Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing - Range, Grit, and Predicting Business Success

Episode Date: November 15, 2019

Is it better to be a generalist or a specialist? Can you ever have too much grit? And what do birds and frogs have to do with business success? On this week’s show, we revisit our conversation with David Epstein, author of the New York Times bestseller Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. Thanks Netsuite. Get the FREE guide, “7 Key Strategies to Grow your Profits” at www.NetSuite.com/Fool.  You can pay what you want and the first $50 is on LinkedIn. Just visit www.LinkedIn.com/Fool. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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It's the Motley Fool Money radio show. I'm Chris Hill. Thank you so much for listening. This week, we are actually off at our company's annual meeting, so we're revisiting one of our most popular shows of the year, a conversation with best-selling author David Epstein. He joined me in front of a live audience at an investing conference. David Epstein has master's degrees in environmental science and journalism. He's been a senior writer for Sports Illustrated, and he's the author of the New York Times bestseller, The Sports Gene.

His new book is Range, Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. During our time on stage, we discussed a wide range of topics, including Tiger Woods, Roger Federer, true learning, and the case for inefficiency. But my first question for David was where he got the idea for his new book. The idea sort of still did grow out of the first book. So the first book was about the balance of nature, nurture, and athleticism. And I was invited to the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, co-founded by the general manager of the Houston Rockets,

to debate Malcolm Gladwell. It's 10,000 hours versus the sports gene. It's up on YouTube. I'd never met him before, and he's very clever, and I didn't want to get embarrassed, so I tried to anticipate some of his arguments. I knew he'd have to argue.

This was specifically about the development of athletes. I knew he'd have to argue for early specialization in sports and highly technical deliberate practice, so I said, okay, I'm the science writer at Sports Illustrated. Let's go look at what the science has to say, and it actually found in almost all sports and most places in the world,

athletes who go on to become elite actually have these so-called sampling periods where they play a variety of sports. They gain these broad general skills that scaffold later learning. They learn about their interests and abilities, and they systematically delay specializing until later than their peers.

We all know the Tiger Woods story of early specialization. That's like the most famous developmental model, but it's actually completely the exception, and golf is like an unusual sports skill compared to other ones. Whereas, like with this, we all know, you know, when Mark Zuckerberg at 22 says, young people are just smarter.

We all hear that story. Meanwhile, the research shows that the typical age, on the day of founding, not when it becomes a blockbuster, on the day of founding it's 45 and a half, but it's like we don't hear the stories that the science was really telling, we just hear the Tiger Woods, Mark Zuckerberg stuff, these much more, it's very like Daniel Kahneman's

availability heuristic, the dramatic stories that we base our models of the world on, not what the actual science finds. And you open the book with a great sports example because, you know, as you said, everybody, I'm not even a big golf fan, And I know the Tiger Woods story of just basically from the time he could walk, he's, you know, his father is drilling him on all these different things.

And he's Tiger Woods. He's the dominant golfer of his time and maybe of all time. But the comparison you draw with Roger Federer, who is also the dominant tennis player of his age and probably on the short list of the greatest of all time, it's a completely different path. Yeah, Roger was exposed to tennis early, but he was also doing swimming, skiing, wrestling, handball, basketball, badminton, rugby, tennis, of course, table tennis.

I'm probably forgetting. Oh, soccer. That was his other biggest one, soccer. And his mother actually was a tennis coach, but she refused to coach him because he wouldn't return balls normally. Like, she couldn't get him to do the normal drills, so she declined. When he got good enough to be pushed up a level with older players, he declined because he just liked talking pro wrestling with his friends after practice. And when he finally got good enough to warrant an interview from a local paper, the reporter asked him if he ever became a pro, what would he buy with his hypothetical first paycheck?

