The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - 310: David Epstein - Why Generalists Will Rule The World

Episode Date: May 12, 2019

The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk #310: David Epstein Full show notes can be found at www.LearningLeader.com David Epstein is the author of the forthcoming Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World , and of the top 10 New York Times bestseller The Sports Gene. David has master's degrees in environmental science and journalism, and is reasonably sure he's the only person to have co-authored a paper in the journal of Arctic, Antarctic, and Alpine Research while a writer at Sports Illustrated.  David has given talks about performance science and the uses (and misuses) of data on five continents; his TED Talk has been viewed 7 million times, and was shared by Bill Gates. Notes: Leaders who sustain excellence = Voracious learners Voracious readers They attack obstacles Extremely interested in people and about themselves The Sports Gene Having great reflexes is a trained skill -- Pro baseball players cannot hit a pro softball pitcher because they have not trained their reflexes to understand the arm angle (Albert Puhols could not hit Jenny Finch even though she throws slower than the average MLB pitcher) "Chunking" is what world class athletes or chess-masters do.  They pick up on cues from the person's body (or the board) and that helps them make quicker decisions -- Ex:  A baseball player understands/learns the cues of a pitcher and what pitch is coming and at what velocity Sports is a "kind learning environment."  It is more black and white than the business world.  In order to translate this to the business world, try to create a kinder learning environment.  Need as much information available as possible. Create an environment where feedback is happening on a regular basis The business world is not as kind of a learning environment The "annual review" is a horrible way to run a business.  Feedback should be happening on a regular basis... Daily. Bill Campbell would go to the meetings of the leaders he coached and gave immediate feedback. Create a feedback loop for yourself from mentors/people you trust "Everyone needs a coach" -- David regularly takes writing courses to stay sharp and learn David's writing process: The first year = Read 10 scientific papers per day.  He reads a TON Advantage David has created = An expansive search function Have a "master thought list" -- Storyboard, shift scenes around He did film editing as a form of cross training for writing a book and becoming a great storyteller 29 of 32 NFL first round draft picks in the 2017 draft played multiple sports.  Cross training is critical for long term success David debated Malcolm Gladwell on stage in front of a huge audience and changed Malcolm's mind.  Watch here. Athletes that delay specialization excel more than those that specializes (golf is the only exception to the rule) The most effective leaders are constantly updating their mental models It should be celebrated when someone changes their mind because better evidence has surfaced Darwin changed his mind Lincoln changed his mind A 'deliberate amateur' = Someone who loves an activity.  "I don't do research, I do search." It's a constant experimentation to learn In a LinkedIn study, the results of a review of all profiles of people who made it to the C-Suite = Went to a Top 5 Business School "The single most important factor is they worked in different functions within a company."  They were generalists. The people who make the most impact with number of patents filed work across classes.  They are wide ranging generalists. Sales is a great entry point for any business -- Learning marketing and sales will benefit you in every job you will ever have "Take your skills and apply them to a problem where those skills aren't being used." People underestimate how much the world will change -- Must be able to adapt and learn "We learn who we are in practice, not in theory."  -- Take action.  Do the work. Work to accumulate experiences Try something, go all in on the thing you are doing in that moment.  100% focus.  Invest everything you have in it. Then reflect on it -- "We learn in moments of reflection." "When you're 23, don't worry about getting ahead, get information about yourself.  Focus on learning." Use the "Get To Know You Document" Why joining The Learning Leader Circle is a good idea

The single most important factor was the number of different functions they had worked across in their industry. So for every different function they took on in their industry, they saved themselves three years in their progression to the C-suite. And I think we tend not to like switching functions because we gravitate toward comfort and being able to sort of automate our tasks. So it's less cognitive load to do decision-making and all those things. But I think what the research is saying is that these people who go exploring, and constantly challenging themselves. They figure out more about what they're interested in, and they also get this more well-rounded view

of the kind of work they have to do. Welcome to the Learning Leaders Show. I am Ryan Hawk. Thank you so much for being here. Text learners to 4-4-222 in order to join tens of thousands of learning leaders from all over the world. Receive Mindful Monday updates

every Monday morning 9 o'clock Eastern. Some of the things that I'm reading, watching, thinking about, as well as the tales to become part of my book launch team, text learners to 44222. Now on tonight's featured leader, it's David Epstein, New York Times, best-selling writer of the sports gene, translated in 21 languages, bought and read and recommended by President Barack Obama and Condoleezza Rice. Also, an incredible TED Talk viewed over 7 million times shared and recommended by Bill

Gates. A few of the topics we discussed what it means to be a deliberate amateur and why this is the optimal mode of operation for you. Then the importance of cross-training in the business world. Why and how you can do this. Then David shares the research behind the single most important factor in earning regular promotions in your career. And a lot of this comes from his latest book titled Range, Why Generalist Triumph in a Specialized World, so good with David Epstein. All right, here we go, David Epstein. So great to have you here on The Learning Leaders Show. Welcome. It's my pleasure. Thanks for having me. I'm curious, David. So I'm fascinated by your background and your work. I've pretty much read it all and watched your videos online. But thinking about

leaders specifically who sustain excellence, I'm curious from your perspective, what do you found to be the commonalities among those who sustain excellence? Yeah, that's a great question and a tough question because I think there are a lot of different ways to get to excellence. But one thing that sort of jumped out at me is voracious learning. And in fact, voracious reading, to be quite honest, like when I wrote the sports gene, I most certainly did not expect, for example, the business community to be part of the readership, and in fact, they turned out to be probably the main readership. And that was a real surprise to me, but it started to make more sense as I got invited

sort of to some of the performance-oriented business conferences and started to realize that these people who are constantly trying to self-improve and learn something different and gain an advantage or just improve themselves, say, hey, I'm interested in performance, I'm interested in approaching problems, I'm interested in attacking obstacles. and I don't care if this tidbit is coming from a chef, a pilot, a midwife, or a computer programmer. I want to know how they approach their problems and think about their problems. And I think that leads them to be voraciously interested in people, massively well-read in a way that I didn't even expect. And so that just seems to be this sort of common characteristic.

And I think it makes some sense to me because I think not only do they keep learning about what they're doing, but also about them themselves. You know, I've written a little bit about the so-called end-of-history illusion that we all realize we've changed a lot in the past, but underestimate how much will change in the future. And I think the reality of that means that if we are not really constantly voraciously learning, if we're treating ourselves like a finished product, you're going to be surprised by the future. And so I think this sort of constant, voracious desire to read and learn is something that has really struck me when I've interacted with those types of people. The sports team came out five, around five years ago. Six years. Six years after my agent told me not to let it be five years before I have another book. Oh, the paperback came out five years ago.

