At three, he starts sort of media training him, playing a reporter and having him answer some questions. And you know, fast forward age of 21, he becomes the best call for in the world. And from a very young age was like, there's some sort of cute interview clips of him saying, like, you know, I'm going to be a jack Nicholas or whatever when he's four years old, basically. So on the other end of the spectrum was Roger Federer, who was also a gifted athlete, clearly from the time he was young, but played, dabbled in swimming,

skiing, wrestling, handball, basketball, tennis, table tennis, badminton, soccer, a little bit of rugby. I think I'm missing one, but anyway, a bunch of stuff. Mother was a tennis coach, refused to coach him because he wouldn't return balls normally. I kind of wanted to do his own thing. Even when he was getting really good and the coach is suggested he move up to play with older players, he declined because he liked talking about pro wrestling with his friends after practice. He didn't have any of those ideas that I'm going to be like the Tiger Woods did. I'm going to be Jack Nicholson or whatever. So when he got good enough to warrant an interview with a local newspaper, and they asked him if he ever

became a pro, what would he buy with his first paycheck? He said a Mercedes, and his mother was appalled by this, and asked the reporter if she could hear the recording of it and the reporter obliged. And it turned out he'd actually said mayor CDs and Swiss German accent. He just wanted more CDs, not a Mercedes. So he was, it was different. So he said in 2006 when they were both dominating everything, Rodgers sort of said like his, you know, I've never met someone who's so familiar with this feeling of being kind of invincible, but his story is completely different than mine.

And so the question was sort of which one of these is more normal, because we know the Tigerwood story, and we've extrapolated from that story to all of these other areas of life. We don't really hear the Roger Federer story that much, and which is the norm, and it turns out that the Federer story is far more typical, especially in non-Golf sports. Is that true? I'd have been surprised, I think, upon hearing about specialization versus generalization, you immediately hark to Henry Ford, right?

And like the advent of what capitalism has been, specializing in, you hear all the time, like one of the first things that I was told when I started this podcast, I was looking online at what the status quo was for how you do a podcast and what you should do. One of the first things niche down, like niche down as hard as you can and then expand out from there, et cetera, et cetera. So yeah, there's definitely a pervasive acceptance of pervasive acceptance of niching downhards, big specialization early on, then leverage the compounding interest that you get on top of that one thing being, because if you start 10 years

later than that, that's 10 years of compounding interest that you haven't got on that particular skill. But it seems like there's potentially an alternative route. Yeah, I mean, in the podcast world, I mean, that makes some sense to me, right? Because there's so much competition right now for podcasts. Like, compared to my last book, which came out six years ago, I mean, the number of podcasts, invitations I've gotten, like, there must have been an exponential explosion in podcasts since then. And I think that makes a lot of sense. And that sort of, that sort of gets to a couple of issues. One of which is that the difference between a

generalist and a specialist is semantic, right? And it's like, what even is it? Like, you know, it's just a matter of degree and semantics. And in the book, I talk about these interesting studies of inventors, of technological inventors. And basically, what these studies show is that they're, in this case, there actually is sort of a label for generalists and specialists, and the researchers usually do it by looking at patents. And they'll say, okay, the specialists over their career have their patents in a smaller

number of technological domains. The US patent and trademark office has 450 different technological domains, and then they have all these subdomains. And so the specialists will usually stay in one or very few of those classes. The generalist might be in lots of them, maybe dozens of them, even, right? And so the question in some of this research was which of these people makes the bigger contributions, technology. And the answer was basically the specialists make contributions and the generalist make

contributions. And then there are these sort of dilatants who don't have a lot of depth or breath and they don't make much of contributions. And then the biggest contributions come from what they call the polymath who starts grounded in a certain area and then over the course of their career begins sacrificing some more depth for breadth. So they do start in this area and they can continue and they could go either path when they have a grounding in one area and they could start going broad right away or they could drill down right away. And what they do is they get some firm footing in that one area and then they start going broad and like combining these different realms taking knowledge from one domain and bringing it to the other.

And specifically, those people do better when they're in these sort of more amorphous technological areas where the next questions, the next steps aren't so clear. So like things that are unexpected breakthrough. So one of the ones I talk about in the book is this thing called multi-layer optical film, which I know that sounds like technical, but I like this example because it is in everything. It's in your cell phone, it's in your computer, and it's basically these layers of polymers or plastics that can be tailored

to reflect and refract light in certain ways, and so that instead of being absorbed by your screen or coming out of the screen, it will bounce around and get recycled. And so you need less battery power in order to to keep the screen bright and all these sorts of things. And the inventor who led the team that discovered that sort of said, you know, I was told all my career to become a specialist in his particular field. And he said, you know, what nobody told me was that I should also learn all of the adjacent stuff, like all these other types of technologies around it, and that's really what gave him his breakthrough. Learning all this stuff that was outside of his specialty, and bringing it into things that he knew better.

And even more generalist level, one of the stories I liked was a guy named Gunpei Yokoi, who didn't do well in his electronics exams in Japan. So he had to settle for kind of a low tier job as a machine maintenance worker at a playing card company. And the students who did better on the electronics exam wanted big companies in Tokyo and he had to be in this playing card company in Kyoto.