And he says a Mercedes. His mother's totally appalled and asks the reporter if she can hear the interview tape. And the reporter obliges. And it turns out Roger actually said Mercedes in Swiss German. He just wanted more CDs, not a Mercedes. And so then his mother was fine. So one of my colleagues, who was the senior tennis writer at Sports Illustrated, described Roger's parents as

pulley, not pushy. So eventually he did specialize, but it was after what we now know is the very typical developmental trajectory for most elite athletes. And golf, the people who study skill acquisition in sports kind of view golf as different, this sort of non-dynamic domain

where you don't need anticipatory skills like to judge things that are happening quickly. And so early specialization may well work in golf. I don't know. There's kind of a dearth of science. I can believe that it does. But the problem is that we've extrapolated from that to all these other skills. We'll get into some of the business stuff

from the book in a second, but I want to stick with sports because it's, and I suppose this ties into business as well, because if you think about youth sports in America, the business of it has almost gotten too big. I mean, it's pretty amazing that Roger Federer's parents

were not only actively sort of pulling him away from specialization, but also his mother was a tennis coach herself. In the United States, the flip of that is she's the tennis coach, and as soon as he can walk, she's got him out there sort of drilling. And not to pick on soccer, but it really does seem like soccer, more than any sport in the United States, the youth sports business machine of that is almost too big to overcome.

No, do pick on soccer. You should pick on soccer. So when I was living in, I don't live in Brooklyn anymore, but when I did, there was a U7 travel soccer team that met near where I lived. And, like, I don't think anybody thinks that 6-year-olds have to travel to find good enough competition in a city of 9 million people. So, no, really. So I don't think that has anything to do with optimal development for those kids. Because we know the way to make the best 10-year-old soccer player is not the same as the way to develop the best 20-year-old soccer player.

But those kids are customers, right? And someone else has an interest in keeping them away from those other sports. When you talk to elite athletes, they're the ones who know, and they're, like, the most against because they know what they did against specialization. but that's a whole other sort of industry but some places like France which just won the World Cup started decades ago reforming its pipeline where they get kids

exposed early and they get them in the pipeline early but then they because I think multiple sports is really just a proxy for diversity of movement and training because there's this classic research finding breadth of training predicts breadth of transfer which means the broader your training scenarios the more likely you'll be able to apply your skills

to situations you've never seen before and so they get the kids exposed early But then they put them in these games where they're playing, like, on sand one day and cobblestones another day. This game called futsal where they're in small spaces. And the coaches aren't even allowed to talk most of the time. They're just saying there's no remote control, meaning the coaches shouldn't try to micromanage the players. So they get them exposed early, but they put them in this very free-form sort of kind of development that we know is the best. So I think there's hope because there are models for making this better.

Business is sort of one of the through lines of this book because, you know, we just talked about youth sports. but one of the things that comes up is sort of the business implications on scientific research. I was saying before we started, one of the more jarring things to me in the book is how scientific funding has increased over the last, say, 30 years or so, but discovery has actually dropped because it seems like the pressure for economic outcomes immediately or in the short term are taking precedent over just discovery. Yeah, and I think everyone knows we want those outcomes.

The end goal is applications. The question is how best to get there. And to that point, I was reading a lot of Nobel acceptance speeches when I was doing the research, and it's a funny thing in the more recent years you start to notice almost every year someone's speech says, well, I wouldn't be able to do my work today because I didn't really know what I was going to find.

I just had this interesting question, and now in your grant applications, you have to say, here will be my application. And that's okay, but, like, we have, you know, a venture, a VC community for that that can be sort of more focused on that. And so why, like, squash the diversity of the research endeavor?

Because so many of the biggest breakthroughs have come from questions that someone was interested in that we didn't know where it was leading. Like, Vannevar Bush, who, you know, led the scientific research efforts during World War II, wrote a report for the president about a successful research culture. And you see these phrases that are like the free play of free intellects working on questions, you know, of their own design. And that led to, like, you know, 30 years of wildly successful progress that led to microwaves and MRIs and the Internet and all these other things. and so we have to keep in mind that we know the process is inefficient

when we don't exactly know what we're looking for so it's a problem that we're having this sort of purifying selection where we're forcing people to say the applications before they really know what they're going to find One of the things I like about your book is we just meet all these people

put aside Tiger Woods and Roger Federer, in your research all of these people you just touched on something from one of my favorite people in the book Arturo Casadevall, who's the science, who talks, you know, speaks to that and talks about the very nature of, you know, sort of pushing boundaries is that you're out there, you're probing, you're not really sure what you're going to find. And by definition, it's an inefficient process.

