The Rich Roll Podcast - David Epstein On Why Late Bloomers Win

Episode Date: September 9, 2019

Conventional wisdom dictates that mastery demands an early start. Relentless focus at the exclusion of other pursuits. And as many hours of deliberate practice as humanly possible. Be it violin, painting, basketball or boat building, there’s simply no substitute for a life wholly devoted to developing that narrowly defined skill. Hence the “10,000 hour rule” zeitgeist embrace — an edict divined by psychologist Anders Ericcson and made famous by Malcolm Gladwell. But is this actually true? Today’s guest put this theory to the test, researching the world’s top performers across a wide variety of disciplines to discover a most counter-intuitive truth — that early specialization is actually the exception to the rule. It turns out that the most successful among us are those who developed broad interests and skills while everyone else was rushing to specialize. Today we explore why breadth is the ally of depth – not the opposite. And why generalists are the ones most primed to excel. Enter journalist and multiple New York Times bestselling author, David Epstein. In addition to being an exceptional runner (he set the Columbia University record for 800 meters), David is a former investigative reporter for both ProPublica and Sports Illustrated with master's degrees in environmental science and journalism. Three of his stories have been optioned for films. And his TED Talk, Are Athletes Really Getting Better, Faster, Stronger? has been viewed over 8 million times (and even shared by Bill Gates). David is currently best known for his two smash-hit bestsellers, The Sports Gene: Inside The Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance and Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. A #1 New York Times bestseller, Range is arguably the must-read breakout hit of 2019 — a book as much about parenting as it is about performance. This is an insanely informative and engrossing conversation about the benefits of being a generalist — in career, sports, science, art, and life. In a world that heavily favors early specialization, we discuss why it’s often the late bloomers who prevail. Why it's the jacks-of-all-traders rather than the nose-to-the-grindstoners who ultimately blaze a path to greater success, happiness and fulfillment in both career and life. We discuss David's infamous debate with Malcolm Gladwell that changed the famous thinker's mind — and spawned David’s groundbreaking books. We talk about the benefits of inefficiency. Why frequent quitters end up with the most fulfilling careers. And why failing isn’t just good, but the best way to learn. Our greatest masters — professional athletes, Nobel laureates, musicians, inventors, and scientists — all resist siloing themselves in a single field. Instead they think broadly. Embrace diverse experiences. And constantly cultivate new interests. My hope is that David’s message will inspire you to do the same. And if you’re a late bloomer like myself, this exchange is certain to reassure and delight. Enjoy! Rich

If you don't change your identity overnight, you have to sort of start with these little keyhole experiments until something that you think was just an interest becomes like a real passion or a vocation. And so I think we underestimate how important it is to try to find like where our talents might most fit. Part of those talents just being voraciously interested in something and then you're going to work really hard at it. Over time, I think you should be moving toward that match quality and don't worry about the lightning. Like you can't force that anyway, but you can have this approach to being a scientist of yourself that means like your strategy will move you toward better match quality in the long term. That's David Epstein, this week on the Rich Roll podcast. Hey people, what's good? It's Rich Roll here, your podcast host. Welcome to the show or welcome back. Let me preface this by saying conventional wisdom has basically always and historically dictated that anybody who wishes to truly master a skill like playing the violin or painting, playing basketball, whatever, that person must start very early, focus intensely, generally at the exclusion of other pursuits and essentially rack up as many hours

of deliberate practice as humanly possible. Hence Malcolm Gladwell's famous 10,000 hour rule, which by the way is actually psychologist Anders Ericsson's rule, but I digress. Anyway, is this actually true? Well, today's guest puts this theory to the test by researching the world's top performers across a variety of disciplines, professional athletes, Nobel laureates, musicians, inventors, scientists. And what he discovered is that early specialization is actually, in fact, the exception to the rule. And the rule, the counterintuitive yet far more common path to mastery and success

and fulfillment involves developing broad interests and skills while everyone around you is rushing to specialize. And so today, we're actually going to explore why breadth is the ally of depth and not the opposite, and why generalists, not specialists, are the ones most primed to excel. Our guide for this exploration is journalist and multiple New York Times bestselling author David Epstein. In addition to being an avid runner, he actually held the Columbia University record in the 800 meters. David is a former investigative reporter for both ProPublica and Sports Illustrated with master's degrees in environmental science and journalism. Three of his stories have been optioned for films and his TED Talk, Are Athletes Really Getting Better, Faster, Stronger, has been

viewed 7 million times and was shared by Bill Gates. These days, however, David is best known as the author of The Sports Gene, Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance. And his latest book and the backdrop for today's conversation is called Range, Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. And this book has gone on to become the must-read smash hit number one New York Times bestselling book of the summer. Many of you, I'm sure, have already read it. And those of you who have already know that it is as much about parenting as it is about sports, business, science, and art. I'm very high on this conversation. It's coming up quick.

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wonderful, and recovery.com is your partner in starting that journey. When you or a loved one need help, go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. Okay, David Epstein, the sports gene, range, the advantage of being a generalist. In addition to tracking David's personal story and this famous debate that he had with Malcolm Gladwell that spawned his research and these books, this is a really awesome and at times counterintuitive conversation that makes the case for things like inefficiency, why frequent quitters end up with the most fulfilling careers. We explore why failing is good and the best way to learn, the dangers of siloing yourself in a single field versus thinking broadly and embracing diverse experiences, as well as advice for cultivating a multitude of new interests

and so many more topics that we discuss. It's a really great conversation. So without further ado, let's get into it. This is me and David Epstein. I've been looking forward to this for a while. So thank you for coming on the show. I appreciate it. Oh, pleasure's all mine.

And congrats on this book. I mean, this is quite an accomplishment, and it's no surprise that it's resonating with so many people right now. I appreciate that. Very different project for me, so I was nervous about the reception. Yeah, it seems like it is and it isn't.

I mean, in many ways, it's an extrapolation of your previous book. Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, right, if you look at like the afterword of the last book, which I sort of came out of a debate with Malcolm Gladwell I was preparing for, that sort of an expanded version of that basically becomes the intro. Yeah, it sets the stage for everything that you explore in this book. And perhaps that's a good launching off point here to kind of contextualize what we're going to talk about. And it's such a great story. I mean, you got to tell the Malcolm Gladwell debate story.

Okay, so the Malcolm Gladwell debate story. I know you've told it many times. No, no. But it is, I mean, and these are, so after the publication of my first book, The Sports Gene, we were invited to the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, which is co-founded by the general manager of the Rockets. We were invited there to debate 10,000 hours versus the sports gene, even though we had middle ground, but that's how it was set up. I'd never met him before, and he was too busy to participate in any of the pre-event calls, So I had like no idea what I'm getting,

and he's super clever. And so like, I didn't want to get steamrolled, you know. You're going to double down on getting ready for this. Right, right. And so in prepping, I sort of tried to anticipate the things that he might argue and knew that he would have to argue for early specialization in deliberate practice.

And so I said, okay, well, I'm the science writer at Sports Illustrated. Let me go look at what the literature says, if it's compatible with that hypothesis. And I saw across most sports, athletes go on to become elite, have this sampling period where they try a variety of things. They gain these sort of broader skills. Importantly, they learn about their own interests and abilities and delay specializing until later than their peers.

And so, you know, on stage, I sort of talked about that, and we sort of contrasted it as the Roger versus Tiger model because Roger Federer played a bunch of different sports and Tiger was early specialization. And after we came off the stage, he sort of said, you know what you got me on was that Roger versus Tiger thing. And we ended up becoming running buddies. He invites me the next day to go do some intervals with him.