And he realized that he was not really equipped to work on the cutting edge. And but that there was a lot of information easily available that as people were sort of racing to the cutting edge, they were leaving behind and that you could combine it in ways that specialists kind of couldn't see. And so he started doing that and went from being a machine maintenance worker just tinkering around just starting a toy and game operation at that company and the company called Nintendo, which was started as a 19th century playing card company. No way. And he started the first toy and

game development operation and and did use that strategy to create the Game Boy, which was outdated processor, you know, screen that looks like rotten salad or something, four grayscale, four grayscale shades of graphics, right? And came out right when Sega and Atari came out with color versions of the same thing. But what he knew, so his philosophy translates to lateral thinking with withered technology. And what he meant by that was lateral thinking meaning taking knowledge from one area where it's sort of ordinary and bringing it somewhere else, where not pushing the cutting edge but taking knowledge from across and bringing it somewhere else. And by withered technology, he meant knowledge from across and bringing it somewhere else.

And by withered technology, he meant stuff that's already well understood and cheaper. So you don't need a specialist eye for what are going to be the developmental hurdles. And that became like a core philosophy for Nintendo. And I think it's pretty cool. And in fact, when one of his colleagues came to him He recounted this when the Game Boy was gonna come out and said bad news

Sagin Atari have theirs like coming out right at the same time and Yokoi said Are they color and his colleague says yes, and he's like then we're fine no problem because what he realized was that the colleague says, yes, and he's like, then we're fine. No problem. Because what he realized was that the barrier to getting more customers was not the competing on the quality of the graphics necessarily or the color. It was, you know, affordability, durability, battery life, all these things. So Game Boy is practically indestructible. Yeah. During the research of this book, I found one of my parents baseman had batteries that had expired 2007, and I flipped it on and played Tetris for a couple minutes. Still indestructible, aren't they? Indestructible. You get a wet, you know, you leave it out dry out and comes back. And also

because the technology was well understood, they were able to pump out tons of games really quickly, like both internally and from external developers. You know, it's almost like making a platform where app developers could start making stuff quickly because they already knew all this technology. So that was a real. I mean, he was like a pure sort of generalist inventor. But I think in some of the other research, it was sort of those polymath inventors who have their area of expertise, but then they kind of understand things that are adjacent to it. Yeah, it sounds like there's a lot of frontiers that you've gone into with this. Considering, as you say, the sports gene focused on athletics and sports, whereas now we're talking industry, we're talking professionals, individual career, multiple career, sports

again, you know, all that sort of stuff. There's a lot of different ways to go here. I don't, I'm going to guess, considering how busy you are, I'm going to guess that you won't have heard Naval Ravacant on Joe Rogan yet. No, I haven't, but I know that he's, you know, I know who he is, I haven't heard of on Joe Rogan. No. Okay, have you consumed much of his content? Not a lot.

No. Okay, well, I mean, he is a real force to be reckoned with. He's the real deal, man. And I highly recommend anyone who's listening and yourself, go check it out. Fantastic podcast, Joe Rogan's most recent one with Naval and on that he says the greatest pleasure in life for me is learning something from one industry and then layering it onto a lattice work of things from other industries. He's talking about it in the He's talking about it in the context of people who virtue signal with the number of books that they're reading or that they've read and look at how many books I've gone through this and the other.

And Navar is a big proponent of reading a book until he gets something that he likes and then just putting it down. And then maybe you go back to it five years later. Like he just wants to have, I think, one of the things that's interesting with that is he read a lot as a kid. His mother used to drop him off at the library after school because he lived in like a pretty rough area in New York, I think. And she'd leave him at the library. He read everything in the library like dictionaries, religious books, magazines, whatever it was. So he's coming at it from someone who

has big base of knowledge. And now, because of that, is able to take all these different concepts, piece them together, and has the perspective, the broad perspective, where he's able to make connections that other people aren't. I thought that was super interesting. That's interesting, Anna. I mentioned a number of really interesting things. And I'm interested to hear this too because some people, I've lost track of my like Twitter now as the inboxes. I'm losing track of my various inboxes. But because some people tweeted at me about Naval and some of them were like, I wonder what he thinks about this because he advocates for only specialized knowledge. And then others were like, this

sounds like it works with what Naval says about combining knowledge I'm like, so I don't know the degree or disagree like maybe he contains multitudes. Maybe I don't know He's a difficult guy to put into a box I think that probably actually identifies the key element of why people like Naval that he is a walking contradiction, right? Like he's this angel CEO, angelist CEO, like venture capitalist investor spends a lot of time in Silicon Valley, spends a lot of time in Silicon Valley, but isn't massively left leaning, it's just normal libertarian. He doesn't have like that ruthless capitalist streak to him and is all about inner peace. Like most of the first bit of Joe Rogan is him talking

about how do we achieve happiness, you need to care about your family and this, that any other, that's totally contrary to what you expect. From like the CEO of this big company, right? He's just a walking paradox. That's interesting, he's, oh, sorry, go ahead, I mean in a row. Just that that's it, he's difficult to put into a box.