Yeah, Arturo is one of the most prominent immunologists in the world. So if specialization continues, he wins no matter what happens, basically. He has no problem getting funding, But he decided to leave sort of a cushy post in New York to go to Johns Hopkins School of Public Health because they were allowing him to start a new education program where he's essentially trying to de-specialize the training of future scientists. Because he's saying, look, he arrived and showed this graph where he said the rate of retractions of science, the acceleration is now outpacing the rate of new publications. So if we continue this trend, we will have retracted all of science in a couple of years. And so sort of science gallows humor, right? But there is this retraction problem now where we're recognizing there's been a lot of bad work.

And by the way, I contributed to that bad work. So I have a master's degree in science and only as an investigative reporter writing about how science works did I realize that I too committed statistical malpractice of the variety he's talking about because I was rushed into, not purposely, I was rushed into very didactic specialized material

about Arctic plant physiology before I knew how my statistical tools worked. And you can get these big databases, hit a button to run this incredibly complicated statistic, to say, statistically significant, master's degree. And this research is still published. And it's crazy that only later did I learn how scientific thinking is supposed to work.

And so we're having this problem. So he's trying to de-specialize the research and get people to sort of think more broadly. He described science as becoming a system of parallel trenches where everyone's in their own trench and not standing up to look over in the next trench, even though that's often where their solution is. And there's all these perverse effects,

Like, women are much more likely to write grants for interdisciplinary proposals, but interdisciplinary proposals are systematically marked down because they always go to one discipline or the other, and so they're less likely to get funded. So we're kind of like, but the world is interdisciplinary. Disciplines are a necessary evil for breaking down how we study, and so we're docking people who are asking questions about how the world really is. Well, and one of the things you get at is, you know, sort of, and Arturo does it with science. We've seen it in the military where basically leaders are trying to figure out what's the best way to mentor people, what's the best way to educate people, and along the way they find out, oh, we've been doing it wrong. Not only have we achieved short-term success in education, we've deluded ourselves into thinking, well, pat ourselves on the back, everything's fine. And, in fact, we've set those people back. Yeah, that gets to some themes in the book.

So they can jump into that one in a couple of places. But one of the themes to me was that there are things you can do that cause the most rapid immediate progress that systematically undermine long-term development. So I'm going to use that cue to get into one of the studies that was the most surprising to me in the book, which was done at the U.S. Air Force Academy, that you could never set up.

Like they have this amazing scenario where they bring in their freshman class, you know, whatever, 1,000 students or whatever it is. And they have to all take a sequence of three math courses, start Calculus 1, Calculus 2, and then a follow-on course. And they are randomized to professors for Calculus 1, then they are randomized to the next course, and then re-randomized again to the next course. So you can really see the impact of teaching,

and that's what these researchers wanted to see. And what they found was that the teachers who were the best at promoting contemporaneous overachievement compared to the characteristics that the students came in with in Calculus 1, those students then systematically underperformed in the follow-on courses. So the teacher whose students performed

sixth best out of 100 in his Calculus 1, got the seventh best ratings because the kids feel like they're learning, they rate them higher, was dead last in how his students then did in the follow-on courses. And it turned out that professors whose students did the best contemporaneously were teaching

a very narrow curriculum, and their students were learning so-called using procedures knowledge that they could execute when the test came but when you get into a different class and you're facing different stuff breadth of training predicts breadth of transfer you don't have those broader conceptual models and so you don't have what's called making connections knowledge which is the broader frames where you learn how to match a strategy to a type of problem instead of just executing procedures so it's really deceptive right because the learners rate their learning is faster they rate the professors as better they do better and then

in the long run, they're undermined, which is deeply counterintuitive to me. Coming up, David weighs in on travel sports, lessons from Norway, and the problem with grit. Stay right here. You're listening to Motley Fool Money. When it comes to finding candidates that are truly meant for your business, urgency can actually be your enemy. And that's why LinkedIn is the best place to post your job.