I apologize. Yeah. Yeah. I'm looking at the paperback here online. Interesting because that work really caught my eye because you mentioned the business community picked it up. So that's a part of the community that I'm in now. But my past is a part of the sports community played sports, all sports growing up. and eventually specialized, which we're going to talk about here in a second,

playing football when I went to college, and then after college for a little bit. And so since we're here, I'd like to talk about it briefly before we get into your next piece of work. But the book is called The Sports Gene Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance. And from your studying that, you look at somebody like Serena Williams or Usain Bolt or Michael Phelps and how he, someone say has the perfect body built to be an Olympic swimmer who wins a hundred gold medals. What did you learn during your research when you find these world-class athletes? What was the difference or perhaps not between them and a regular person? So there are for sure, you mentioned the Phelps body, there are for sure differences, right?

Like, for example, one of the things I mentioned is that because we've had this sort of artificial selection that has proceeded in elite athletics where a century ago, one of the examples I like to use is that there was this idea that the average body type was the best for all athletic endeavors. And this came out of this sort of German sports scientist at the time had an agenda about the perfect form of man. That was this phrase I kept seeing when I had some of their their old journals translated. And so athletes in most sports were approximately the same size because this idea was that it would be the best for everything. And, That's totally different now. Right now athletes have exploded into different areas, right?

The tall athletes, basketball players have gotten taller. Female gymnasts have shrunk from 5 foot 3 to 4 foot 9 over the last 30 years because it's more helpful. And Phelps, as I've mentioned, has, he's something like seven inches taller than the guy who holds the world record in the mile, but they wear the same length pants because you want sort of a different physique for their endeavors. That said, the fuss that is always made on TV about how I. Phelps is, like he's a fish and he can barely walk on land, his body's so weird, is overblown. It's not that unique among elite swimmers there. He does not stand apart among unique swimmers. So while you need these prerequisites, I think the bar for entry to the elite level in sports,

more people are eliminated by their genetics and physiology and their access to training than ever before, right? As it gets more competitive and there's more sorting of the right body types, you need more of all of that before. And I think what I learned is that a lot of things, you know, there were things that you need these sort of, it's a big advantage to have certain body characteristics. But other things that I thought would be very much under genetic control, like the reflexes to hit 100 mile per hour fastball, which is something I meant to talk about in the sports gene, turn out not to be under genetic control basically at all. And other things that I thought would be, have nothing to do with genetics, like the feeling of reinforcement you get from training. physically have important genetic components.

So really, my intuition about elite athletes was countered, you know, was running in the wrong direction to what the research showed in many areas. What do you mean? Can you talk me more about that? The reflexes part with Jenny Finch as a pitcher to Albert Pooholz was a fascinating story, basically to long story short, these guys, major league players had no chance against a world-class softball pitcher, primarily because that they're used to hitting a, from a different, I guess you could say, angle from where the pitch is coming.

And it's almost some of the thin slicing that maybe Malcolm Gladwell talks about, that these guys get used to it. And same way with chess players and others. Can you expand more on what that's all about and how that is a developed skill? Yeah, so this is a skill called chunking, essentially. So the reason these baseball players, and this came out of just my own questions from watching sports, right? As I saw a softball player striking out major league hitters and just did a quick, like, back of the envelope calculation said, okay, she's throwing 60 miles per hour from 43 feet away.

That takes longer to get there than the 90 mile an hour fastballs they're facing from 60 feet and six inches. So why can they not even hit a foul ball? And it turns out that their reflexes are no faster, you know, Major League Baseball hitters are no faster than normal people. Albert Pujol scored in like the 66 or 67th percentile compared to a random selection of college students. So he did worse than me. And so it's 200 milliseconds is about the minimum reaction time. That's a fifth of a second. That's the time it takes just to see that a ball's in flight for that information to cross the synapses to the back of your brain. And for you to initiate muscular action, not to do something, just to initiate muscular action.

And that's half the total flight time of the pitch. So if you're actually waiting to react, it's way too slow. Not only that, but, you know, we tell everyone tells kids keep their eye on the ball in Little League. It's like we actually don't have a visual system that's capable of tracking an object as it's anchored. position changes that rapidly as it gets close to your face. So that advice to keep your eye on the ball is nonsense. You actually can't do it. Those kids could close their eyes once the ball were halfway in. If it weren't psychologically upsetting, it would make no difference to their performance. And so the way these athletes are able to overcome these apparent biological limitations,

and same thing for speed of tennis serves, is by picking up cues from the pitcher's body, right, the movements of the torso, rotation of the shoulder, the flicker of the pitch, which is the flashing pattern that the seams make when the ball spins. And they group it into what sports scientists call a chunk that's like one signal of information that says, ball's going here, there, swing or don't swing. And they have to make that processing decision as soon as the ball's released because otherwise it's way too slow. So when you replace the baseball pitcher with a softball pitcher who has different rotation of

the torso, different movement of the arm, different spin of the ball, they are stripped of these learned perceptual signals that allow them to basically see the future. and suddenly they are useless. Suddenly they are like, you know, good hardware with the wrong software. And it doesn't work for the problem. So really, they're just learning to pick up on these signals that allow them to see the future and make it apparently as if they are just reacting fast. How does this, it's fascinating, man. How does this relate to, let's say somebody who is a mid-level manager works in an office setting for a big company?

and they're trying to get better at understanding a room, social dynamics of people. How can a person listening who has a role like that develop or be more conscious and intentional about developing skills to read people, to understand others? Is there advice you would give to them that you could poll maybe from the sports gene that a world-class athlete does, whether they see the way a tennis player is getting ready to serve, that that could then translate into the business world? That's an interesting question you ask because it does and it doesn't. And in some ways, and this gets into some things I talk about in range anyway. So one thing about a lot of sports is that they are what psychologists call kind learning

environments. And so if you look at the spectrum from kind to wicked learning environments and different sports are at different points in the spectrum, but a very kind learning environment, is where all of the information is available. It's on the table. You can see all the information. And when you do something, the feedback you get is both immediate and perfectly accurate. So we can think about something like golf or shooting a free throw, whatever.

You shoot the ball. You see exactly what happens. It goes too far in one direction. You can adjust and try again. And in kind learning environments, by being cognitively engaged and repeating, you will get better. So that's something you want to do. You want to put yourself in these situations. and be cognitively engaged, right?