And I think when that happens, the cognitive dissonance starts firing in people's heads a little bit. And what happened, they don't know how to interpret him. And I guess that actually, when we're talking about generalists versus specialists, for me personally, I like having a multi-faceted life. I like having a multi-faceted personality. I like not being a trope of myself or like a caricature of myself. No, wait, I'm writing things down because you're getting to so many things that I want a couple of things that I want to mention here. So, so so one about involved, this reminds me, you know, not to like turn people to books other than my own, but they should read books other than

my own. One step, right? It's range. Right, obviously That goes without saying. Link is in the show notes below. No, but, but that reminds me of this book that I really loved called Wired to Create by Scott Berry Kaufman and Carolyn Gregor because basically one of the themes is that these creative people are like contradictory on all their personality tests. Basically, like they contain multitudes, you know, and so they will display these sort of like beliefs and values and personality traits that you usually assume are in contradiction, basically. And so that was like one of my main learnings from that book. So it's really interesting to hear that. It also reminds me of, I spend some time in range on scientists for a number of reasons, one, because I'm interested in them, two, because I used to be in training to

be a scientist. So I mean, I was like living in a tent in the Arctic when I decided for sure I was going to be trying to become a writer. And so I didn't realize at the time that like grad school in environmental science, where I was totally ordinary scientist, then when I get to like sports illustrated, suddenly that knowledge is extraordinary. But you have the most well advanced scientist in the room, right? Totally. So that sort of combination, but also scientists, you know, in the sweep of humanity,

scientists are specialized, like no doubt about it. But I kind of wanted to show that even within that, look at the benefits you get of broadening more than you, you know, where everyone's saying you can just be more specialized of even being broader. And in that chapter, talks about that, there's this research that looks at which scientific papers go on to make the biggest impacts. And the biggest impact papers, you raise the chances of a paper becoming high impact if it has what's called an atypical combination of knowledge, which essentially the researchers look at journals that appear in the citations of papers. And if the paper makes as citations of journal pairs

that have never appeared in other papers before, which typically means because they're coming from different disciplines basically, that raises the chances of it eventually becoming in high impact paper by a lot. Most papers, no matter what they do, don't become high impact papers of course, because it's very small. But if it has two atypical combinations of knowledge, then it's

really much more likely to have that. So it's sort of similar to that, right? It's like making these sort of combinations of knowledge that aren't typically made makes it a much higher chance of becoming one of these hit papers basically. Yeah. One of the things that I'm thinking, so we've discussed, we've kind of, I guess, Joe. Oh, one more thing. So hit me. Hit me. Okay.

Because you mentioned not being a trope of yourself, you know, and after the sports gene came out, that was sort of a surprise success for me. Um, and worried about being pigeon-holed after that. I guess I wasn't worried about it because I was, because one, outwardly, it's fine for people to pigeonhole me. If I do something that's more valuable to readers or more interesting to them, and that's what they're identifying me with, that's fine. The pigeonhole I'm concerned about is the things that I want to do, right?

So if I'm viewed as being an pigeonhole, I don't mind that so much, but I don't want to actually be an pigeonhole in my daily life. I guess you can break out like anything that you do, presuming that you don't then take the particular label that you've been lumbered with and feel like you have some sort of duty to follow that. Right. As long as you don't do that, you're actually like, because a perfect example is what we're talking about now.

Like I wrote a book on sports. Now I'm going to bring one out that kind of touches on sports, but touches on loads of other stuff as well. Like, fuck you, I'm going to do what I want. Like, and if the people from the sports team come along for the ride, then fantastic. I mean, the advice was basically to write the sports team too, right away, after the sports team.

It was, do it again, brand yourself as the sports science guy, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And I specialize. Yeah, two weeks after that book came out, I left Sports Illustrated and went to a job that has nothing to do with sports. At this place called ProPublica, that's just, you know, doing reporting on drug cartels

and stuff like that. So like, you know, several years after the book came out, I would still get introduced places as reported Sports Illustrated, haven't been there in four years. And so, and maybe if I branded myself as a sports science guy and wrote sports team too, I don't know the counterfactual, like maybe financially that would have been more successful. I really don't know.

But it is absolutely not what I wanted to do. And I feel at things obviously, I've been going well with this book. And, you know, there are chapters on art and music and those, researching those chapters, ignited interest for me, that really changed the way I go to a museum or listen to a concert. So it really has added to my life

in a very material way, just like doing the exploration. And I think that's one of the ways that, you know, we kind of get into this sort of work where we talk to people with unfamiliar ideas, because we're interested in a lot, you know. Yeah. So thinking about the outcomes, I want to go back to the actual process of how we talk about specializing at the beginning, and then moving on to being a generalist later on. And the actual sort of nitty gritty about that, because I'm sure a lot of people are looking for some prescriptions and some heuristic for how they can apply that to their own lives.

One of the things that I think we're talking about the outcomes that we've discussed so far, I wonder, you talked about high-impact papers having these, and you can use that as a simulator or a representation for other things, right? Like there are some people who will have generalized and then specialized and had a big impact, etc. etc. I wonder whether the distribution in terms of the most optimal approach for a broad cross-section of people. I wonder whether you get winners and losers with the generalization and whether you get more okay performances with the specialization.