And he was like a Canadian provincial champ in the 1500 meters. He's quietly this extraordinary runner. Yeah, and he's like the biggest sandbagger in the world. I talked to him recently and he's like, I'm like, are you running again? Because he was having a knee problem. And he says, I'm at the point where I can run for a minute without pain. So I'm just doing a minute.

And then I see like a week later, pictures on Twitter of him doing intervals, like at a track. And I'm like, you're such a, yeah. So like, you gotta be ready for the workout. What's it like to go running with him? It's great. I mean, it's, he's, he, if anything, I would say he needs to learn how to back off sometimes. Like when he hits the intervals, he hits them really hard and sometimes like all the way up to his races a little bit. So, So my like sort of contribution to his training was like, you're 12 days out from your big race. Like don't hammer this session.

Yeah, yeah. But it's great. It's a lot of fun. And then, so then we would talk about this stuff on our own time. And to my delight, you know, I sort of found that he didn't view our ideas as being like this zero sum competition,

but more like let's talk about it and learn stuff from each other. And that was like a great kind of model for me. It's really cool. And what I appreciate about that is his malleability, like his openness to new ideas and his willingness to say, yeah, I was a little bit, maybe not entirely wrong,

but there are certain things that David brought up that I was wrong about. And I will happily admit that and do so in a blurb for your book, you know? Yeah, I mean, yeah, I love that blurb. And so we were invited back to the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in March. And, you know, this one's also on YouTube. And at the end of the video, he says, like, I now feel that I conflated two ideas.

The fact that it takes a lot of practice to become good in something, with the idea that that implies that to be good at X, you should do only X from as early as possible. And I thought that was like a great way to update the mental model, basically. Yeah, it's cool. I was thinking about this earlier today, and it occurred to me that on some level, it seems that it depends on how you define that 10,000 hours.

Like how broad is the scope of the work, right? Like if you're very specific about that, then yes, your argument prevails. But if you take a broader view of what it means to put in that 10,000 hours and what those disciplines entail, then your ideas kind of dovetail into each other. Totally. And in many ways, I mean, you're getting at the heart of some of what I was wrestling with here, right? Because as I've looked sort of when I started interacting with the so-called 10,000 hours literature, the deliberate practice framework from my last book, you would see things that said, you know, that denied that, right? That even doing weights for a golfer didn't count as deliberate practice because it wasn't golf or trying these other things didn't matter and that there was no kind of natural proclivities for things. So you should just pick something for someone and just put them on that path.

And over time, I think that definition of deliberate practice has gotten, it's sort of broadened sometimes to such a degree that it looks like it's only what in retrospect did cause someone to improve, at which point you don't have so much of a scientific hypothesis. But if my contribution would be broadening that definition the way people think about it, I think that'd be a great contribution.

Right, if you look at the work that goes into you putting a book like this together, as I've heard you say, like you read thousands of these studies and many of which seem irrelevant or don't directly inform what ends up on the page, but that's part of the 10,000 hours, directly inform what ends up on the page, but that's part of the 10,000 hours, right? And maybe that study that you dismissed or wasn't appropriate for this

book has a second life in something else that you write, you know, 10 years later. Totally. And also in, I mean, that's part of this, like, I used to kind of chastise myself for being inefficient because I would end up reading so much stuff that didn't, you know, I'd go down some rabbit hole and come up a week later and say, how did I ever think I was going to write about that? But now I realize that that sort of searching requires some inefficiency and that's sort of how I find the things and connect all these things and sort of know the arguments that will be out there too. Right. Because I'm aware of the literature even that I didn't put in the book basically. Right.

even that I didn't put in the book, basically. Right. On some level, you're a product of your thesis in the book. Like you're somebody who is an example of a generalist who found their way by dabbling in many different things and sampling to use your language. How much of that is in the back of your mind when you're writing this book? Like I'm gonna self-justify my own trajectory.

Yeah, no, it's, I mean, I think to some degree, both of like my first book was my own questions about like the interplay of nature and nurture from being an athlete and from being a spectator, right? And in this case, I didn't initially like realize that much that I was sort of kind of investigating my own path a little bit because the spark came from this debate with Gladwell

and then these interactions I had with the Pat Tillman Foundation and some of those career changers there. And sort of as it went along, particularly when I got to this thing called the Dark Horse Project, where I was interviewing the researchers and they're like, by the way, would you like to become a subject? Because like obviously, you know, you're just like the people who are studying these sort of career zigzaggers. So it was sort of like partway through when I kind of realized like, this feels so relevant to me. And I don't know how much of that

was sort of implicitly in my mind, but that's when it became sort of explicit when I came to that, the dark core, those researchers who study how people find match quality, you know, the degree of fit between what they do and who they are. Yeah, I mean, you're somebody who, you studied environmental science and astronomy.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Columbia, which is a bizarre choice for somebody who ends up writing for Sports Illustrated. Yes, yes. Well, I've gotten almost, I would say, linearly less tied to long-term goals as I've gotten older. When I was a teenager, I was sure I was going to go to the Air Force Academy and be a test pilot and be an astronaut. And of course, I didn't do any of those things. And I ended up studying, you know, geology and environmental science and astronomy. And I was living in a tent in the Arctic when I decided for sure I was going to try to become a writer.

And at the time I only felt sort of behind. I didn't realize that when I entered Sports Illustrated as a temp fact checker, like a number of years behind people at the same level or even at higher levels. But it turned out that this, my very ordinary science skills taken from this area became suddenly extraordinary

at Sports Illustrated where kind of merging those, I didn't have to be in zero sum competition with everyone waiting in line to be like the next NFL beat reporter. I could just do my own thing and compete against myself. And if I could do that well enough, like I could have a role. That's so interesting.

And your athletic career trajectory also informs the same idea. Yeah, I very much had a sampling period, football, basketball, baseball. You know, for the people that watch this on video, they won't be surprised that I didn't make the NBA, you know, because I'm a small guy. But I started to realize, you know, I actually did, I got injured once and decided to run to like stay in shape for other sports and kind of like started getting addicted to it. You know, you start to feel that improvement. I wasn't even, I wasn't good. I was bad, but I was improving.

And so I decided I just keep on wanting to keep doing that. I started in college as a walk-on, was like literally the worst person on the team. I got paired with a guy who was, when we were both juniors in high school, he was 20 seconds faster than I was in the 800 meters, right? Like that's like embarrassing if you saw those. Yeah. Yeah. You're, you're not exaggerating. I mean, in the book you're like, no, I was literally the slowest. Like the coaches felt sorry for you. Yeah. Yeah. That's why, yeah. I remember the coach gave a pep talk once where he was kind of like, man, it used to be painful to watch you. I'm like, I guess that's cool. But at the time I was sort of like, thought that was a weird way to give a

pep talk. But, but it, so it, it led to it led to this stuff like you know I won the award at Columbia for the athlete who achieved significant athletic success in the face of unusual challenge and difficulty my challenge and difficulty just being that I was terrible yeah at first right but the good thing about being a walk-on was you know and I was paired with this guy who was already like a Canadian national level runner for training and he already had all these expectations and he had to score for the team and all this sort of stuff. Whereas I, nobody cared what I was doing or if I was scoring. So for the first two years, I could just blow, you know, my results just trying to find a

type of training that worked for me. And then when I hit that, I like took off like rocket fuel, right? And I flew by him and he like, he never beat me again. I ended as a university record holder and all these things. But I think it was a blessing in disguise that I got to have those first two years to experiment with myself because nobody cared if I, how I contributed. Right, right, right. Yeah. I mean, it's impossible for me to read your book and not reflect on, you know, the choices that I've made throughout my life and my own, you know, kind of strange career trajectory. And I'm somebody who,

and my own kind of strange career trajectory. And I'm somebody who, you live in DC, right? Like I grew up in DC, was terrible at all sports, found my way to swimming. And it was the one thing that I felt like I had some low level of innate talent and I just gravitated towards that. And very quickly specialized in this and just kind of doubled down.