LinkedIn Jobs screens candidates with the hard and soft skills that you're looking for. things like collaboration, adaptability, creativity. LinkedIn looks beyond the work skills and puts your job post in front of qualified candidates who match your business requirements perfectly. Visit linkedin.com slash fool to get $50 off your first job post. Again, that's linkedin.com slash fool. Terms and conditions apply. Welcome back to Motley Fool money i'm chris hill this week we're sharing my recent conversation in front of a live audience with david epstein author of the new book range why generalist triumph in a specialized world so in terms of business um and leadership and one of the things i think uh you touched on in the

book was had to do with sort of like uh maybe using linkedin to figure out how you know how do people get promoted? It really does seem like the people who have the widest breadth of experience, they're the ones most likely to move on. I should say, we absolutely need specialists. I don't want to denigrate specialists.

I like Freeman Dyson, the mathematician and physicist and writer's framing of it, where he said, we need frogs and birds. The frogs are down in the mud looking at all the little details. The birds are up above. They don't see those details, but they can integrate the work of the frogs. He said, we need both for a healthy ecosystem.

The problem is we're telling everyone to be frogs and we're not telling anyone to be birds. And the LinkedIn research you're referring to, they were looking at, they looked at about a half million members because they have these amazing database. What are the best predictors of someone who goes on to become an executive?

And one of the best predictors was the number of different job functions that an individual has worked across in their industry. And their chief economist thinks that's because they get this much more holistic view of the industry. Each additional job function saved them about three years of experience in moving toward the C-suite.

And that kind of resonated with me because I sort of saw that as I was visiting different companies. I know it's only been out for a week or so, but I'm curious, what's been the reaction that you've gotten from, not necessarily from readers, who I'm sure are enjoying the book,

but to the extent that you've heard from communities or leaders, whether it's in industry or youth sports or something else? Yeah, more positive than I expected, and maybe that's because the blowback part takes a little longer. But this book got out of the gate faster than my last one did. And the last one, there was a lot of pushback about the 10,000-hour rule stuff.

Helpfully, this time, Malcolm Gladwell and I were recently at a conference in March, the same one where we first did the debate. And this is on YouTube. In a minute 54, he says, I now believe I conflated two ideas, the idea that it takes a lot of practice to get good at something with the idea that in order to become good at X, you should do only X, X and only X, starting as early as possible. And I thought that was a very astute thing for him to say,

And I think that might have softened some of the blow a little bit for me. But it really has been interesting to hear people identify with it and some of the executives. So I started getting invited to some business things, and the executives would tell me, like, this really resonates. And some of, okay, and one, so I just met a woman who was the head of executive search for a really big company. And she, this really resonated with her. And she was telling me, I think, in the age of LinkedIn, for all its good things, we are getting too narrow in describing our job functions.

Because if you look at research on serial innovators, for example, this woman, Abby Griffin, whose research is in range, she says to HR people, you have to keep it broad because the serial innovators, they often zigzag, they've had other domain experience, they have a wide range of interests, they tend to have hobbies, they read a lot, they need to communicate with people outside their domain.

And when you define the job too narrowly, you accidentally screen them out. And so some of the people who do sort of executive search, apparently that's resonated with them because they've sort of reached out to me and said, we are increasingly making this square hole and we have the square peg we want to fit it, but those aren't necessarily actually the people

who are set up to make the biggest contributions. I've actually experienced that on LinkedIn because I host a radio show and a podcast and that's what I list on LinkedIn. And once a month I get an email from LinkedIn and it's, here are some jobs you might be interested in. And all of them are host jobs, but it's like at a restaurant.

And I'm like, maybe I need to do a better job of getting across what I actually do because... Well, that would be a transfer of skill. It would be a transfer of skill. You know what? I'm too specialized. I should branch out and do that sort of thing. Coming up, David weighs in on travel sports, lessons from Norway, and the problem with grit.