Did you have a look at anything like that? I'll consider it. That's a good question. And I think in some ways it's sort of domain-dependent. And let me explain why I think that. So I introduced this concept in the book that of different types of learning environments what the psychologist Robin Hogarth calls kind and wicked learning environments and kind learning environments are where all the information is freely easily available human behavior is usually not as involved very much. Next steps are clear you get automatic feedback when you do something and that feedback is fully accurate. So you can think of golf as something like this or chess, and it's based on repetitive patterns. And so in a lot of areas, like if you read some of the underlying sort of 10,000 hours type

research, a lot of the advantage of specialized experts has to do with types of pattern recognition, basically. So they learn to pick up these patterns in an unconscious way that allows them to make certain types of decisions. And in chess, for example, that works like rocket fuel. Like early specialization works in chess. In fact, if you haven't started studying those patterns by the age of 12, your chances of reaching international master status, which is like one down from Grandmaster, drops from like one in four, like one in 55 or something like that. So it works.

The thing is, those domains also tend to be the easiest to automate because of those unchanging rules and based on repetitive patterns and easy feedback and things like that. So the reason that chess, you know, computers got so good at chess so quickly is because it's a kind of learning environment. If you, as you get more wicked, so think of, like, from computer chess to self-driving cars where there's lots of rules, lots of recurring situations, and yet it's the sort of unusual things that have kept us from being able to fully implement them. And now people are talking about, well, maybe we implement them only in certain areas that have certain rules and stuff like that. And then to the far end of the spectrum, which is like medical research, where IBM's Watson has underperformed so badly that some of the AI researchers I was talking to were concerned that it would

like damage the reputation of AI in healthcare. I haven't even heard that story. Yeah, yeah. So one of the one of the doctor scientists I was speaking with said, the reason Watson destroyed a jeopardy and totally failed in cancer research is because we know the answers to jeopardy. So it's a different challenge. So some of it has to do with the domain you're in. So I think some of the domains that are most amenable to narrow specialization also become the easiest to automate.

So that can create some serious losers. Future yourself, I guess, that suggests generalists did the way to go. In those realms, but I also think you're right that with generalization, there are some winners and losers, right? Because for some people, it means they may end up looking a lot more like a dilatant. So LinkedIn did some research recently that looked at what predicts who becomes an executive. And they have because they have these enormous databases. So instead of study of like 20 people, this study was half a million people.

And the number one, number one best predictor was if you went to a top five business school program, which, okay, my guess is that that's not causal because of the schools, because it's selecting for people who are already doing quite well, you know. But the next predictor was the number of different job functions you had worked across within an industry. So each different job function saved about three years of experience, en route to going to become an executive. So that's very different than what we think of, right?

Is selling people like bounce around these. Yeah, so the chief economist's main recommendation, since they recommending someone like go to a top five business school, like that's not such a useful recommendation, because that's not opened to everyone. And expensive and all that. So his top recommendation was to work across a large number of job functions, which is not the advice that you usually hear.

And I bet for some people that makes them ending up looking like a dilleton where it's kind of like, well, you haven't really learned anything that well. And for other people, they're the most likely to become the executives. And so I think there probably is some of that winner and loser. And I think, so I was just at a, sorry, I'm, this is related, but I'm sort of, can I digress a little bit? I have a digressive brain. Wherever you want to go, David,

we're going down the rabbit hole with you, man. Okay. I was at this conference of the people are interested in investing. And, you know, what do I know? But they invited me to the conference to talk. And you're just the guy who doesn't have a clue, that's in the corner. That will be me. We'd be signing the corner together. But so and they put up, before I went up they took something from my book and did a poll for the audience, you know they could vote on their cell phones. And the poll was, what do you think is the average age of a founder of a blockbuster startup on the day of the

founding of the company? Okay, and I think the choices were 25, 35, 45, 55 and 25 was the overwhelming answer. Well, Max, Max, I could say once all old people are stupid, right? All young people are clever. Young people are just smarter. That's it. Yeah. Right. He was 22 years old when he said that. So he had an interest in saying that, okay. And, and, but the actual answer, there's just some, some pretty new research from MIT and Northwestern and the US Census Bureau that showed the average age is actually about 45 and a half. And that's, that's not when the company becomes breakthrough. It's the day of founding, right? So these people at this event to really pay attention to all this investing stuff were overwhelmingly. It was like 70% they thought 25.

And I think the reality is that those startup founders often have to do some zigzagging, and they end up with these sort of unique groups of skills where it makes sense for them to go compete on their own ground and try to start up something new because they have these intersecting skills. And obviously startups are high risk, high failure, high reward and all those things. But I do think you can be a big winner or a big loser as a generalist. How much do you think, as you're discussing that there, one of the things that comes to mind is diminishing margins of return. So thinking about as someone specialises down, there is

only so much better that you can get at something. Anyone who's tried weightlifting or powerlifting knows that to PB within your first, your PB in every week in your first year of like going to the gym, right? But then after 10 years of training for you to add like five kilos onto your total, it needs an ungodly amount of preparation and people are working at the very margins of their performance. Right. So there's a question of maybe you can get more banged by incorporating a new skill where you're on the lower end of the learning curve still. And I think that's interesting. But there's two things. Even aside from diminishing returns, you can actually start to have really perverse effects from increasing specialization.

So surgeons is an area where I mentioned in the book that specialized surgeons have fewer complications, period. They do. That's good. So you have to have problems. A few problems. A few problems. That's right.