And that was my lane. And this is an era in which on some level, I think the philosophy at the time, at least with respect to this sport, was kind of inherited from Soviet camp systems in terms of like how to develop an athlete. And there was a lot of pressure at a young age to start doing double workouts and you know i was a little bit later to that than some

of my peers but at 15 you know i was doing three to four hours of training every single day six days a week um and i i'm i'm a successful product of that system but also i now in retrospect looking back realize like how limiting it was in terms of my overall development, not just as an athlete, but as a human being, because it crowded out any space or time to really explore other things. Yeah. And I mean, at least what I've, and correct me if I'm wrong, but what I've read about you is you had a little bit of exploration before that where you tried these other sports and realized they weren't a good fit. Right. And then you found sort of some identity in swimming.

Right, so you had some sampling period early on. A little bit. Right, that it seems like- Enough to know immediately that I was bad. Right, but that's important, right? Because you can't intuit that stuff. Like you have to try it and reflect on it. And then it seems to me like you sort of continued

that sense of a sampling period, like later in life, like the things that you've ended up doing is same for me. My most important projects are never things that I saw coming. And in fact, like the things that you've ended up doing is same for me. My most important projects are never things that I saw coming. And in fact, when I was listening to maybe like a year ago, a podcast you and Julie put up from one of your retreats, it seemed like almost all the questions people were asking you were,

how do I figure out what I should be doing? Like some form of how do I figure out what I should be doing or how do I know? And so, you know, I think that that sampling period that you can be limited in a way that like precludes you from finding your match quality,

right? Like one of the quotes I loved in the book that stuck with me, because I don't know what I'm going to do next, right? But I'm not as like agitated about that as I used to be, was from this woman, Herminia Ibarra, who studies how people make successful career changes. And she said, we learn who we are in practice, not in theory. And what she means by that is she's,

you know, marshaled all this psychology research to show that we're not as good as we think at just like introspecting and understanding what will make us feel fulfilled, what we're good at, what we're interested in. We actually have to try things, then reflect on it in like a very, you know, deep way. If you can like actually take some real time for reflection then keep zigzagging. Right. There's so much sort of social and cultural pressure that pushes up against that though. For sure. We have all these judgments about what it means

to walk away from something or to quit something. And it impedes our ability to sample on that level. Yeah, no, definitely. And I think that's why one of the things that really, again, resonated with me about Herminia Ibarra's work was, she says, you know, we think of, you know, you're pressured not to change and you develop a new interest.

A lot of your kind of confidants say like, you know, don't get off track, don't get behind. And it's a really hard thing to do because it requires changing your identity, especially if you're really, you know, what you've done is a big part of yourself. You don't change your identity overnight. You have to sort of start

with these little keyhole experiments until something that you think was just an interest becomes like a real passion or a vocation. Right, yeah, you talk about the sunk cost mentality. Yeah. Right? Where it's like, I can't walk away from this. Like I experienced that with being a lawyer. It's like, I went to law school.

I incurred law school loans. My parents helped me out. Like, I can't walk away from this. I've invested way too much in this. What would that mean to my identity and all the other people that supported me and everything that went into this? Yeah.

No, and the sunk cost is so strong, right? There was one inventor in range named Jayshree Seth who became extremely successful. And what I thought was really interesting was she said when she started her master's program, she realized after a year she didn't like what she was studying, like some area of material science. And so she wanted to switch and she was told, don't switch, you'll get behind. She's like one year into a 50-year working life and they're saying, don't switch, you'll get behind. Then she does her PhD, decides she's not really into that either,

decides to switch when she goes into the professional world. And again, they're like, this is, you know, disaster for you. Right, you're a dilettante. Right. She goes to 3M and realizes that that sort of sense of insecurity forces her to like interview tons of her colleagues. She learns what they all do. And suddenly she knows all this like adjacent stuff to what she does and can assemble these teams of people who become incredibly productive. And she becomes one of their most decorated scientists ever. But if she had listened, you know, about being one year behind and how long is your, so I think that the trade-off for finding a better match with like a little bit of experimentation time, there's like almost,

you know, no question. Yeah. Well, we live in interesting times where there's this, you know, in interesting times where there's this, where it seems like across the board in all disciplines, everything is becoming more and more specialized. Like you don't go to medical school to just become a doctor. You have to find some very detailed niche and your education and experience is very structured and limited to that one thing, just because you went to medical school, if you're, whether you experience is very structured and limited to that one thing. Just because you went to medical school, if you're, whether you're an anesthesiologist or,

you know, you're working in a lab or whatever, like you're, the expansiveness of what you understand and study and experience on a day-to-day basis is very limited. And it's almost like if you look at cell biology, like we started as single cell organisms and become increasingly more and more complex. And if you look at planet Earth, we start with, you know, hunter-gatherer societies and then villages and these cities that when you're flying on an airplane and look down on them, look like biological organisms where every tiny human being plays one very discreet, specialized part in that. And your book is really a call to, it's almost like this call to go back to the way that we were, in not just a Renaissance way, but even all the way back to the beginning, where man had to learn lots of things in order to just simply survive. And now we've kind of lost our connection with that.

And survival means being very good at one very limited thing. And yet now we're in a time where with AI and the tech innovations that we're seeing that we really need to be more generalized in our approach to our lives. Yeah, I mean, you hit on a number of, I think like deeply profound things there.

So to go to sort of the first one in medicine, right? Where now it's super specialized. And that specialization sort of the first one in medicine, right, where now it's super specialized. And that specialization has been inevitable and beneficial in some ways, but like a cardiologist used to be specialized. Now to be specialized, a cardiologist has to work, let's say, on only cardiac valves, you know, the little floppy doors that let blood in and out of the heart. And that specialization has forced those practitioners to use what's called surrogate markers, where instead of looking at the body, the organism, right, they treat one tiny thing that they assume is a proxy for the outcome that they want. And so that cardiologist might do something to alter the cardiac valve. But what you really

care about is if people die from a heart attack or stroke at different rates, right? And it turns out in many cases, we treat these little surrogate markers. And then when you zoom out and look at what people actually care about, it's made no difference, right? They die of heart attack or stroke at different rates, right? And it turns out in many cases, we treat these little surrogate markers. And then when you zoom out and look at what people actually care about, it's made no difference, right? They die of heart attack and stroke at the same rate with a different cardiac valve or with lower blood pressure numbers or whatever.

And so this sort of reductionism that we've applied to the body, which is clearly a system, right? You mentioned single cells. We know a lot about how cells work, and yet like we're not even close to being able to predict the type of poetry that a person who's just made up of cells will write.

And so I think sort of a lack of recognition of how important the system, the emergent properties of the system are, has led to these sort of perverse effects in medicine. So one of the studies I cite has now just been replicated where if you are checked in for certain cardiac problems into a hospital, you're less likely to die if it's during the dates of a national cardiology conference. It's so amazing and counterintuitive.

Right. When all the cardiologists are at the conference, that's when you want to go in for your procedure. Right, and you're less likely to actually get some of the procedures that have low evidence levels, right, that the most specialized. So the specialized surgeons do have fewer complications when they do a procedure, but they also do the procedures in many, many cases

when they're not helpful, basically. And, you know, to our credit, one of the cardiologists, a cardiologist wrote an editorial about that study saying, my colleagues and I used to joke that this conference would be like the safest way to have, safest place to have a heart problem in the world. And this has really turned that on its head

and we need to like do some reflection. Yeah, the analogous example is that of the airline crews that when they're new and haven't worked together, that's when you're rife for the bad things to happen. Yeah. Yeah. So it was like some 70 some percent of commercial air problems occur on a crew's first day of working together and mostly on their first flight, right? Because if things go as planned, there's very well known and, and appropriately specialized roles for a flight crew. The problem is when their training is too,

um, sort of repetitive basically, which I would say in some ways fits like one of the original definitions of deliberate practice. Um, they lose the ability to improvise and they will stick to those, those practices that they've learned that have become automatic. Even when to like an outside observer who doesn't even know anything, it becomes like ridiculous to do that.