Stay right here. You're listening to Motley Fool Money. Welcome back to Motley Fool Money. I'm Chris Hill. Let's get back to my recent interview with David Epstein about his latest best-selling book, Range, Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. Let me stick with the reaction for a second because we've certainly seen this in the world of business and investing where essentially some group of people

is pounding the table looking for data. They get the data and they don't like what they see and they reject it. I think the blowback that's probably coming your way is from soccer parents because there's no way to read this book and think if you're a

well-meaning parent who has and soccer is huge as you know in the DC area, if you're a well-meaning parent and your kid's interested in soccer and pretty good and they're 10, 11, 12, whatever like that, there's no way to read this book and come away thinking, oh yeah this is great, this is perfect for

my kid. Yeah, and a couple things you mentioned I want to touch on. One, with soccer parents, yes, there's some pushback. So at first, I thought this sampling period and delayed specialization in sports would just be talent selection issue, because when you can delay your selection, you're more likely to get fit with the right thing, improve your match quality, whereas, like, I was just

looking at the European Junior Soccer Championships, and 47% of the participants were born January, February, March, because when they're selected young, it's just for who was born earlier in the selection year, so, and then they won't make it all the way, so that happens. Germany did a study of some of their top youth players

and they match them for skill at certain ages and then track them over the next couple of years and it turns out the ones who do more unstructured play and diversify do better by time too and eventually you have to focus but not during that developmental period. So there is some pushback about that and one of the problems with the U.S. in sport development

is everyone should go watch the Norwegian HBO Real Sports on Norway. I watched that last week, it was amazing. Yeah, because they exploded the Winter Olympics and they've basically taken out competition in youth leagues from other youth sports, whereas we have the largest number of athletes in basically every sport that people have heard of

in the world, so we can be really inefficient and like our college system we have more athletes in most sports than the rest of the world combined because of our college system who are young adults, so we can afford to have bad development and still get people coming through the pipeline, so we'll probably do okay if we still have a lot of people playing, but

I think there are actually good forces at work in youth soccer in the US, it'll just be slow. Just to add a little bit of context on the HBO Real Sports about Norway, this is in the wake of Norway winning more medals at the Winter Olympics last year than any country has ever won. And I love the fact that the way

that the government is funding youth sports is through sports gambling. But they basically just said, you know, the two quotes that stuck out to me were someone saying, yeah, the conversation that America is having right now about sports gambling, Norway had that years ago and decided what to do. And the other quote is someone saying,

yeah, our approach in Norway is essentially to look at how the United States approaches youth sports, and we do the complete opposite. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because they have to be efficient. They can't afford to burn a ton of people like we can. And that's interesting about sports gambling. Not that I'm an expert in that,

but it reminds me of this guy I like to follow, Josh Wolf at Lux Capital, who always talks about, you know, he looks for when a directional arrow is kind of going in one direction, right? Like, privacy is basically, like, not coming back fully. And sports gambling seems like that to me, where it's like there are all these obstacles, but it seems to me like it's only going in one direction.

And so, like, why not make it productive and help it go in that direction productively? That's just my opinion. So we talked a little bit about what we should look for in leadership. For people who are either in the position of mentoring someone at work, managing people at work, or hiring,

what can we glean from being a generalist so that we can both be better at hiring but also be better at mentoring and managing the people on our team? Yeah, and I think a lot of the people I talk about in the book, it wasn't sort of like the Renaissance was like, I'm going to be a Renaissance man. They became generalists because they zigzagged in search of that match quality, that term that economists use to describe the degree of fit

between individuals' abilities and interests in the work they do. And so they sort of arrived where they were with this diversity of skills and interests. And the model I like to keep in mind for mentoring is something I mentioned sort of only briefly, but the Army's program they started called Talent-Based Branching, where they realized with the growth of the knowledge economy,