Not just swinging like at a driving range and not really thinking about it, but actually looking at the feedback at what you're doing and being in a realistic situation. Because like, right, you don't, the signals that you get from hitting off a T are not the same that you get from the real situation, the ones that you actually need to pick up. And so you want to put yourself in this real situation. But one of the difficulties, I think, in a business setting is it's not nearly as kind of a learning environment because the feedback is, it may be nonexistent. really. It may be delayed. It may be inaccurate. So I think the most important thing in that world

where you're dealing with more open problems is to try to make that learning environment a little more kind by making sure you get some feedback after you're in that situation, whether that's approaching people to find out if they interpreted things the same way you did, stopping to reflect on how things went and what you tried and sort of experimenting again. So after working on range, I keep what I call a book of experiments because self-regulatory learners stopped to reflect on the things they try and it makes them more aware of how they're doing. So I think you want to try to make your world a little more sports-like by making sure you're setting up feedback systems, whereas those are easy to have in sports. Like sports has this built-in obvious feedback

systems, but you don't get them in most of the rest of the world, so you sort of have to try to build them. And I think that's incredibly important, especially in an area where we're oriented toward like the annual review of whatever you're doing, right? Everything about cognitive psychology of learning suggests that that is nonsensical for learning. It might be okay for hiring and promotion or whatever you have to do. If you want to put someone on a performance improvement plan, you have to give them an annual review. But as far as actually making them better, delaying feedback like that is horrific. You need to set up immediate feedback systems if you want their learning environment to be more kind and for them to be able to start to pick up on these kinds of patterns that give them

better judgment. Sorry, that was a long answer, but it gets something that, like, It bothers me because we know so much about helping people learn and we don't really implement it. Well, another book I'm reading at the same time as Range, your latest book, is called Trillion Dollar Coach. It's about Bill Campbell. You may have heard of them. Bill was famous for coaching some of the most successful leaders in Silicon Valley and abroad. And also it hits on Anders Erickson's original research when it comes to purposeful practice. And purposeful practice is not just the 10,000 hour rule that Malcolm Gladwell.

talks about. It's, in addition to that, having a regular feedback loop from a master. So if you're hitting golf balls, you have a golf pro with you, able to give you feedback after every single swing, right? And one of the things that Bill Campbell did when he was coaching these Silicon Valley leaders, he would actually go to their meetings and sit in with the person that he was coaching in order to give that person feedback after their meeting. So for example, one of the, one of the developmental areas was, I need to be better at least. leading a team meeting, right? Most managers do. Most people listening lead meetings and are a part of meetings and most meetings are really bad. And so he, he would say, well, I'm going to come with you.

And then would be able to provide direct specific meaningful feedback every single time. And that's why his people, that was one of the things. That's why the people that he coached improved in some cases dramatically, very quickly because they had a regular feedback loop in place. Right. And how simple is this stuff? Right. So that's why one of the reasons I sort of start range very early on discussing this spectrum from kind to wicked learning environments is because it applies to everything. And coaching, I think coaching is just, you know, it's so native to sports, but it can help everywhere. Yeah. Not because you need to be told what to do because as you get to a higher level of performance, you know, especially in sports, but also other places, nobody can tell you exactly what to do anymore. What they can do is help you set up an environment where you learn about yourself and you kind of keep zigging and zagging and triangulating until you find the perfect environment for your own learning. And they eventually kind of hand you off to yourself and you become this autonomous learner. But that's like the big secret of coaching, right, is it makes a wicked learning environment a little bit more kind by setting up the kind of feedback mechanisms that we can take for granted in things like golf because they're just artificially built into the endeavor, basically.

David, what's interesting about this, I have a few one-on-one coaching clients that are leaders in business, and I don't really broadcasts that don't really seek out too many of those. But the guys, they're only guys currently. I'd rather not be that way. But currently, they're only guys. The guys that have reached out and asked me to play this role for them, to me, none of them need it. It doesn't seem like it at least. They're very successful. Businesses are run extremely well. Yet, I find it's, it's, it's, interesting that those are the ones who say, no, I really do need it. And here's why it's helping me. And the ones who don't think they need it are the ones who seem to the most. But what it comes down to is everybody. I mean, everybody needs the person or people in their life to provide that regular feedback loop. I completely agree. And that's that's about, I mean, I'll even like the kind of, you know, whatever, I guess the better, more established I've gotten as a writer, the more likely I am to like if I see a beginner's writing course near me to go take it and just like do the exercises in the class or whatever and see what the teacher has to say because you

start taking that stuff for granted right there's always something to learn and I'm I'm acutely aware of the fact you know from having done this research for range that we underestimate how much we will change and how much things will change around us and so I kind of proactively want to get into those those sort of feedback environments because I realize we have this cognitive bias of thinking we can get somewhere and be like, I'm a finished product. Now I can just, you know, sail on my skills. But in fact, we change more and the world change more around us than we think. So I think if you're not sort of having that agitated feeling of like I always need to be learning and changing, then you will slip backward by default because other things change more than we

basically anticipate. That, I can't help but ask as I'm in the, I just finished my first manuscript. And this book I read, I love your style of writing in both the books I've read. but particularly in range, why generalist triumph in a specialized world, which I want to dig into here in a second. But what was your process for putting it together? And then what does it literally look like when you're writing? What time you do it?

What is your desk or your couch or your library? Like what does it look like with your computer? Like how much is written by hand? What is it like for you? This is such a hard question. I asked my people started asking me this about the sports team. And it's like a hard thing to answer. Like, I wish somebody had been filming me not that I would go back and watch it.

So I asked my wife once. I'm like, what did I do again? And she said, you went upstairs and came back down two years later. I'm like, oh, okay, yeah, that, I mean, you know, it's, but I do guess I get obsessed with the project. So honestly, for me, and this is not necessarily advice by any stretch, but for both my books for the first year, I essentially don't write. For the first year, I try to read 10 scientific journal papers a day. every day for the first year. Most of those will never go into the book. But what I consider one of my advantages, I used to get mad at myself because I felt I was inefficient because I would end up

reading so much stuff. I would go down some rabbit hole from some one line and some study that I get interested in. And, you know, two weeks later, I resurfaced like, how the heck did I ever think that was going in a book? And I would get mad. I'd say, how could I be more efficient? But I've started to realize maybe this is self-serving, but maybe it's a little true also, that one of my advantages is I have this really expansive sort of search function, if you will, where I have to go through a lot of things that aren't going to turn out to be useful to find a whole bunch of things that are not obvious and that other people aren't finding. And that led to some of the coolest findings in range. But that's why I set aside this time. You know, there was a point in my career