Yeah, you become very rigid in your processes and thinking patterns. Yeah, yeah. And there's this, one of the sort of a summary, one of the researchers in range I interviewed sort of summarized a body of work for me about problem solving in a way that I thought was very eloquent. She said basically amounts to breadth of training predicts breadth of transfer. Transfer being your ability to take your skills and knowledge and apply them to a new problem that you haven't quite seen, so something unexpected happens. And breadth of training is the diversity of the problem types that you face in training will predict your ability to do that. And if you're facing sort of a narrow range of problem types, then you'll learn what's called using procedures knowledge, where you learn how to execute something really well.

If you're facing this incredible diversity, you learn this more making connections knowledge, where you're learning how to match a strategy to a type of problem. And that's the kind of knowledge you need when it comes to improvising. Right. One of the really interesting things that you explore

is this difference between kind and wicked environments, which kind of informs the Fed available, next steps are clear, goals are clear, patterns repeat, rules never change. And when you do something, you get automatic feedback that is both immediate and fully accurate. So in kind learning environments, basically by doing something and being cognitively engaged, you get better just with experience. On the other end of the spectrum are wicked learning environments, where all the information may not be clear.

Human behavior is often involved. People may not be waiting for each other to take turns. The next steps may not be clear. Rules may change. Patterns may not repeat. You may or may not get feedback. It may not be automatic. It may be delayed.

It may be inaccurate. In some cases, it may even teach you the wrong lessons. So one of Hogarth's examples of a very wicked learning environment was this New York City physician who would palpate patients' tongues, like feel around their tongue with his hands. And by doing that, he could predict weeks

before they showed a single symptom that they would develop typhoid, like over and over. And he became incredibly prominent for doing this. And as one of his colleagues later observed, using only his hands, he was a more productive carrier of typhoid than even typhoid Mary. So he was transferring it to these patients' using only his hands, he was a more productive carrier of typhoid than even typhoid Mary. So he was transferring it to these patients' tongues

with his hands. And so his accurate predictions were reinforcing the exact wrong lesson. And so that's a really wicked learning environment when the feedback enforces the wrong lesson. We're not, you know, most of us aren't in that wicked of an environment either, but the work that we do,

it's kind of increasingly the kind world stuff can be, is what AI is taking over. And the wicked world where we can't count on repetitive patterns is where most of us are operating or will be forced to operate. Yeah, where the variables are innumerable and the dynamic is always shifting. And you just can't control the environment in the way that you can, for example, with a golf swing. Yeah. Right? Yeah.

And I mean, Hogarth, so Hogarth said, pretty early in the book, so tennis is more dynamic than golf, right? The patterns change a little bit. The game speeds up as you get to higher levels, these things like that. But even that, I sort of had to move on from because Hogarth specifically talks about tennis,

which was total surprise to me. But he says, you know, most of us are actually in the work that's most important for us, playing Martian tennis, where you see people doing stuff, but nobody's told you you the rules it's up to you to deduce them and they could change at any time without notice yeah that's interesting coaching is uh is a big part of this as well like you if you have, in sports, it's very binary, right? Like there's an athlete and there's a coach and the coach is always there to provide feedback.

So adjustments are always being made. But then we go out into the world and do whatever we do and we're not in a situation or an environment where we're getting that kind of or an environment where we're getting that kind of constant feedback so that we can make those kinds of adjustments. So talk a little bit about how that plays out in your thesis. Yeah. And even if we do have those coaches, most of us aren't in that sort of zero-sum sports world, right? So one of the things I realized after my first book, after I started, to my surprise, getting invited to these sort of more general performance conferences, not just sports, was that sometimes I felt we were making poor extrapolations from sports in certain ways.

Because sports are zero-sum, and they're very easily quantifiable, and the feedback is easier to give in a lot of ways, or to perceive. And in many cases, it's just automatic to what you're doing. In the wider world, that's not necessarily the case, right? So even having a coach, which I think is valuable, you're not going to be able to expect perfect feedback. But I do think it can help a lot. So one of the, I'm like, I'm a new parent, for example, and I've been getting a lot of questions.

I wasn't like trying to write for parents so much. This is a parenting book in many ways. That's something I definitely want to talk to you about. That's what I'm starting to realize. And so people are like asking me for parenting advice. I'm like, well, with my four months of experience, let me tell you how it goes. And so what I've sort of started to think of my role

as like combining the things from this book where say, okay, you learn who you are in practice, not in theory. You have to search for your match quality, zigzag. And then you end up still in kind of a wicked world. There's something I mentioned sort of briefly called talent-based branching that the army started using when they were having problems with retention. And they had this strict sort of upper out structure

for people's careers, for their high potential future officers. And that wasn't really working with retention. And it started not working primarily since the 90s, basically. And so first they throw money at people. And the people who were going to stay took it. People who were going to leave left anyway. Half a billion dollars of taxpayer money down the drain.

So they start other programs, like one called talent-based branching, where they say, okay, instead of saying, here's your career track, go up or out. They say, we're going to pair you with a coach. Here's some possible career tracks. Try one. The coach will help you reflect on how that fits your interests and talents. What else is available? Then try another and another and another. And you'll keep sort of triangulating what's a good fit for you. And that turned out to be a great retention strategy for them. I think because match quality is so important to us, that even more than money, getting someone in doing something

that emphasizes their talents and their interests is so important. So I view my role as a parent as kind of, you know, other than keeping them alive and all that stuff, the details, is as like that coach in the talent-based branching process. I say, can I facilitate a lot of opportunities

for you to try and then sort of help you reflect? Because you have to do that proactively, that reflection. That doesn't just happen. So it's like a prime trait of so-called self-regulatory learners who end up learning a lot about themselves. You have to actually like proactively do it and then help him reflect on those experiences.

So he takes the maximum amount of signal and learning from each one of those experiences. So that's sort of how I conceive my role. Yeah, I mean, you, as a parent of four kids, like it's always been, it's not because I read a parenting book. It just seemed, it just seemed obvious to me that the job is to expose them to as many things as possible and then pay close attention to what they gravitate towards, what they naturally seem to be inclined to do, and then fill the gap, like show up and support that and then be neutral.

Like if they decide, I don't want to do that anymore, like that's okay. You know, I grew up in an environment where, you know, grit and perseverance took center stage and it was like, no, you stay in it. And as successful as, you know, that made me in certain respects, like I said earlier, it limited me. And so my whole thing is like, I'm not emotionally attached, right? Like, let's just pay attention, do this, do this, do this, and just notice and be okay

with whatever the kid decides they wanna do or don't wanna do. Yeah, I mean, but that feels like it's not nearly as clean advice as like pick the thing for them and drive. And I do think it's important to note that we are, like the Tiger Woods story is probably the most impactful development story, you know, in modern writing. And the Mozart is also another big one. But I think as I was sort of looking into those, I think we're telling them a little bit wrong.

Like Tiger has said, my father never asked me to play golf. Never. It was the child's interest that matters, not the father's. Yeah, but his dad didn't have to say that. Right. Because his actions spoke louder than whatever came out of his mouth. Exactly. And I looked back at some of like Mozart's letters.