they were, like, hemorrhaging their most talented officers. So the more likely they were to give an officer a scholarship to West Point, or four years ROTC, three years, two years, et cetera, the more likely that officer was to leave on the day that they could get out, basically. And to the point where a general suggested defunding West Point because it's an institution

that taught its cadets to get out of the army. Which of course it didn't, right? But with the rise of the knowledge economy, they could move laterally. They could take these skills and just move laterally as opposed to sort of what they call in this Army Strategic Studies Institute study that I mentioned, the company man era

where you faced more repetitive challenges and just sort of went up or out. And so first they tried to throw money at those high potential people to keep them and the ones who were going to stay took it and the ones who were going to leave left anyway and that was a half billion dollars. And then they started something called talent-based branching, where instead of saying, here's your career path, go up or out,

they assign someone a coach, and they say, here's a bunch of possible career paths, try a couple. Your coach will then help you reflect on whether these fit your, you know, your interests well and your abilities, and then we'll keep zigzagging in search of that better match quality. And that's had much better retention value and optimizing performance because match quality is really important for your motivation and your performance, or as one of the

researchers I quote says, when you get fit it will look like grit, because it turns out when people get a good fit they work a lot harder and so I think that conceptually that role of sort of the coach who helps reflection as you get this sampling period is a really important and powerful thing that I would frankly love to have

in my own life. You mentioned grit and that's another thing in the book is sort of like rethinking the idea of grit as being this inherently great quality that we should embrace at all times. Yeah, and I want to say

some of the critique I took of Grit came right out of the papers from Angela Duckworth and her colleagues. So I think they were quite fair in a lot of their papers about the limitations of what they were doing, but lost in translation, as is often the case. So Grit, you've probably heard of it.

It's a psychological construct. You take a survey, half the points are awarded for resilience and half the points for consistency of interests. And the most famous study was on actually West Point cadets who were going through the six-week orientation called Beast Barracks.

And grit turned out to be a better predictor of who would make it through than were the more traditional measures. Most of them made it through anyway. Not very many quit. But that's great. But then you fast forward to, you know, West Point funds those people

because they want them to stay 20 years. And yet half of them are leaving basically the day they're allowed. And is that because they lost their grit? No, it's because the fastest time of personality change in your whole life is 18 to your late 20s. and sometimes you develop new interests and they gain these skills and they see they can

do other stuff in the rest of the world. And that's not a problem of grit. That's a problem of match quality, which is why they started the talent-based branching. And the way that people optimize their match quality is by trying a bunch of things, getting as much signal as possible, and quitting until they get to a better spot. So I think the sort of deification of not quitting for the sake of not quitting should not be extrapolated from a study that pre-selected people with a six-week goal that they already had. You don't want to extrapolate that to the rest of the world. And they say that in their studies. And in fact, the day before my book came out, or two days before my book came out, Angela

Duckworth's newsletter was called Summer is for Sampling. And she said, take the summer to try a bunch of new stuff. Of course you shouldn't stick with something before you know what you're doing. That's not what I did in my career. I sampled before getting gritty. So to the extent that grit means work hard when it makes sense, I'm totally on board with that. I'm curious about how you go about your research, and in particular, how we as investors can not accept something at face value. Everybody loves a great story,

but in a lot of ways we're using the wrong stories. And so to the extent that we come across a business leader or a company that has a great story attached to it, where should we be looking to sort of poke holes in the infallibility of what we see? I mean, I think stories are important, and especially in the communication area we're in now where you can see it's essential for a leader

to weave an important story that draws people onto their team and motivates them. And one of the inventors I talk about in the book, a woman named Jayshree Seth, who keeps going away from her actual academic training, and that leaves her in the position where she has to interview other experts, what she calls her mosaic building process.