when I was a senior writer at Sports Illustrated and the science writer there where I was comfortable and could kind of keep doing what I was doing and was churning out a fair number of articles and had to sort of make the decision, do I want to keep doing this, or do I want to find a way to take on these larger projects where I'm going to have to give up some of the other stuff I'm doing? And I don't even know if they'll be successful, but I have to kind of dive in and try to explore really widely and I decided to do that and you know I also got lucky and and the first book gave me freedom to then do what I wanted for the second book but that that's a really important part of my process this incredibly expansive search function and what what happens we're getting into

the since since a lot of the things you just asked me I almost am not even sure I mean I have an office in my home I don't really keep regular writing hours when I get stuck I go on a run and carry a pad with me and that often helps the things that I can tell you for sure that first year I try to do 10 journal articles a day. Two, I have a statistician that I kind of basically essentially keep on retainer so I can call any time I want to go over the statistics in a paper and make sure it's legitimate. And so I talk to him all the time. Three, I start this thing I call a master thought list where if I come across something interesting, I put it on the list just on a, you know, on a pages document and maybe I'll link a citation or a quote or whatever, a graph,

a picture. And as ideas sort of start coalescing, I'll move different tidbits on that sheet toward one another. And then as they, there are enough of them to be sort of a theme, I put on what I was called a tag above it. And I'll write a bunch of words that I think I would search on the document if I wanted to find this idea so that I can make it easily searchable. And then as those different tags start coalescing, I start moving like ones to other like ones. And pretty soon you almost have like a storyboard in a way, you know, like you would if you were making a film where you're just shuffling different scenes around, right? So like I think of writing very much as cutting film, which I had an experience with once that really helped my writing, right?

This is like, this is very, you know, I'm seeing everything through my range colored glasses, of course, but it's like the single most important experience for me in learning how to structure writing because my major challenge is how to structure information, how to organize information, not how to write the sentences, was doing some film editing where I partnered with a guy who had repetitive stress injury, and so he had to talk me through doing the editing for him. And I realized what happens is you get all this film, right, or which what reporters would call string, if you're a writer, you then cut it up into chunks where everything that you want to keep, everything that's between those chunks falls on the floor.

And then you just have to order those chunks, like note cards, so that one out point or the end of one section leaves a question that brings the person back to the next endpoint. And then you just shuffle those in the right order, and that's it. Right. And so people who are masters at this, like Wes Craven was, could take objectively stupid material and bring you back from commercial break because of the way he organized the out point and the way it makes you want to see that next endpoint. And so that's how I use chapters and section breaks in my book. And that sort of flows from this master thought list where I've sort of been coalescing ideas into groups and then shuffling them around like cards. That's that's probably the best, the most, because so much of the other stuff I do is kind of not that conscious. and different depending on the project. But those are a few things that I used for both books that I think were helpful. Well, what it says is it's not an accident when great work is produced. It's not an accident.

And you're very intentional and thoughtful, process-oriented. And a bit of cross-training is helpful. And I want to then bridge the gap between your first book and second book. And here's one stat I found that I think does it extremely well. I was looking at the first round draft picks in the 2017 NFL draft. There was 32 players selected. 29 of those players played multiple sports in high school. I am a huge believer in playing multiple sports.

Being a generalist as an athlete, I've found and seen that that is healthy to compete, to develop different skills. Being a shortstop and a pitcher made me a better quarterback. No doubt. I'm convinced I'm certain of it. And playing basketball as a point guard made me a better quarterback as well. and quarterback is what I end up getting a scholarship to do in college. And so when you see that 29 of the 32 players drafted in the first round, the NFL draft played multiple sports, and then

you hear these parents talk about specialization, getting a coach just for one sport starting at age six and doing that through high school with hopes of getting a scholarship, I think it's great to get a coach. But I also would say, instead of just practicing with a coach, you should be playing basketball or another sport in addition to the primary one that you think your kid, will whatever, excel at. And so that kind of is the gap between book one and book two. Now with Range, why Generalist Triumph in a specialized world, can you share maybe based off that story, then what led you to this one?

Yeah. So that's, you mentioned some great points there, which is the range obviously opens up with sports. And that grew, even though the book in many ways seems unrelated, it actually did grow out of the sports gene. This is how. After the sports scene came out and it kind of developed this audience that I didn't expect, I got invited to debate Malcolm Gladwell at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in 2014. And I never met him. And Darry's Conference. Exactly. Yep. And I invite the general manager of Houston Rockets. And I had never met Malcolm and I was petrified because he's so clever and I didn't want to get embarrassed. But, you know, I didn't know if he was going to like put his literary boot on my neck or whatever. And so. I, you know, like anything, driven by terror, I really did my homework. And I guessed that he was going

to argue, first of all, he and I have a lot more common ground than the 10,000 hours versus the sports gene the way it was set up. But of course, that's, you know, the setup for the debate, and it's on YouTube. He, I guessed that he was going to argue for the, you know, primacy of a head start in very technical training and whatever sport it is you want to succeed in. And so I treated that like a hypothesis and said, okay, if that's our hypothesis that this works and is the biggest advantage you can possibly have, then we know what the data should look like for athletes who go on to become elite. So let's see what it actually looks like. And I went and gathered up every study I could find that didn't just take a cross-sectional look at athletes and say, wow, they've practiced a lot. But that actually tracked them to see their developmental trajectory.

And it turned out that systematically the athletes who go on to become elite delayed. delay specialization compared to their peers who plateau at lower levels. And they do a wide variety of activities early on. They gain a breadth of general skills. They learn about their own abilities and interests. And they specialize later. They specialize eventually. But it's delayed.

And in fact, you mentioned playing multiple sports who made you better quarterback. In fact, it looks very much like language. Like people who grew up bilingual are then better able to learn another language, even a fake one, of scientists give them a fake one without being explicitly told how to learn it. And it looks very similar for sports. It equips you with sort of these underpinnings that allow you to more quickly take on new skills going forward. And I think there may be, so I called this the Roger versus Tiger problem in the debate where Tiger Woods, of course, is this epitome of early specialization. And his story is at the core of a half dozen bestsellers, not to mention a lot of other books,

that then say this is the model for everything. And what the data show is that that is actually a bad extrapolation. Golf is, in fact, a kind of horrible model for almost everything else that humans want to learn. It's a very unique task, non-dynamic, no teammates, almost like an industrial task where you want to do the same thing over and over with as little variation as possible. So I can believe that early specialization works in golf. I don't know. There's like not much science on it so the scientific jury's out, but I could believe it potentially. but it's certainly not the case in other sports.

And so the introduction to range is called Roger versus Tiger, and that very much grew out of this debate that grew out of the sports gene. So even though the book goes off in all these different areas, it does have that link to the previous work. How did Malcolm respond when you were putting it to him? Well, you know, we had, we just got invited again. So he and I just met up again. We became running buddies after this anyway.