I found these accounts where musicians came over and visited his house when he was a kid. And Mozart wants to play with them. He wants to play violin, second violin. And his father says like, you've not taken any lessons. Go away. You can't play. And he starts crying. And so one of the other musicians goes in another room with him and says, I'll play with them. He wants to play violin, second violin. And his father says like, you've not taken any lessons, go away. You can't play. And he starts crying. And so one of the other musicians goes in another room with him and says, I'll play with him. So he stops crying. And then they hear second violin part coming from the other room and they come in and watch and little Wolfgang's playing. And the letter says, it's translated letter says, little Wolfgang was so emboldened

by our applause to insist that he could also play the first violin. And so then he goes and play. And that's when his father starts responding to this and creating, you know, all these opportunities. So I don't think we have to be worried about missing Tiger and Mozart, as rare as those people are. I think you still have a better chance if you expose them to a bunch of stuff and maybe one of those things catches fire, but they're not like father manufactured. They were facilitated once they showed this intense and unusual interest. Yeah. I mean, the other thing with that approach, I mean, every parent wants to think that their kid is a genius, a Mozart or a Tiger or whatnot. I mean, these things are so rare. And what happens

more often than not is even in the instance of great talent, you end up with a Todd Marinovich or an Andre Agassi, that even in the most successful test case, there are all these psychological problems that manifest later in life. And we've seen this with Tiger, you know, even in the best example being Tiger, he has this crisis, you know, at this stage in his life, because, you know, I mean, just as an armchair psychologist looking at that, it's like, he has all these, he has childhood trauma, he's got all these unresolved issues, and he's been in this very narrow lane for so long. He hasn't fully developed as a human being. And at some point, you know, the explosion becomes inevitable.

Yeah. Yeah. And so I think maybe he had to do some of that growing that you would normally hope to do a little bit earlier, you know, on a very public stage. Yeah. So he's done it and now he's come back. But, you know, you see it with Michael Phelps as well, you know, the same thing and the great sort of comeback, but as a whole human being,

because that pause had to occur in order for the maturation to take place. Yeah, and I think that's an important thing to keep in mind. Like we are whole human beings, right? And we know, even if we just restrict it to athleticism, we know like the way to develop the best 10-year-old athlete in most sports is not the same as the way to develop the best 20-year-old athlete. And I think that's sort of a decent analogy for the whole person, which is the way to optimize the

things, the goals that are being set for kids is not the same ways to optimize their long-term development. I mean, that's really one of the underlying themes of the whole book, whether it's like learning math, sports, or sort of developing interests, is that the things that you can do to cause the apparent most rapid short term success can sometimes undermine your long-term development. Right, yeah, that's really the core message of the whole thing. Like, do you want the immediate satisfaction of rapid progress early in life, or are you looking to set someone up for long-term success? Yeah, and I have to say,

I found that deeply, very deeply counterintuitive, right? Because I was very like achievement oriented when I was young too. So it was definitely something I sort of wrestled with, convincing myself for sure. Well, the best example, my favorite example in the book is Van Gogh. I mean, it just goes on and on and on with all the things that this guy was trying to do before he kind of found his thing. Yeah. And talk about grit, right? He had this,

every stop that he goes on, the people around him comment on his work ethic. So he's first this great student at a boarding school, but he doesn't like living away from home. So he drops out, then he's an art dealer. And he writes, his uncle had this fabulously successful art dealership. He gives him a job, and he writes his parents, says, I'll never have to look for work again. You know, pretty soon he has disagreements with his boss. He gets laid off. Then he goes to be a teacher, kind of likes that, but doesn't totally work out. Decides to be a pastor, follow in his father's footsteps. He makes a hat with lights on it so he can stay up later, like with candles, then read later than his peers and get up earlier than them.

And he copies whole texts by hand. And he keeps saying like, you know, my advantage will be my work ethic. But like Latin and Greek aren't coming easily to him. And he leaves that and he keeps bouncing around and becomes a bookseller. And there his colleagues left records of his endurance, again, where when the bookstore flooded, he saved a lot of the store by just carrying armloads of books by hand for hours and hours. And he bounces between being then a pastor, and then he kind of fails out of that, and then a catechist, so he's just kind of itinerant, unlicensed creature

in the coal country, this area where the workers are so downtrodden, they refer to ground level as up there in hell above the mine. And he flames out at pretty much everything. He's living in the coal country, has no possessions, no achievements. He's coming up on being 30 years old and decides to try to document the life around him, buys a book called The Guide to the ABCs of Drawing and starts sort of trying to draw the life around him.

Isn't that good at it at first, but sort of likes it and realizes when he turns his gaze on nature, he's got something there. Sort of tries to learn watercolors. Doesn't work. The guy listed on his Wikipedia page for his education is like a cousin that he spent three weeks trying to study watercolors with before the cousin was like, you don't have a delt, you had enough hand.

And he'd been told early in life that he wasn't a good drawer. That's right. He couldn't do it. Well, even, I mean, early when he was 33, I think he got, he tried to take a formal course because his brother basically said, like, you have to try some real training or I'm not going to send you money anymore. And he finishes last in the class competition and is told to go down to a class with 10

year olds, right? But he keeps bouncing between these experiments. And one day he takes some oil paints out to a beach in a storm. It's getting sandblasted and he has to run in and out of cover and slap paint on this first oil painting, slap paint on the canvas. And that sort of rids him of this crippling perfectionism where he's going really slow. And the next letter to his brother says, painting has turned out to be easier than I expected. And then he continues to pinball from one experiment to another until he sort of merges all those experiments in the last two years of his life and just becomes disruption on a massive scale. Like he changes what artists do from thenceforth.

It's like the bridge between, from realism to modern art. And so it's an interesting kind of case study of grit or not because he worked so hard at everything he did, but then he would also end up like quitting these things until he found a fit for himself. Almost the perfect combination of grit and the ability to let go.

Yeah, yeah. So I think, you know, in range, I talk a little bit about this economist who sort of modeled the way to find your match quality in the world. And it's very much like Van Gogh. So I sort of described him as this match quality searching algorithm

where you dive into something and try to get very much like Van Gogh. So I sort of described him as this match quality searching algorithm where you dive into something and try to get as much signal as you can. And so Van Gogh would do that because he'd dive into everything so wholeheartedly, which meant it was often difficult for him, but he would get a very quick signal about if it fit him. And then you keep zigzagging until you find sort of the thing where you can uniquely feel fulfilled.

So some aspect of what you write about is an unraveling of Angela Duckworth's work with grit. I mean, you recognize the importance of it, but also you kind of unravel her thesis a little bit. And her book has been so fundamental and instrumental in informing professional lives and it's so heralded. So explain a little bit about where you kind of fall on grit. Yeah, and can I say, by the way,

some of my critique of grit in the book is largely to her and her colleagues' credit taken from their papers, which just kind of did not get into the public consciousness. Right, like you're drawing different conclusions from the same work that that book came from. Yeah, and based on some of the stuff in their papers. But so the most famous study is of West Point cadets,

U.S. Military Academy cadets, going through what's called Beast Barracks, this rigorous six-week orientation. And GRIT was found to be a better predictor. The GRIT survey, 12-question survey, half the points are awarded for resilience and half for consistency of interests. And grit turned out to be a better predictor than whole candidate score, which is these more traditional

measures, test scores, athleticism, all this stuff. And most cadets make it through BEAST anyway. And so that's a good thing to know, that that grit is important for that. But there are a couple issues to keep in mind. One is you have what statisticians call severe restriction of range. So basically these cadets were selected for their whole candidate score. And when you do that, when you select people for something in that way, you basically exaggerate the effect of other variables. So it'd be like if I study what causes basketball skill and do my study with only centers in the NBA and find, well, only practice got them to the NBA, not practice plus being seven feet tall because I've selected a group that's already pre-screened for height. So there's this restriction NBA and find, well, only practice got them to the NBA, not practice plus being seven feet tall,

because I've selected a group that's already pre-screened for height. So there's this restriction of range issue, which Duckworth in her paper says, this pre-selection means that we can't really extrapolate this to groups outside of this study, which is of course exactly what has happened. And not only that, but like life is not a six week orientation, right? And so you've pre-selected people for a very specific short-term goal. They're already in the finals of the National Spelling Bee. They're already in West Point. And so if you open that timeline a little bit and look at those cadets down the line, since the 1990s, about half of those very gritty cadets who get through West Point, get through Beast and get through West Point, have been quitting the Army almost on the day that they are allowed.