And if she builds a good question, those people are drawn onto her team, and she became one of the most prominent inventors at 3M through doing that. So it's important to build those stories. That said, I think we should be cognizant of something people here might be familiar with, what Kahneman

and Tversky called the inside view, which means you're focusing on the details of a particular scenario, the internal details of a situation. And when you do that, whether you're looking at an investment you're going to make or a type of leader, whatever scenario you investigate more deeply, you will become more convinced of. So if you're

saying, you know, this or that will happen with this investment, as you investigate one scenario, you'll increasingly find it to be likely, whether that's which racehorse will win, you know, which leader will succeed, or which politician will win. to the point where in studies when people have to investigate multiple scenarios deeply, they'll end up adding up the probabilities

in one situation to over 100%, because they get more and more convinced of things that they're investigating. So I think you need to realize that you should start with sort of a scientific mindset of actually trying to falsify your ideas and make sure you're investigating whatever the opposite is.

Because especially with Google, right, you shouldn't be typing in, searching for the answer you think is right, right? So as simple as it is, when I want to spellcheck, like, a name or something in my manuscript, I don't type in how I think it's right. I type it in purposely wrong and look to see the corrections

basically. So I think we need to be cognizant of that inside view where you get sucked into the internal details and you should actually zoom out, look for other analogous scenarios to what sort of usually happens and start by trying to falsify your own beliefs. Both of my books have turned out very differently than my book proposals

and I think that's in large part because I end up falsifying some of my own beliefs and the only way to do that is to start out with that in mind, because if you don't start out with that in mind, it's definitely not going to happen. Coming up, a few thoughts on parenting and advice for recent graduates. This is Motley Fool Money. If you don't know your numbers, you don't know your business. And the problem that growing businesses have that keeps them from knowing their numbers is the patchwork quilt of business

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can find it at netsuite.com slash fool. That's netsuite.com slash fool to download your free guide, Seven Key Strategies to Grow Your Profits. Go to netsuite.com slash fool. I've got $2 in the jukebox, $5 in a bottle. Welcome back to Motley Fool Money. I'm Chris Hill. We're sharing my recent conversation in front of a live audience with bestselling author, David Epstein. One more thing about sort of your work process, because I was reminded when I was reading your book of the great quote from Lorne Michaels, the creator of Saturday Night Live, where he was asked one time about, you know, how do you know when the show is ready? And he replied, well, we don't go on because the show is ready. We go on because it's 1130 on Saturday night.

and it's clear that you love to research stuff and I'm curious if you hand it in the manuscript because you felt it was ready or did you hand it in because it was 1130 on Saturday night that's a good question the three questions I get the most about book writing and are are you going on tour do you get royalties and how long did it take to write none of which have anything to do with like the content of the book, of course. But after my first book, it was kind of a blur, so I asked my wife, you know, what did I do? And she said, you went upstairs and came back two years later. And so, but the process for my books, both in the first year, my goal

is to try to read ten studies a day, every day for the first year, if I can. Well, and I should mention that, since you mentioned your wife, I should mention that, so when I first knew that I was going to be sitting down with you, I remember thinking, oh, that's the guy who Malcolm Gladwell probably wants to punch in the mouth because he poked holes in the 10,000 Hours thing. And I was delighted to see that, you know, one of the quotes on the back of the book, Malcolm Gladwell, for reasons I cannot explain, David Epstein manages to make me thoroughly enjoy the experience of being told that everything I thought about something was wrong. I loved range. And I think he might have tweeted that out, and I saw on Twitter that your wife responded, oh, I felt the same way on our first date. So that's...

Yeah, that was the last time that happened. But yeah, he's a super open-minded guy, because I had interactions with other 10,000 Hours authors who were not that open-minded. Like, if you're going to write about science, something you're writing about is wrong. You just don't know what it is yet. And I'm sure I will at some point.

But if you're too attached to those ideas, I mean, that goes against everything that the foxes, the best thinkers, the people with the best judgment in Chapter 10, what makes them good at judging the trends in the world? And so I think I would not at all be living by, you know, the things I write if I were dogmatically stuck to everything I write. And I think he's been a great model for me in that sense, to be honest. and instead of viewing our back and forth as zero-sum,

I think he viewed it as something where we could both learn, and to me that's kind of a model that could be used in more situations today. Before we get to audience questions, congratulations, I understand you and your wife are recently new parents. Thank you. So fantastic.