Fewer problems, specialized surgeons. And even if you account for their experience, the number of times they've done the surgery, specialized surgeons still do better. So there's something on top of just experience about being a specialized surgeon that makes them even better. I don't know what it is. But that's the finding. And so if you need to have surgery, you know, you want to specialize surgeon. At the same time, specialized surgeons tend to do a huge number of procedures that don't need to be done at all, such that, you know, if you, there are these studies I cite where, if you have to check into a hospital with a heart problem, you're less likely to die,

and this is, of course, these are US based studies, if you check in on the dates of a National Cardiology Conference because you're less likely to get some of these intervention procedures that you may die with, right? So the cardiologist who wrote the editorial for this study said, my colleagues and I would joke that this is the safest place to have a heart problem at our conference, and this study really turns that on its head, and suggests that a lot of unnecessary procedures are done because the specialist will get this sort of when all you have is a hammer,

every problem looks like a nail syndrome. And so they're really good at the procedure, but they'll also continue to do it. Even after science shows that it unequivocally should not be done anymore. There's a whole book about this called Ending Medical Reversal by these two doctors that talks about how Procedures keep being done even after science has like totally showed they should not be done anymore.

Why do they keep being done? Is it people's kind of are they Passionate or like feels some sort of sense of patriotism to the procedure? It's it's a good question and I kind of wrote an article about this at ProPublica called When Evidence Says No and Doctors Say Yes. And I thought at first that it would be the simple case of, you know, when you pay someone to do one thing, it's hard to get them to do something else. But, you know, if they get paid for procedures, but a very prominent hospital here said, okay, we're going to uncouple payment from procedures

for this particular kind of procedure, placing a stent where you put like a tube in a blood vessel and open it up when it's been narrowed. And if someone's having a heart attack, like, you know, they'll save their life, but this was particularly for people who just come in with stable coronary artery disease or stable chest pain basically,

and a number of randomized trials have shown that it doesn't work for that. It's not better than just these less invasive therapies. And when this prominent hospital decoupled compensation from the procedure, it still didn't solve the problem. Someone else did a sort of a psychological study of doctors who were doing these procedures. And what they basically found was that they didn't believe these randomized controlled trials. And they would say like, patient comes in with chest pain, they have a narrowed artery.

Obviously, I fix it by opening it up, right? Like it makes sense. What they call bioplausable makes a ton of sense. But, but turns out that we didn't design the human body. It's not a kitchen sink. It's much more complicated than that. And so when specialists are using what you now call medicine surrogate markers, they are fixing one piece

of a puzzle and assuming that it affects the total outcome of this larger system. But in fact, in many cases, what they're doing is lowering someone's blood pressure. And then people die of heart attack and stroke at the exact same rates with lower blood pressure numbers. And so you really need someone looking at the outcomes you actually care about, not just at these surrogate markers, which are one small piece of the whole puzzle.

That's super interesting. So going more towards, I guess, the nitty-gritty of the heuristics of how people can apply some of this sort of stuff to their own life, whether they be an athlete or a professional or someone that's just looking to advance themselves through life with some skills. I'm currently reading a number of books that kind of all fit into this, Scott H. Jung's ultra-learning.

I've got a pre-release at that. There's a lot of stuff. He obviously he's super specializing. He did the MIT computer science course of three years in six months. Then he went and upgraded his ability to do portraits of people like 100x to that in the space of 30 days. So he's periodizing specialization,

but over a broader time span is actually being a generalist. Yeah, that gets it something that in most of the people I highlight in range are not like what we think of in from like the Renaissance where it's like, oh, there's these, there's virtue in just being like, you know, a Renaissance person and doing all these different things. And it's much more that they are on the hunt for what economists call match quality, the degree of fit between your abilities and your interests and the work that you do. And the way that they find that is by zigzagging. So this woman who studies people's career fit that I talk about in Ranger names her many

at Ibarra, she's actually at the London Business School. And she has this saying, I love to say, we learn who we are in practice, not in theory. And what she means is that there are all these personality quizzes and kind of career gurus that suggest that we can just introspect and go forth, you know, and like a commencement speech. It's like picture who you're going to be in 10 or 20 years and march confidently toward it. When in fact, the research suggests that actually we have to do stuff to learn about what we're good at and what we're interested in. So he says, act and then think. You do something and then reflect. And that's how you learn about the world, right? Sort of like dating, like early on, it might seem

like you should marry the first person you dated. But once you take more data, that seems like a less good idea. So we thought about the rest. That is the absolute fact. So we thought about careers, you know, the way we thought about dating, we probably wouldn't pressure people to settle down so quickly. But those people end up doing this sort of zigzagging in search of match quality. Because once you get good match quality, your growth rate is a lot faster.

And so they're not setting out to say, I'm going to be a generalist. It's that in the process of this zigzagging of saying, here's who I am right now, here are my skills and interests. Here are the opportunities in front of me. I'm going to try this one. And maybe you're from now I'll change, because I will have learned something about myself, and I'll do something else. And so they just end up with these

broad experiences and skills, not because they set out to do it in many cases, but because that's how they get to their match quality spot. Totally. So a couple of things coming to mind there. David Dade is the way of the superior man. He talks about phases in people's lives. And he says that one of the times that's a trigger for he's talking about men but it applies to women as well. When men realize that their time with a particular project is gone is that something which used to excite them no longer does and he says a lot of people believe that you need to kind of gritty teeth and grind through it and that it would appear doesn't seem to be the case. I think most people and this is one of the main questions that I've got,

and I think a lot of people at home may be thinking this as well, the attraction of novelty is very high, and this diffuse focus where we're constantly being distracted by things is on an incredibly granular level, essentially generalization. Like, you're looking at, I'm going to do this, and I'm going to do this, and I'm going to send a text, and I'll look at my email, then I'll go do this. And I think that as you scale that up over time, a lot of people may struggle to work out when am I calling myself short from really working hard at something which is simply difficult but worthwhile and rewarding. And when am I making a change to try something new when it's justified?