And that's a more modern phenomenon. And so, you know, some officials in the Army felt that this was, the Army had developed, West Point had developed a grit problem overnight. Like one high-ranking official who suggested defunding West Point because it was, quote, an institution that taught its cadets

to get out of the Army, which obviously is not the case. But what turned out was actually the case is that the Army kept this upper out work structure, which worked in a more industrialized world where organizations were highly specialized and you faced repetitive challenges over and over and over. And so there are huge barriers to lateral movement. But as the knowledge economy allowed lateral movement and put a priority on people with knowledge creation skills and problem solving these broader skills,

and you can have lateral movements. And by the way, from age 18 to your late 20s is the fastest time of personality change in your life. So the idea that people, these cadets were developing new interests shouldn't be a surprise. And so they started leaving because they didn't have control over trying to find a good fit for themselves in the army. So they left and went outside. And that's why the army started these other programs to give the highest potential officers more autonomy over their career trajectory because they realized they didn't develop a grit problem overnight.

They developed a match quality problem overnight. And by the way, the day before this book came out, Angela Duckworth's weekly newsletter was called Summer is for Sampling. You know, maybe this is a coincidence, maybe it isn't. Oh, wow. But Summer is for Sampling where she says like, this is when kids should sample a bunch of stuff because, of course,

you shouldn't be too gritty until you figure out what you should be doing. And that's what I did in my career for a decade first, and that's what everyone should do. So, whether or not it's a coincidence, it's wonderful timing, and I'm glad she shared that. Yeah, and in the example that you just gave, it sort of dovetailed also with the rise of the information age and, you know, more opportunities, you know, abounding for these people that made staying in the military less attractive. Yeah. Because there were greater opportunities outside of it. Exactly. knowledge economy opened up this lateral mobility where there are, you know, again, when we were in sort of a kinder learning environment where you're facing the same challenges in the work world,

wasn't changing as quickly, experience in a specific task was so important that it was a huge barrier to someone coming in from the side. But now that's not the case. And so obviously cadets en masse have sort of realized their opportunities and taken them. Yeah. When I look at how that kind of sports world intersects with the business world, and now these worlds are the things that you write about, going back to this idea of coaching and feedback, this is something that we get in sports. It's very direct. In the work environment, not only do we not have coaches that are providing that kind of feedback, we're in environments where you're not necessarily encouraged to succeed. In fact, most people would prefer that you not succeed.

So after a meeting, you're not told like, hey, do this next time. It'll be better. They're like, well, we're just going to weed that guy out, and I'm going to step on top of him and move up the chain. And so people are living out their careers really not connected to the results of their labor in a way that's most favorable for their upward mobility. No, I mean, I think that's an absolutely apt observation. And again, I think it's also one of the points where I sort of wanted to respond to some of sports as an analogy for the work world, because we don't have to view the work world as zero sum in that way, in the way that like, you know, a football game has to be zero sum. Like if someone's going to win, someone else has to lose. Or if someone else gets a certain number

of catches, someone else is basically going to get fewer. And I think that's sort of a problematic mindset in the work world, but you're totally right. Right. Let's talk about talent transfer a little bit. This is the idea that when you are a generalist for a period of time, that the way that we learn certain things can inform and apply to other skills. So it's really about learning how to learn as much as it is about learning how to do a specific thing. Yeah, yeah. Is that accurate?

Yeah, definitely. That ability to transfer. And so to put that, this is one area where sports actually has been a more appropriate analogy in some ways. So some countries like Australia and the UK, when they were going to host the Olympics, they sort of looked at some of this science that said, oh, actually maybe we should let people shuffle themselves around and search for things and started these, what they call talent transfer programs,

which essentially was in some ways kind of the anti-10,000 hours school of thought. Not in the sense that you don't need a lot of deliberate practice to be good, but in the sense that here are people who are older, you know, they're old enough that if they haven't made the national team, we should probably say, you should go do something else. But just allowed them to try other sports. And both countries got gold medalists out of those. People who had done a bunch of other sports

hadn't quite found their fit. But they had learned these sort of broader skills. And actually the Australian Institute of Sport, when they were doing that, compiled this data that showed people who had played at least three invasion sports, meaning like it's real time, you know, not taking turns, but you have to, people are trying to get past you

or balls trying to get by you, those sorts of things, will then more quickly pick up subsequent sport skills going forward. So it might be a little bit like, you, those sorts of things, will then more quickly pick up subsequent sports skills going forward. So it might be a little bit like, you know, growing up bilingual, where I think a lot of the, I was going to write more about multilingualism, but I couldn't convince myself that a lot of the popular science is actually correct. But what did seem reasonable to me was work that showed that people who grew up bilingual are better able to learn a third language, even if it's like made up by the scientists in an experiment

without being told the rules. And those are the skills that you really need. So to put it in another context of math, so this one chapter, it's more about like the classroom kind of learning. There was just a study that came out that I didn't have, it came out too recently for me to put it in range, or I certainly would have,

because it gets to this issue called interleaving. That's one of the learning techniques I talk about. So in this study, seventh grade math classrooms were randomly assigned to types of studying math. Some got, they would have problem, do blocked practice, problem type A, A, A, A, B, B, B, B, B, C, C, C, C. The other would get never see the same problem twice, always different. And that mixed, that interleave, that's called interleave when you mix it up, that group would be more frustrated. They rate their learning as less.

They'll rate their teacher as worse. And then come test time when both groups have to see problems they've never seen before, that group obliterates the other group. The effect size was on the order of taking a kid from the 50th to the 80th percentile. I'm being selective in what percentiles I choose because if it was higher, the move wouldn't sound as dramatic. Because what they're learning is not just how to execute procedures for a certain type of problem, but how to match a type of thinking strategy to the structure of a problem. And that's the kind of transferable knowledge that you learn if you're sort of a good generalist. Yeah, creative problem solving as opposed to just learning how to solve a specific problem

in a specific context. Exactly. And that's why one frustrating experience I had in reporting range was when I was spending some time with a woman named Deidre Gentner, who is probably the world's expert in using analogies from like outside of a domain to help you problem solve whatever you're facing. And she came up with this study to make a long story short where she was giving Northwestern students

these types of problems and they had to essentially try to solve them by identifying like the deep structure of the problem. And students could do pretty well in their specific major, but most didn't do well outside of their major, even if the structure of the problem was similar, just different features. But the students who did the best

were these ones in this program called the Integrated Science Program, where they had no major. They just had all the, they were supposed to dabble in like all of the sciences and they did the best on this. But then when I went around and asked other faculty about that program,

you know, why not expand it? They were like, well, because those kids get behind because they don't have a major. I'm like, here you have on your faculty, probably the world's expert in this type of problem solving saying, here are the students we're equipping the best for doing it. And her own peers are saying, not good. They're getting behind. I'm kind of like, that's just giving me a headache. That's the cultural and social pressure that's butting up against this, right? There's so much momentum behind the way that we've always done it. put the world back together again. But if you're just in one department, your incentive is to have those customers, right? You don't really care about the others. Or if you're a, when I was

living in Brooklyn up until not long ago, there was a U7 travel soccer team that met nearby me. Like, I don't think anybody thinks that six-year-olds can't find good enough competition in a city of 9 million people, right? That they have to travel. It's like, those kids are customers for someone, right? And they need to keep them from the other sports, right? that they have to travel, it's like those kids are customers for someone, right? And they need to keep them from the other sports, right? And if their incentive is only to win the six-year-olds, whatever it is, then they're just responding to their incentives because their incentive isn't to develop the best 20 or 30 or 40-year-old. Right. Soccer is a really interesting test case example because it's such a massive participation sport in the United States.