Thank you. Now that you, how's the sleep deprivation, by the way? I'm going to be honest. given my work process, and I went to there's a mom's group that my wife's in and then we had Dad's Day where you come and the guys are like, you know, horrible, and I'm like

you know what? My life has been easier with a newborn but not trying to finish a book than it was trying to finish a book without a newborn. So I think those were the people who really wanted to punch me in the face. So now you have this new role, this new title and I'm

assuming that you are now seeing the world through the eyes of a new parent you were an athlete in college how are you going to manage and navigate the world of youth sports

among other things we'll get to education in a second but one of my friends who was a winter olympic gold medalist said he keeps saying I know this is just your plan to like reduce the competition while you make your kid the tiger woods a blockchain. And I'm like, hmm, maybe that's not a bad idea. But I think my approach, so I started college as a walk-on and left as a university record holder in track and field,

but I played football, basketball, baseball, all this other stuff first, and the fact is I started to realize that there was a commonality in the part I was good at, which was the running for a long time part. And so that was very much talent-based branching for me, where I got to try all this different stuff. Big surprise, I didn't make it to the NBA. But I started to get signals about my talents, what they were. And that was a really important thing for me. And so I think my role as a parent will be to be that coach in the talent-based branching system where you make a lot of opportunities available and expose him to a lot of things.

And I don't want to prescribe diversification any more than I want to prescribe specialization. But to make sure that when he tries these things, I help him reflect on it and get the maximum possible signal. Because that's one of the characteristics of so-called self-regulatory learners, the people who learn about their own skills and weaknesses. They evaluate themselves more objectively compared to, like, how their bosses would evaluate them than most people do, is they spend a lot of time reflecting after they do stuff. So I think my job will be to facilitate that reflection for him. And also, I'm utterly unworried about missing the next Tiger Woods or Mozart or whatever, not only because those are incredibly rare, but in both cases, I think we tell those stories a little wrong. Like, Tiger said in 2000, my father never asked me to play golf. I always was bugging him to play golf.

It's the child's interest that matters. And then his father facilitated all these opportunities. Same with Mozart. There are some letters I was going through where it becomes clear that the first time he wants to play with musicians who come over, he wants to play violin. His father's like, you haven't any lessons. Like, go away. And he starts crying. And so one of the other musicians goes in another room and says, I'll play with him to get him to stop crying.

And then they hear the – because he had been saying, I can play second violin. And they hear him playing it. And then they start, the musician says, little Wolfgang was emboldened by our applause to insist he could also play the first violin. And so, and doing it with all his made-up fingering. And so I'm not so worried about missing those opportunities. You know, I'll try to expose him to those things,

and if something catches on like that, then you react to the interest. But I'm not concerned that I'll miss that opportunity. It seems like a good segue into final question, which is, of course, this time of year, it's graduation season. so in the 45 to 60 seconds we have left what is your message to the graduating class of 2019 okay um my message the graduating class of 2019 congratulations thank your families

um start paying off your debt um uh oh wow no i think my advice would be to ignore the all the other commencement speech that you had at your other commencements or that your friends are getting, which amounts to picture who you want to be in 10 or 20 years and confidently march toward that and stay the course. As the investor Paul Graham has noted, there's a word for that in computer science. It's called premature optimization. You don't know who you're going to be. There's something called the end of history illusion that finds that we all recognize

we've changed a lot in the past and systematically underestimate how much we will change in the future. So you are a changing human, and the only way to learn about yourself is to keep sampling and zigzagging in search of match quality. So look at the opportunities in front of you today, take what's interesting now, and maybe a year from now you'll change because you'll have learned something about yourself and find something better. David Epstein.

David's book is Range, Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. It is available everywhere you find books. As always, people on the program may have interest in the stocks they talk about. The Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against, so don't buy or sell stocks based solely on what you hear. That's going to do it for this edition of Motley Fool Money. Our engineer is Steve Roido. Our producer is Mac Greer. I'm Chris Hill. We'll see you next week.