He's like a borderline world-class runner for his age group, Myler. So we started training together and would, you know, discuss on our own time. And we were just invited back to the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in March of this year. And that's also on YouTube. And he said, we were supposed to introduce each other in the panel. And he said, this is David Epstein. In his first book, he devoted several pages to attacking my work. And I've realized that he was right.

So that was a surprise to me. He's one of the most open-minded. Talk about the virtues I talk about in range. He's one of the most open-minded guys. Like sometimes as writers, I think we can get committed to a stance more extreme than what we believe because we've written about it and we get associated with it. And he is, you know, he has more incentive to do that than anyone and yet is constantly updating his mental models. And by the end of that, that debate, which again, you can see on YouTube. if you're interested, he says, you know, I've been convinced that some, he says, I knew that

deliberate practice was important, but I thought that also implied that specialization would be the way to go. But it turns out that if you want to be the best at X, you also have to do some things other than X. And I've changed my mind about it. And so I thought that was pretty, pretty cool. I found that to be a commonality among leaders who have great security in oneself, some comfort in their own skin, a lot of confidence. A leader that I typically am attracted to following is one who they have those strong opinions, but they're weekly held, meaning that if I believe this deeply, however, I am wide open to changing my mind if better evidence is shown to me. I think those are the types of leaders that we want to work for. I agree 100%. And I mean, that gets to why is that so

rare though. I mean, I've worked in this world. I mean, I'm fortunate to actually work with a, with one of those right now, but it's, it's, it is few and far between. Why do you think that is? I mean, look, that that's kind of in some ways part of the topic of chapter 10 range and the foxes versus the hedgehogs, right? It's like the best, the people with the best judgment flip flop like crazy. Yes. And yet flip flopping is something that we publicly penalize people for. Especially like politicians. I mean, if somebody changes their mind. Like they've had like Abraham Lincoln changed this mind on some really important topics. Nobody nobody, nobody, if you study him deeply, you'll see that. But I mean, he should be,

and he is now revered, but like other people should be revered, I believe, for being willing and having the strength to say, you know what, I was, I really did believe that. I really truly did. But I was wrong. I changed my mind because I found evidence that proved me wrong. Even if it's not like perfect evidence, but I learned, I read. I talk to other people. And now I think a little bit differently. I think that should be celebrated. Absolutely.

I mean, you know, and thinking as a science writer, like sort of a little known thing that people didn't call me on very much, is if you look through the citations of the sports team, I cite one of my own magazine articles is something I'm refuting. Because once I had spent a year reading 10 journal articles a day, I realized even for a long cover feature story in Sports Illustrated, I had gotten something wrong. not like wrong in fact, but wrong in implication and and counted on some science that didn't end up replicating once more rigorous methods came along. And the fact is, I hate to say it, but the same will be true for range. If you write about science and you sort of walk to the edge, the cliff's edge of human knowledge and look over in order to try to bring some rigor to discussing things people care about, something is going to be wrong. Like better methodologies will come along and some aspect of science. won't replicate. The problem is I don't know what in the book that is. So the best I can do is spend that year really interrogating and figuring out what to leave out, getting independent fact

checkers, all those things. But the fact is, something in there will still be wrong, and I will have to change my mind on it. I just don't know what it is yet, but I think you can take steps in your process to minimize the risks of that and hopefully make it small when you do realize what that is. So you write out being a deliberate amateur. Again, let's, let's target this perhaps answer. I'm like pushing you in a corner, but I know you can handle it. So let's target this into that avatar. Wait, can I give one more thing that you reminded me of? Go ahead. You mentioned the changing of the mind. Yes. And I read a little bit of in range about Darwin's process. And when I was reading his diaries, one of the really interesting things was to see that his first four models of

evolution by natural selection were forms of creationism or intelligent design. And then in the fifth model, he considers that as a totally separate question. And it's just amazing to see someone going through an intellectual transformation of that magnitude, right? To have that to be that open-minded. It's incredible. Okay. That's really good. So I talked to Liz Weisspin about the importance of rookie smarts.

And she's got a book about that. Liz is very, she's fantastic. Talk to her a few times on this show for those who want to hear and go back and check those out. But you write out on chapter 12, I'm going to bounce around between chapters. So I'm starting towards the back. But this one's on deliberate amateurs. What's the value or benefit or of a mid-level manager type leader to approach work, approach life in general, their team with a thought process of being a deliberate amateur? And I should say that's a term I used and attribute to in the book to art historian and creativity researcher Sarah Lewis.

And she notes that amateur, you know, we think of it as a word that sort of denigrates someone's activities, but really it means someone who just loves an activity amateur. And the deliberate amateur is someone who dabbles. Or the greatest, the example, the phrase that I liked, one of my favorite phrases in the book was Andre Geim, when he's talking about, he's a physicist who's talking about being a deliberate amateur. And he says he likes to change his whole area every couple of years. and he says it's psychologically upsetting,

but that leads him to his most important work, and he likes it. And he says, I like to say I don't do research, only search. And so he just keeps trying different, different things. And of course, that led to him doing all sorts of wacky stuff. One experiment earned him the Ig Nobel Prize, which is basically for the silliest research.

And then another one of his silly experiments won him the Nobel Prize. So he has both the Ig Nobel and the Nobel. The Ig Nobel was for levitating a frog with really strong magnets. and the Nobel was for discovering graphene, which is a single atom thick material that has all sorts of interesting properties. And it's that sort of willingness to go off into other areas and follow interests. And instead of having this sort of solely long-term sites where here's what I'm going to be doing in 10 years or 20 years, it's what he says and what these other delimited amateurs say is

here's who I am right now. here are the skills I have, the things I want to learn, the problems I face, and here are the opportunities in front of me, and here's the one I'm going to try, and maybe a year from now I'll change. And so they end up going through this constant experimenting. They kind of become generalists along the way, not necessarily on purpose, but because by doing that, they accrue all these diverse experiences, and they zigzag their way to a place where they uniquely can succeed.

So I think it's sort of no accident. I was just reading some research from LinkedIn, because they have so much correct. career data, they can do pretty interesting research where they looked at a half million profiles to look at what was the most, what were the characteristics that most predicted someone who would go on to the C-suite, essentially? They looked at 20 years of people who had at one time worked in a top-10 consultancy. And there were things that you would expect. You know, you had to have some years of experience. I think going to a top-five MBA program was very helpful. It was unclear if that was because of the program itself where it was just selecting for a certain type of students or what.