And yet, and on some level, it's sort of a generalist thing. I think it prepares you to play all different kinds of sports and be an athlete in a multivariate way. And yet, despite the massive numbers of young people that participate in this sport, we don't seem to have the best system to generate the best teams that can compete at the highest level against, you know, European and South American teams. I mean, that's changing a little bit now,

but how do you make sense of that? Yeah, on the men's side, on the women's side, obviously. Yeah, the women are crushing it. But, and the women's side, I mean, I think is a testament to opportunities, right? If you go around the rest of the world, like American women have much better opportunities in soccer than the rest of the world. And it's, and that shows.

So hopefully the American women won't crush it as well at some point in the future because other countries will have as many opportunities for women to play. But I think, and sometimes people say, well, for on the men's side, our best athletes just are playing other sports. And I don't accept that explanation. Because if you look at even the number of registered players we have, it's like way more than countries that do way better. Yeah, it's crazy. But what we don't really have, but I think are starting to sort of develop in other ways, is like the street soccer culture, right? If you go to Brazil, the kids are playing futsal, where they have the small ball,

it stays on the ground, it's kind of heavier. One day they're playing on sand, one day they're playing on cobblestones, different shapes, surface, different number of people playing on a basketball court, whatever. So it's kind of a different game all the time. And I think, because I think the playing of multiple sports is much more a proxy just for your general diversity of movement and problem solving. I don't think it matters that like you put on a basketball jersey instead of a soccer jersey um and so they have that they grew up with that kind of like more general kind of problem solving instead of this more formal um soccer playing that a lot of like americans have gone up with practice right and

even even so after my first book when when i added the afterword and wrote about specialization i got a lot of feedback that was like you know saying that athletes who go on to become elite usually have this less structured early beginning. Feedback from people saying, maybe you're World Cup and showed that, in fact, the members that went onto the national team played a lot less, way less deliberate, much more unstructured activity when they were kids, dabbled in other sports. Not until they were 22 did they start participating in more organized soccer than these high-level amateur players.

In France, they started decades ago. They just won the World Cup. They started decades ago reforming their pipeline in a way where a French kid who's in their development pipeline probably plays half as many organized games as an American kid of the same age. And they vary the challenge.

They play these small-sided games, a different size pitch. And one of the guys who helped design their system has this saying, he said, there's no remote control. And what he meant is the coaches shouldn't try to micromanage the players. You want this like organic problem solving and play. And so they restricted the time when the coaches are even like allowed to talk during those, those smaller number of games. Yeah. Well, what I intuit from that is

it's, it's a looser, it's a, it's a cultural thing where it's just ingrained into the way people are living on a day-to-day basis. It's not laden with the structure and the pressures that often lead to burnout and making kids want to do something else, right? Like, they allow these young people to fall in love with it, and that becomes, like, deeply rooted. And I think that provides the foundation for longer term success. Yeah, no, I totally agree. And by the way, our women, some of our best women, you know, Alex Morgan and others did play a variety of sports and didn't specialize until later, but I completely agree. So I think it's, it's our approach in the U S has been with these like very specific development programs where what you're talking about and what I think is more important

is this sort of broader culture that the sport exists within. And that's how you really develop a large number of these people who can become creative players at the top level. Right. A lot of what you talk about is kind of an antidote to the tiger mom philosophy. And you even point out like, what was her daughter?

Her daughter's name was like Lulu. Lulu was like, she quit violin at 13, right? Nobody remembers that part of the book though. That's the whole thing though, right? Like if she quits at 13, then you've lost the game. Yeah, nobody remembers that part, right? So on page one of the book, and so page one on the book was the start of her,

the excerpt of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother in the Wall Street Journal. And it became the Wall Street Journal's most commented on article ever, you know, both very positive and very negative. And on page one, she says, here are the secrets to raising stereotypically successful kids. And she assigns one of her kids violin, you know, and presides over like five hours of practice a day or whatever. And then later in the book, she says, her daughter says to her,

you picked it, not me, and quits, right? And this is like, in study of 1,200 musicians, the most common reason for quitting was the instrument the kid wanted to play is different than the one they are playing. And I give her credit for being reflective about that. She didn't have to put that in the book, but nobody remembers that part.

That's interesting. Yeah, I mean, the individual has to take ownership of this path. And maybe the parent can perform some kind of inception to make that happen. But short of that, when it's the, there's the tiger mom thing, it's like, this is about the parent, not about the kid.

This is about the parent living vicariously through their child to succeed on a level that they couldn't or whatever gets projected onto that child. And you know, it's generally a recipe for disaster. Yeah, and I think we've seen that now come out in these incredibly perverse ways, right? With like this college admissions scandal stuff that happened where you're sort of like, you know,

there's a level of, okay, I can understand how a parent might do this because they don't want their kid to fall behind even if they're not thinking about, you know, there's a level of, okay, I can understand how a parent might do this because they don't want their kid to fall behind, even if they're not thinking about, you know, what the kid might want to do, like getting them ahead in something that the kid doesn't really like. But that college admissions scandal went to a level where I'm saying the only thing, the only way I can make sense of this is that like your kids are jewelry that you're trying to show off. Because this makes, I can't even figure out another context to make sense of that. I think it's also indicative of, you know, what I've heard described as like this snowplow parent, this snowplow culture where, you know,

parents feel like they just have to clear this path for their kid in order to succeed. I don't think it's such a good idea. You know, it's running at cross purposes with, you know, the kind of grit and the love of learning and the exploration and the spirit that we wanna instill in our young people. So like, how do you look at like,

what's going on culturally with respect to parenting and how to like find a better way? Yeah, I mean, I think, again, I think systems are kind of set up in, I think a lot of our systems are sort of still have like the residuals of like the industrial era sort of, because like our education system has a lot of the hallmarks of like Taylorism and industrial management science where it's like workers are going to face repetitive tasks. They need to have a certain level of certain types of skills. And here's how we're going to turn them out,

just like we do the stuff in industry. It's amazing, given all the science, how little has changed in our educational system. It's true. It's true. And so there's a part in the book where I talk about how everyone thinks like education is getting worse, right? They're like, it was better in my day. And actually it's not the case.

Like if you look at, like there's no question that students today have a better mastery of basic skills than like their parents did. But if you compare tests from a generation or two ago to tests now the kids have to take, it's like previously they could just memorize formulas. Now they're asked for these like much more difficult problem solving tactics. So it's not that school has gotten worse. It's just that the challenge has changed so rapidly to prepare people for this more dynamic work world. And I think we should sort of embrace some experimentation within that and realize that like we should move a little bit away. Not that there aren't basic skills that everyone should learn, but that maybe part of developing

young people should also be facilitating some of that experimentation and helping them find the place where they fit instead of just like kind of putting everyone through that same conveyor belt. So given everything that you've learned and studied, if you were suddenly vested with overhauling our educational system at, you know, maybe the high school level or the junior high school level, like what would that look like? Like what would be the systems that you would put into place? Yeah.