Yeah, yeah. And I'm not a big advocate of multitasking, on that sense. This project is very different than my last project. It was very different than my previous projects and whatever my next project is that I have no idea will be very different. But when I do those things, I focus in on them.

Period. You know, very hard. Yeah. Yeah. And so that's a good question. And I think, again, to think about how many of our is work, one of the reasons she says that when you change, it's difficult because you have to change your identity. You're not just changing your job or what you're doing.

And that's a slow process. And so a lot of the people that she saw that did it well, they sort of dip a toe into something. Or they learn about somehow they get a keyhole view into something, they meet some new person or whatever it is. And they maybe take a class and sort of they see a little, a little by little. And then they start to realize they have like more interest in this or more talent for it or whatever.

And then their friends start telling them like, just keep it as a hobby. You don't want to change. Like, you know, you'll get behind. And eventually they get to a point where they're like, no, I have to sort of do this. And so I think the way I approach this is I set up sort of experiments. I have a little book I call Book of Experiments,

but where, you know, the way I used to when I was a science grad student, I have a book with hypotheses. Now I'll have a hypothesis about myself, something I want to learn or something I want to try. And here's what I'm hoping to learn. Here's my hypothesis. I'll give it a try, and then I'll reflect on it. That's what self-regulatory learners do.

They reflect a lot on those things, and keep going forward like that. And that worked well for me in the reporting of this book. So I got kind of stuck with the organization of the book, and decided to take an online fiction writing class. And for beginners, and we had to do exercises like right only with dialogue or right with not not with dialogue at all. And after doing that, it prompted me to go back through my whole manuscript and start stripping down all these quotes because I realized I was like leaning on quotes in a lazy way to explain information that I should have just been writing and leave

the quotes for sort of more voice. And so that was just a little dip my toe in that experiment, but I have to say it also ignited, I was doing it to try to try to get off this plateau a little bit, but it ignited an interest that I wasn't really, that I didn't really know I have. So I'm sure I'm gonna try some more of that now. Is it gonna be fiction? Is it gonna be fiction? I don't know, I mean, I'm sure I'll do more writing

in that, I'm gonna surprise some people. Yeah, yeah. But I'm sure I'll try more of it for sure, because I think either way it made me a better, made me a better nonfiction writer. But point is you didn't, I didn't have to like take a total right turn. Like it's this or that. I was able to kind of dip my toe into it in a way that's useful for me. And so I think those that Hermione Bar as approach of small experiments is like a way to try to do these things. But I think they should be done deliberately. Not like I'm doing a million

things at once. It should be like, what do I hope to learn? What am I interested in? Who or what can I engage to test that and then reflect on it and go forward, not just like scatterbrained itness? Like proactive testing while you're becoming broad. Are you familiar with James Clea's Explore exploit framework? Yeah, I mean the Explore exploit framework is predates James Clea's Explore Exploit framework? Yeah, I mean, the Explore Exploit framework is predates James Clea for sure. Oh, that's where I first read it in atomic habits. Where do you know where it comes from? James, yeah, I mean, oh, it's old in the business literature.

I don't know who first discovered it, but yeah, the Explore Exploit of creation of new knowledge versus ringing the most out of knowledge you already have there. knowledge versus ringing the most out of knowledge you already have there. And one chapter in the book is about outside problem solvers basically. And what that means is, so there was a guy who was the VP of research and development Eli Lilly, massive pharmaceutical company. And I remember when I interviewed him, he said, look, I'm a specialist. I'm an organic chemist. If it doesn't have a carbon in it, I'm technically not qualified to work with it.

And he realized that specialists, you know, they have an arrow view and a lot of times solutions come from this knowledge that you couldn't have foreseen would be important. And so when Lily Chemist got stuck on certain problems, he went around asking, he said, I'm just gonna post them online and see if anyone's,

and of course they're like, that's ridiculous, right? We're like a company about, I don't know, 120,000 people or something with the most resources and how is someone to solve them. All right, give it a try. Does it answer, start rolling in, right? I remember one that he liked came from something they were stuck on with some chemical came in from an attorney who had worked on a patent case having to do with tear gas or something like that. And it worked so well. He spun it off into a separate company called Inocentive that helps other companies post problems. They get stuck on for outside funding problem solving.