But as far as the things that someone could sort of more control, the single most important factor was the number of different functions they had worked across in their industry. So for every different function they took on in their industry, they saved themselves three years in their progression to the C-suite. And I think we tend not to like switching functions because we gravitate toward comfort. and being able to sort of automate our tasks, so it's less cognitive load to do decision-making and all those things. But I think what the research is saying is that these people who go exploring and constantly challenging themselves, they figure out more about what they're interested in, and they also get this more well-rounded view of the kind of work they have to do.

And so I think this deliberate amateurism, this idea of being willing to dive into something new with regularity, is not just sort of a whimsical, quixotic thing for physicists, but shows up in people who want to become executives. Estonians have a saying nine trades, the 10th one, hunger. In Korea, they believe a man of 12 talents has nothing to eat for dinner. The Greeks warned that the person who knows a lot of crass lives in an empty house. I was reading an article by Andrew Hill that you probably read, the hidden benefits of hiring jacks and jills of all trades,

which I think part of the research that he found was probably from that LinkedIn study. This, I think, is parallel to the work and your research done in range. For the person, again, who is in the middle of their career or even in the beginning stages of their career, they're looking to build a great productive life in business or whatever it is they're deciding to do. what what does the other than that that that great LinkedIn study that you just cited what advice do you give to them when it comes to why not specializing is to their advantage so let me let me talk about what what the research says about that because I think that's the the empirical facts are more important than my advice so if we look at say comic book creation and this is these are some work I discussed in the book what there were a pair of of researchers who, comic books have a really well-defined era of creative explosion because up until about, in the mid-50s, a doctor convinced, who had fabricated a lot of his work, convinced Congress that comic books were causing children to become deviance, basically. And in order to avoid

congressional oversight, basically, the comic book industry started a self-censorship body. And for the next, up until about 1970, they were self-censoring. And around the, that time, a government agency asked Stan Lee to do a Spider-Man narrative that would educate people on drug abuse, basically. And so he wrote a Spider-Man narrative where Peter Parker's best friend overdoses on pills. And it was run by the Comics Code Authority, the body, the self-censorship body, and they didn't approve it. And Marvel and Stan Lee, they decided to publish anyway. and it was received so well that instantly the this was about 1971 that instantly the censorship standards relaxed and there was this creative explosion all sorts of stuff happened right these serious graphic novels about uh you know the holocaust or other other parts of history series like love and rockets which is one where the ethnically diverse cast that ages in real time with readers or psychologically complex characters who are battling anger and personal problems and all these these sorts of things. So these researchers looked at this era of defined creative explosion and said,

okay, let's see who was the best since then, who produced comics that they could track over time. One of the advantages over a lot of business studies is a lot of business studies I see have suffer from extreme survivor bias where they only look at the people who succeeded essentially. In this case, they could track the value of all of these comics and the careers of all of the creators, whether those were individual creators or team creators, up or down over time and see whose comics became worth the most and who was most likely to produce a blockbuster that exceeded way beyond the norm. And they made hypotheses about what would lead to success.

And some of those were really intuitive. They said, like an industrial learning curve, we expect to see more repetitions leads to better performance. We expect the more resources a publisher has leads to better creator performance. We expect the more years of experience has, you know, a creator has leads to better performance, et cetera. They were wrong about all of those. More repetitions was basically a non-factor until they got really high, in which case it was negatively correlated with performance.

I'm guessing because those creators were overworked. Didn't have enough time to think. The resources of the publisher had no impact. It was actually slightly negatively correlated with performance. Years of experience in the industry, no impact whatsoever. What did was the number of different genres that a creator had worked across. So they categorized genres, 22 different genres, you know, whatever, nonfiction, fantasy, adventure, adult, crime, etc. And the number of different genres was so important.

And for an individual, not just a team. So if you had an individual who'd only worked in one genre, but you could put together a team of four people where each one had worked in a different genre, then you were better off with that team that had four genres between them. but after once you had an individual who had four genres or more, they did better on average and were more likely to make a blockbuster than a team with the same experience by platoon. So it looked like having this broad experience contained within an individual allowed them to integrate and create in a way that you couldn't even replicate with a team. And I thought that was a really interesting finding. So I went to see if there were things like that in other industries. And the almost exact same finding comes out in studies of,

millions and millions of technology patents where what you see is that the people who make the most impactful inventions are not necessarily the ones who've drilled the deepest on a technology, but the ones who have their patents spread across a large number of different technology classes. So the U.S. Patent and Trade Merrick Office organizes technology into about 450 different classes. And the people who have worked across many different classes are the ones who make the biggest breakthroughs. And so I think these are just sort of two symbols. I like because one's, you know, technology and one's just artistic. But this pattern shows up in so many places where this broad genre experience, which seems to put someone behind for a while, turns out to be the unique

advantage. And so I think whatever we're doing, that's, we want to kind of aim for that broad genre experience. And it's the same thing as the LinkedIn study, right? How many different functions of your industry you have worked across. And that's not to say that these hyper-specialists are not valuable. We need them too. But I think it's clear, and one of the, a guy in the book who was, you know, was deemed an innovator of the year by R&D magazine and decided to study innovators, he tracks the importance of specialists in technological invention over time and found that it's actually

getting somewhat less important counterintuitively because the information that specialists turn up is so quickly and widely disseminated. now because of communication technology, that it makes it a lot easier to be broader than a specialist, and there are a lot more opportunities to recombine already known stuff. You know, there are more than we could ever do and that are a lot easier to make impact than it is by just drilling down deeper and advancing in a very slight way, some cutting-edge technology. So that's a long answer. Yeah.

But I think the data in different industries are pointing in the same direction about getting this broad genre experience. The problem is we're so cultish about a head start that feeling behind for a second, we assume that our cross-sectional looks are a trajectory when in fact they are not. I worked in sales coming out of college after I got done playing football. And I found it interesting. One of the best hires, he's become a good friend of mine now that I ever made, had a background in finance and accounting, which was very rare to hire salespeople with that background. Usually they go into a job where it's finance or accounting. And I found, though, once he deserves huge credit, but he became incredibly good at the job, one of the best, if not the best.

And sales is pretty black and white profession. There's stack rankings every day. You could see how people do, you know, here's how much revenue this person generated. And I found he was so much better set up for a future of, from a leadership perspective, because he's got the analytics, the numbers. the finance, smarts, all of that, which is helpful, but then also has developed this incredible skill to market and sell, which I think is very important for people to develop because we are all in sales every single day. You had to sell your manuscript more so the first one, probably than the second one, but you were in a sales role and everybody works in sales from

time to time. So I think if you broaden your career by doing, by working in different parts, usually sales can be a good entry point for a lot of people because they're oftentimes they need people to do it. It's hard. And then you can weave your way to other parts of a business. And as I'm hearing, I'm gathering from you that that is a wise way to build a productive career by developing skills in multiple different parts of a company. Absolutely.