And they try to frame the problem in a way where it attracts people really far away from the discipline of the people who got stuck. And so that's like one of Inocentive services. And so like they solved, they helped NASA solve a problem. They'd been stuck on for 30 years with predicting solar storms, particle bursts, the can damage astronauts or equipment. And a guy who would just retired from a cell phone company

solved it in six months. And at first the NASA scientists were like, no, no, that's a different approach. And they're like, that's the point, right? And so now this guy's name is Alf Bingham, who founded an incentive. Now there have been a bunch of,

I don't wanna to say copy yet. Just other other Things like that like one's called Kaggle and that looks for outside solvers for machine learning program Which is something you consider really specialized but it turns out that the people who solve those problems You know, it's someone who solves like a Kaggle health problem where it's something something with data and health care Whatever they often aren't an expert machine learning and they often aren't an expert in health care either But they have like some I mean, I think the real thing is that the real thing is that the real thing is that the real thing is that the real thing is that the real thing is that the real thing is that the real thing is that the real thing is that the real thing is that the real thing is that the real thing is that the real thing is that the real thing is that the real thing is that the real thing is that the real thing is that the real thing is that the real thing is that the real thing is that the real thing is that the real thing is that the real thing is that the real thing is that the real thing is that the real thing is that the real thing is that the real thing is that the real thing is that the real thing is that the real thing is that the real thing is that the real thing is that the real thing is that the real thing is that the real thing is that the real thing is that the real thing is that the real thing is that the real thing is that the real thing is that the real thing is that the real thing is that the real thing is that the real thing is that the real thing is that the real thing is that the real thing is that the real thing is that the real thing is that the real thing is that the real thing is that the real thing is that the real thing is that the real thing is that the real thing is that the real thing is that the real thing is that the real thing is that the real thing is that the real thing is that the real thing is that the real thing is that the real thing is that the real thing is that the real thing is that the real thing is that the real thing is that the real thing is that the real thing is that the real thing is that the real thing is that the real thing is that the real thing is that the real thing is that the real thing is that the real thing is that the real thing is that the real thing is that the real thing is that the real thing is that the real thing is that the real thing is that the real thing is that the real thing is that the real thing is that the real thing is that really, really difficult stuff. The listeners will be familiar with the Stephen Wolfram episode. I sat down with Stephen Wolfram last week with Wolfram. Oh, that was an interesting man. That guy is a force of nature. I saw a lecture from him once. He's a force of nature man. Like a terrifying individual, terrifying and fascinating individual. And he was saying that

they live stream like a ridiculous amount of their calls now. So it's just like, you wanna know what's going on in the Wolfram language office today cause he's at home CEO, right? And he's just there, he'll be on his treadmill desk, treadmill in a way, and there'll be like a few hundred, a few thousand people just watching. And there's a lot of people. I wanna see that.

It's really available online, really available to watch those guys going on, right? And so you're talking about this thing where people are crowdsourcing it. He is in real time just allowing other people on the internet. Some of them, I'm going to guess he's got like a super popular coding, like subculture fan base, right? I'm going to guess that that will be, you know, like me or you might have like the sports on or whatever, like in the background, there might be working away doing some stuff and they just got Steven Wolfram like on his treadmill, like cracking on.

But you know, there we go again, like anyone can go on, right? And he was saying exactly the same thing. Said exactly the same thing that people are giving them solutions from different disciplines that they wouldn't have thought. Yeah, it's really interesting. And that's not that is absolutely not to say that specialists aren't important, right? Absolutely not. In fact, I like to highlight the NPR in our public radio, did a review of range and they say that I spend a lot of time giving credit

to dissenters, which I like because not even to centers, like I agree we need specialists also. I like the way that the physicist mathematician Freeman Freeman Dyson and Great Writer framed it. He said, we need frogs and birds. Frogs are down in the mud looking at all the little details. Birds are up above. They can't see those details, but they can integrate the information of frogs. And he said, the problem is we're telling everybody

to become frogs. And when disciplines and science changes, that becomes a big problem. And that's sort of how I think of it. And so I think you need, like these problems that stumped the people at Lillie, obviously they were solving a lot of problems on their own. They were posting the ones that they got stuck.

So I think with the combination of that, of the endosensive approach and those specialists, that's where you get the best of both worlds. And you have this healthy problem-solving ecosystem. Yeah, absolutely. How do you know if you're a frog or a bird? For the listeners at home, how do they work that out? That's a great question.

And a semantic issue to some point, right? Like if you look in the patent research, it has to do with how many technological classes have you worked across. If you look in this comic book research, I cite, it has to do with how many different genres have you worked across and all these sorts of things. So I don't really know. I don't have a perfect answer to that. Although I think

most people have some intuition about it, actually. But I definitely don't have a perfect answer about it. I don't think that there really is going to be one because it is so personal dependent, right? Thinking back to some of the things that you've said already, a lot of recent podcasts come to mind. Laura van de Kam, who wrote off the clock, she talks about, and the four disciplines of execution as well relates to this. Strategizing is easy, but execution is hard. The reason is that we are forced to actually do shit if we execute. Like we have to put our money where our mouth is, it's opposed to just talking a good

game. We also have paralysis by analysis that people are so concerned about making the wrong decision, that they will hold off making any decision. I think if Jeff Bezos that said, in action is more costly than action because once you start to act, you can change your course on the fly as long as you're sufficiently quick to move. But the law of Andecan point is that she, off the clock, she talks about committing to plans in the future. It's all about maximizing memories,

maximizing your perception of time through increasing memories, and memories are generated through intense on novel experiences. But when we get to an evening time and we think that we might wanna go do a salsa class, Netflix is there and the bed's warm and it's cold out right in outside. So she talks about committing to an execution