And the importance of marketing, right, which in many ways is sort of a broad-based skill. I didn't put enough emphasis. I've done it before and I put more on it now and I realize, you know, and I'm more interested in studying it now, I realize that one of the things I have going for me is the way that I pitch people when I want an interview with them, when I want to take a bunch of their time. And that is a form of marketing for me, right? Like I have to, I'm not going to pay them. I have to get them interested in spending some time for me and how do I do that, right? And it's by doing your homework, by personalizing these pitches. It's basically marketing. I did that to, I actually did that to you.

Exactly, exactly. And it worked because I respect it. When I see somebody doing that, they're doing their homework, they're taking this approach. Like, I'm going to respond to that. It works. And so I think that's absolutely the case. And even thinking of, you know, I discussed my own career a little bit in range, but when I was at Sports Illustrated, I would get a lot of queries from students saying, well, I want to be a sports writer. Should I major in English or journalism? I study geology and astronomy, okay? I have no idea. I didn't take a class in either of those.

And it turned out that some of the stuff I learned, I have a master's in geological sciences. And some of the skills I learned there are what allowed me to come into Sports Illustrate as a temp fact checker and leapfrog the people who are waiting, you know, 50th in line to be the next end. NFL beat reporter because I had these weird skills, just like Oliver Smithies, the Nobel laureate in the deliberate amateurs chapter says, take your skills. And, you know, he says you're probably not going to have totally unique skills and you're probably not going to have a totally unique problem. So take your skills and apply to a problem where those skills aren't being used or find a new problem and bring them to your skills. Either way is to sort of mix and match. And his idea was that I think I think I've seen Mark Andresen talk about this, where you don't have to be a one percenter in a

particular skill if you're pretty good at a bunch of different things and you sort of stack them on top of one another so that you're, you end up sort of competing on unique ground, which was the case for me at Sports Illustrated. No one else was doing the science writing stuff there. So I didn't necessarily have to be the best at any one thing, but I could kind of mix and match problems and skills in a way that made me unique. A couple more. The trouble with too much grit. Peculiar title of a chapter, chapter six, because we've, you know, we've been beaten

over the head with the word grit now. It's all over the place. Ted talks, books. There's a lot of good things about it. I understand. Believer in it. But can you talk about the trouble with too much grit? Yeah, so grit, the psychological construct that I think appeals to you and I both intuitively, immensely, right?

Like who would argue that you don't need perseverance? But the psychological concept of grit, most associated with the researcher Angela Duckworth, comes from a 12-question survey. Half of the questions essentially ask if you are resilient or you persevere. and the other half asked if you have stability of interests, basically. And her most famous study found that new cadets at West Point, the U.S. Military Academy, when they're brought in for what's called Beast Barracks, which is six weeks of physical training, and essentially where they are transitioned from being normal high school students to being officers in training,

and very rigid and difficult and disciplined. It's a fragile time for some of them and some of them quit. And what she found was that that grit questionnaire was a better predictor of who would persist through Beast Barracks than was the whole candidate score, which is what the U.S. Military Academy, which is based on physical tests, leadership experiences, academic test scores, all that sort of stuff. And that it was a better predictor than that, just the grit questionnaire. First of all, the whole candidate score actually predicts much better how someone does at the military academy overall. But that's an interesting finding. And I think that's important. But the fact is, very few of those cadets quit Beast anyway.

They almost all make it. And the problem I discuss in range and that Duckworth and her co-authors highlight in their own scientific articles, but which seems to have been lost in the translation to the public. So I just quote their own journal articles in some of this section. is that they were using what's called a restriction of range. So when they pick subjects that got into West Point, those people are already so siphoned off from the rest of humanity for the things that go into whole candidate score, their athleticism, their test scores and those things,

that you've compressed the range of what you're looking at and it makes other factors look more important than they really are. So the example I give is if I want to do a study of what causes basketball skill and used my subjects only as centers in the NBA, right? People who had already been highly selected. And I would see that, well, practice, they'd all practiced a lot. So conclude, therefore, practice is the only thing that got them to the NBA, not the fact that they're also seven feet tall because I've compressed the range on that variable.

So it is no longer predictive. And in fact, and I've done this, there's a very high positive correlation between height in the American population and points scored in the NBA, okay? but if you restrict your range to only players already in the NBA, that correlation becomes negative. So the advice you would give parents is to have short kids for them to score more points in the NBA. So the problem is when you've already selected out a group of people for this very narrow range of traits, you make grit look more important than it may be, which, by the way, if you go to the papers, it still only accounts for a couple percent of variance between people.

So the other famous studies are like in the finalists of the national spelling bee. And the problem with those cases is the people's goals have been pre-selected, right? It's to do better in the spelling bee. It's to make it through B-Sparricks in West Point. And so you're scoring them for not changing their interests when their interest has been pre-selected for the purposes of that study. And what you see when you extend the time and what I look at in that chapter, the trouble with too much grit, is those gritty West Point alums, half of them quit the military on the first day when they are able. five years later, five years later after their graduation after they've done their service, right? So did they all the sudden become not gritty?

No, it turns out that since the explosion of the knowledge economy, and, you know, around 1980, that those West Point alums, who the military is most likely to invest a lot of money in, have been the most likely to quit of any type of officers in the entire military. And that's because they are very talented and they start to realize that they have other interests And in the knowledge economy, you don't have to just move up the ladder at a corporation. You can transfer your knowledge laterally to other places. And that's what they've been doing. And so the military, there's a quote from a high-ranking officer that I use in the book

where he says, maybe we should defund the military academy because it's teaching its cadets to get out of the army, which of course it's not doing, right? It's just that people learn things about themselves in their late teens and early 20s. in fact, the time of greatest personality changes from about 18 to your late 20s, and they develop new interests, and they maximize, they use those interests, the exploration of their interests, to maximize what economists call match quality, which is the agreement, the degree of fit between your abilities, your interests, and the work that you do. And maximizing your match quality is incredibly important for how far you're going to go in what you do. And so giving people

points for not varying their interests is almost making sure that they are not going to maximize their match quality. And I think that's a real problem. And we should be careful about extrapolating results from grit studies outside of the narrow context where they were studied, where the goals were pre-selected. And in fact, the grit researchers say exactly that in their papers, but it gets totally lost in the popular coverage. If you're hiring a team to do anything of significance, is that something you want. Do you want a resilient person? Do you want someone who's demonstrated skill of fighting through adversity? I think absolutely you do. I think absolutely you do, right? But, but resilience for sure. Yep. But scoring them for not changing their interests, I think is not good.