and I think that when you're talking about dipping your toe, what came to mind for me is a good, heuristic, a good tool for people to use at home is, well, okay, just commit, commit to something in advance, maybe even pay for it. But like, I've always wanted to try yoga, right, book a yoga class now, go on somewhere, book it now and pay $10, $10, $20, whatever it is. Because you're probably going to end up going because you've committed to it and that it might be shit and you might hate it. But you don't know that until there's no way to know it. You're insight into yourself and your opportunities is constrained by your previous experiences,

right? So if you hate it, I thought I was going to be a scientist and then I started doing more lab work. And I found out that that was not the path for me, but that was the only way to find out, and to try some of that stuff. And I think there's even an added bonus to what you're suggesting, which is that if you look at how, there's a thing called the end of history illusion

where we all recognize in psychology finding that we have changed a lot in the past based on our experiences, right? The things we've gone through and all this stuff has caused us to change, okay? Our values and all these, and our skills and all these things. And then we, then we say, but I'm not going to change much in the future. That's at every time point in life, we say, at least these really weird results, like, like people underestimate how much they'll taste will change. So if you ask someone, how much money will you pay today to see your favorite band play

10 years from now? The average answer is $129. And if you ask how much money would you pay to see your favorite band from 10 years ago, today, the average answer is $80. Because we underestimate how much our taste changes. And as I was looking at this personality research, I actually showed that one of the very predictable changes is the big five trait of openness to experience declines as people get older.

That's a fascinating family knowledge. Yep. And we know that trait is highly associated with creativity and you can change that decline, slow it or possibly even reverse it by just trying new stuff. So these studies that were making seniors learn how to do new stuff. So there are these studies that we're making seniors learn how to do new types of puzzles and all these things. And even if they didn't get better at the puzzles, their openness to experience changed somewhat. So I think we gravitate toward things

we're already comfortable with in competent app. And difficulty in trying some new thing isn't a sign that you aren't learning, but ease is if things if things you're doing are too easy for you Then you're not learning It's weird isn't it because there is a particular kind of mindset. I've recently started swimming and I suck like Really bad at my cardio for swimming cardio outside of the water and terraform is not bad cardio in swimming not so good cardio for swimming, cardio outside of the water and terraform is not bad, cardio in swimming, not so good. Okay.

But the takeoff, like I haven't done something that I've stuck at consistently and has had like linear progressive overload for a fair while, and the new gains are astounding. And it's addictive, you're like, shit, this is what it's like to do something that I'm fucking crap at. And then you're like, oh my God, I've just,

I've pee-beed, I pee-beed again. I pee-beed again. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I was a crack, I played a whole bunch of different sports, football, basketball, baseball, the stuff, American football. And then I ended up on running

and I ran track in college and I was a walk on and I sucked. And then I, but I, I write about this in my first book, but I, but I improved really rapidly. And I ended up as like a university record holder, you know? And so, but it was totally addictive. And in many ways, I thought I was an easier spot than the guys who would come in as these big time recruits because they had all this pressure

and it was very hard for them to improve. And I'm like improving like crazy. Which is addictive. It is addictive like that. And one of the other things as well to consider is that as you If you are going into something new and if you're cultivating as James Clea would talk about the the Compounding effect of an effect an effective habit over time. Yeah, Matt Fraser CrossFit Games champion comes to mind. There's a story in chasing excellence by Ben Burjram where he says that Matt wouldn't let himself leave. He did an engineering degree, I think, a mechanical engineering,

something like that, something like supermanly at uni. And he wouldn't let himself leave the library until he could like- Hopefully it'll become less manly over time. Yeah, I know. He wouldn't let himself leave the library until he was able to complete the baton, do like an entire chapter or whatever it was that he was learning. And if he got one thing wrong, he'd force himself to sit there and go again. And he think, right, okay, roll that forward to the sort of values that he has now. Yeah. And it's exactly the same. Like, ridiculous degree of excellence,

ridiculous degree of integrity and virtue and all the rest of the stuff. Yeah. I can agree more. David, today's been amazing. I'm absolutely certain that we're going to get requests for you to come back on. So I think you might need to hurry up and either find some room in your schedule or write another book quickly. I'm okay. I'll find room in my schedule because I'm not writing another book. So as I said, after my last book, no more books.

We'll find out if two years, three years from now, if I feel like I've recovered. Yeah. As of now, I'm saying I did last time no more books. So maybe it'll be six years again. Who knows? We'll see, man. For the listeners at home, where can they find you online?

DavidEppstein.com. Easiest place. And day and night, Twitter handle is DavidEppstein. Fantastic. I love just placed and day and night Twitter handle is David Epstein. Fantastic. I love a nice, short and easy to remember, handle on all of that stuff. David, it's been amazing. To the listeners, the book range will be linked in these show notes below all of the other resources that we've mentioned as well. I'll go back to her and make some cool show notes.

David, I hope that you survived the remainder of the media, too, or I know it's been crazy for you, but I've loved how many of you are. That's great. I'm very lucky. You are. You are indeed. You are indeed. You are indeed. But you are delivering ridiculous volumes of very interesting stuff, so it doesn't surprise you.

I appreciate that. Thank you. Thank you very much. of that