Because I don't, I think you want them to be oriented toward improving their own match quality. Yes. And finding where they can do the best work. And if they're just going to say, no, I must keep hitting my head against the same wall, that I, or my grit score will go down. That I don't think is good. So when I tried to take the grit score for myself as a teenager, I wanted to go to the Air Force Academy, knew exactly what I wanted to do. I scored like in the 99th percentile, again, trying to take it retrospectively. So great of salt, of course. When I took it for myself now, where I know my skills and interests a lot better, I scored in the 50th percentile. You know, I won, I walked on to my college track team and left as a university record holder and won the award for the athlete who,

quote, overcame significant difficulty to achieve significant athletic success, okay? And what a pretty funny stuff, but my significant difficulty just being that I sucked at first and then got good. So like resilience? Right. So I'm all for resilience. Yeah. But I came to that sport because I realized it was a better fit for me than the other ones I had

tried. Yeah. Right? Yeah. So it's, it's resilience absolutely. But I think we also need to be oriented toward maximizing our match quality. Gotcha. I know you got to run.

One last thing. Let's say somebody, a 23-year-old sitting across from you in your office right now, upstairs when you go to disappear to write a book. You take a 30-minute break. And at the end of that time, you're sitting with that person. They're saying, you know, David, your career is incredible. It's wide-ranging. It's very rangy, diverse. What advice would you give to me, the 23-year-old who's looking to, you know,

to live an enjoyable life, a fulfilling career. I know this answer could take an hour and you have like two seconds, but I'm curious to get. What are some of the final parting thoughts you'd give to that person? I would tell them that it's very, very, first of all, they will underestimate how much they'll change. So they don't know their future. The challenge for them is how to behave when they cannot know the future, when you can't know the future you or the future world you're going to live in. Because they're both going to change more than you think. So how should you behave facing that situation?

And for me, the thing to do is to not worry too much about a perfect fit right now because it's almost impossible. You know, it would be luck. It's possible, but it's not likely that you'll stumble into it yet because you don't know yourself or your world well enough. Your insight into yourself, one of my favorite phrases in the book is from a woman who studies Hermione Ebarra who studies career transitions. We learn who we are in practice, not in theory.

Meaning your insight into yourself is constrained. by your roster of previous experiences. And this idea that you can take a personality quiz and just introspect and find your perfect life, in fact, you're just taking a cross-section of yourself based on your previous experiences. And you really need to accumulate experiences to know what you should do. So look at your opportunities around you now. Don't worry about who's younger than you and what they have that you don't.

Look at what your skills are now, what skills you want to learn, what interests you want to explore, what the opportunities are in front of you right now, including by working the people on the fringe of your network, right, the so-called strength of weak ties, see what world you can get insight into on the fringe of your network. Try something. Make sure you maximize the informational signal from that thing. Like, go all in on it, see, explore, set it up like experiments. Here's my hypothesis. My hypothesis when I did a summer internship in a lab was I'm going to love being a lab researcher. This is going to be the rest of my life. Turned out I was wrong, but that was an incredibly important information signal for me. So for now, for everything I do,

I keep what I call a little book of experiments, whether it's my physical training or working on my writing, where I set up a hypothesis about something new I'm going to try. I try to go into that experience with an eye toward testing that hypothesis. Am I going to like this? Is it going to make my skills better and so on? Is it going to maximize my time? And then I reflect on it, because reflection is like the single most important characteristic of so-called self-regulatory learners. And that's true in sports too, who people who learn their own strengths and weaknesses better than their peers and assess them more like outsiders do. So I think you should, when you're 23 years old, don't worry about getting ahead because we're obsessed with precocity. Don't worry

about it. Worry about getting a massive information signal about your abilities and interests that you can use to then make the next zig in improving your match quality and then just keep doing that and then rinse and repeat and do that and you'll zigzag your way to a place where you can uniquely feel fulfilled and succeed but it takes some time so just try to be patient wow i'm glad i asked that david thank you so much for uh joining me here on the learning leader show where would you send my listeners to learn more about you online uh davidepstein dot com all the the info about range and the sports gene is up there and and by the way i really appreciate you know it's it i learn a lot from hearing the questions that someone in a domain that I'm not in every day asks. So it's really neat to hear

through your questioning what resonated with you and what you're curious about. So it's great learning for me. I appreciate that. And I highly recommend both books. I actually, you probably don't remember, I tried hard to get you on four years ago because of the sports gene when I was at the very beginnings of this podcast. So I'm happy that we got a chance to do it now four years later. Sometimes always thinking the answer is not yet instead of no can be beneficial. And that's process. So I would recommend the sports gene as well as range. Why Generalist Triumph in a specialized world. You can tell about the care you put into this. And as my dad has always told me, it's a lot harder when you care. And it's evident that you care a lot. So thank you so much, Dave for being

here, man. I'd love to continue our dialogue as we both progress, man. Absolutely. And I apologize, I don't remember that four years ago. In my defense, I was not knowing that the sports team would open up this new world for me, I was starting a new job two weeks after a great. You were talking to Barack Obama at the time. So I think I wasn't as high on the list. Well, but no, but it's not that. You know, no, I don't judge. Someone does their homework.

I don't judge on anything other than that about who they are. Oh, I got you. I'm saying my, and I'm guessing my cold email skills have gotten a little better too. I bet they have. But also, seriously, I was starting a new job and trying to prove myself to a new editor that didn't care at all about the sportsbook I had just written. So it was like a frantic time for me.

No worries, man. No worries. I love it. And like I said, I love to have another one because I still have pages of notes. to talk to you about. So it'd be fun to record again in the future, man. Happy to. Awesome. Thanks so much, David. My pleasure. Thanks. Great talking to.

You too. All right. Okay, I really enjoyed that one with David. I think you could probably tell. It crosses over into my background in athletics and how that then can be implemented in the business world. This idea of being a deliberate amateur and how that plays into Liz Weissman's rookie smarts love that part cross training in the business world really interesting and then just all the detail behind having a wide range of skills and how you attack problems i thought this one was

really useful i hope you did as well if so i would love it if you would share it with a friend or two word of mouth marketing is the best form a real genuine recommendation hey you should listen to this one with David Epstein, I think it could help you, is the best way to help continue to spread this message. And it gives me the opportunity to do what I love on a daily basis. And for that, I will forever be grateful. Thank you so much. Talk with you next week. Can't wait.