I mean, I think I would try to do some of like what Deidre Gentner said, where I would sort of try to teach this types of mental models for attacking problems in different disciplines. So it would take different in the science and the humanities and history and try to kind of have those connected in a more integrated system so that people diversify their mental models. But I think I might be willing to experiment with stuff like,

because I think so much of what kids get in school is of so little use to so many of them and not not to say that again there aren't certain things they should learn but that i would almost be willing to like um come up with you know have have a year or something dedicated to experimenting and like randomize them to learn a little bit about different disciplines there were these i i cut something from range but was looking at these studies of what's called career academies, where kids who are probably not going to go to college get into these programs where they still have to learn the normal high school stuff, but they also are sort of introduced to types of work in the world where, you know, some vocational training

or internship or exposure. And one of the interesting things about the career academies was those kids end up doing better, even if they go totally away from the thing that they were getting that education in. And I think it suggests, one, that they end up having these productive interactions with an adult in their life. And also they get some signal about like what work is like and what's possible and if that's a thing they want to do or not. So I think I would facilitate much more sort of of that kind of talent-based branching where it's like,

let's expose you to some things and see like what feels like a fit in terms of interestingness and, and your, you know, and your abilities. I'm encouraged by this kind of shift in perspectives about careers that we're seeing with millennials and, and, and even the generation beneath them in the sense that, you know, look, the idea that you're gonna join this corporation and be there for your lifetime has gone the way of the dodo. That doesn't exist anymore. And we're in this increasingly more and more freelance-based economy,

where young people are interested less in security and more in experience, and are more likely to kind of gravitate and move around and try all different kinds of things and work remotely and travel and do this. And to me, reading your book and understanding where you're coming from, that seems to be an encouraging signal of people that are going to be more, you know, have all of these general experiences that are going to inform more well-rounded people who will be better at these kinds of problem-solving skills. Yeah. And I think also it allows you to

make your career and the stuff you do more reflective of who you are, right? Because even most very specialized people, like they're doing that because it's an advantage. It's not like necessarily they're like self-actualization. But also I think if you believe in any kind of market principles, this is a market for human capital. And the less friction we have to people trying these different things and cobbling together these different roles, I think the more productive you make those people. The phrase I like to keep in my head is,

when you get fit, it looks like grit. I think there's some evidence that grit is a state, not a trait, meaning that it's not just an innate characteristic, right? Like I was a college runner. Some of the people who were the grittiest people I've ever seen on the track were the biggest chickens I've ever seen in the classroom and vice versa.

And it has a lot to do with your context. And then when you get someone in the right fit, their behavior will look like grit, right? So if we can let people do a little bit of that triangulating, I think we end up with more productive people. Yeah. There's a weird thing where it seems like on paper that a high-performing athlete who understands the importance of diligence and focus and grit and perseverance and knows how to work hard and achieve a goal, that that would translate seamlessly into the workforce.

And that was not my experience trying to make that transition from athlete to professional. And more often than not, with high-performing athletes that I know, they experience this period of confusion and loss and they just can't translate this amazing skillset that they have into the workplace.

And you have some cool, interesting thoughts about that, but let's explore that for a moment. Yeah, no, I think, and you know, I know a lot of retired pro athletes, and that is absolutely the norm, with very few exceptions. Like maybe some guys go into, you know, like sports broadcasting right away, but those that don't, I think.

Right, when you're just a civilian overnight. Right, right, that there's this like incredible period of identity change that needs to happen. And they do have skills that they can use, right? There are things that they can take that they can use, but they have, there are also things like that they haven't developed and an identity that sort of they haven't fleshed out in those ways.

And so I think it can be like really traumatic. You know, there's a form of that that sort of partly prompted me to write the book, not with athletes, but with these people who had been given scholarships by the Pat Tillman Foundation. These were former military or some current military and military spouses

who were given these scholarships to aid career changes, essentially. And one of my college training partners was a Tillman scholar. He was given one of these scholarships. I was a Tillman scholar. He was given one of these scholarships. I got invited to speak to a tiny group of them. It was like 15 or 20 people. And because my buddy thought that like this sort of talking about late specialization in sports would resonate with them because they're career changing. And I sort of said, well,

I better like also put some non-sports stuff in it, you know, because they're not athletes. And that's sort of what led to the first research and looking in other domains. And I sort of tacked that onto the end of the talk. And they like, every one of them like came up to me after and, and, you know, were saying like, this is so good to hear. A guy in ex-Navy SEAL who was in grad school at Dartmouth and Harvard at the same time sent me this note saying, later saying, we were so relieved to hear this. Like they all feel so behind, not only in their profession,

but also in this identity shift. And they have these incredible experiences and these incredible leadership and problem solving and determination skills, but they've been made to feel so far behind, right? And so it was odd to me almost that it was like catharsis for them to hear that like, no, these are good things that you've done.

Like these will help you. It's just, but it's gonna take a period of transition because your identity doesn't change overnight. Interesting. Where does talent come into play here? I mean, this is something that you talked about in Sports Gene, but like how do you square talent with all these other ideas that you're juggling?

Yeah, and I mean, I obviously, having written my first book, think that talent is an important thing. And I should say the proposal for my first book did not think that. Like I thought it was gonna be a 10,000 hours book. And I was, after I spent a year looking in that literature, convinced otherwise, but that both talent

and environment are both very important. But I think there are certain studies like outside of the sports world that I've followed over time where you can see that when people have ability tilts, where they're sort of better at certain things than others, they can start to triangulate that over time and they become more satisfied and more productive when they get in a place that like tends to match their abilities. That's not to say everyone has

to like things that they're good at by any stretch of the imagination, but obviously a lot of other things come with that positive feedback and these sorts of things. And so I think we underestimate how important it is to try to find where our talents might most fit. Part of those talents just being voraciously interested in something and then you're going to work really hard at it. And if you don't believe in talent at all, then you should do the 10,000 hours, right? Because it's just pick something and go crazy at it, right?

We could randomly assign people to what they're doing. But I don't think we can randomly assign people to what they're doing, but I don't think we can randomly assign people to what they're doing because of our different talents and interests. And so I think it's incredibly important to find that place where you fit, where you will display the characteristics of grit. But some people are just voraciously hard,

are hardwired to be voraciously interested in things. And some people are not. Like, is this a teachable thing? Like, I guess if you have an amazing teacher that can like light a spark in you, it's one thing, but there are certain people that just are expansive in their curiosity and others aren't. Yeah. No, I mean, some people just become polymaths, right? Like in, in, in one chapter of range, actually write about these studies of inventors where like you can classify inventors by some of them are, if you look at their patent history, there are 450 different patent classes and of technology. And you can see some have drilled into like one or two areas.

Some have spread their work across a huge number of areas. So those specialists in general, and they both make important contributions. Then there are people who have done not that many different classes and haven't gone that deep in one, and they don't make very big contributions. So they're not all that interested in anything. And then there are the polymaths who either start in an area with some depth

and then become really broad, or start broad and zero in on an area of depth. And those are the people that make the biggest contributions, right? Who are sort of polymathic. And I don't think that's, you know, I think they're following their interests and they just have these sort of innately voracious interests. Yeah. Their talent is their curiosity. Right. Totally. Totally. And I think that, and again, looking at that patent research,

the impact of these broader people has been exacerbated since about the mid eighties, again, in the sort of as communication technology has allowed information to be disseminated more quickly and more thoroughly they can combine they can gather up things from all these different domains and make combinations of knowledge um you know so sometimes their patents will like have a dozen classes listed in like one thing that they're doing um and so i think this is a particularly good era for really curious people because so much information is available and you can combine things in a way that the people who are more narrow can't do. But if you're not that curious, someone actually asked me recently at an event who was saying, how do I broaden my mental models and get this kind of thinking and problem solving if I'm not really that innately curious of a person?

And that's a really hard question. But you can assign tasks. You can just say, read books. You know, I mean, eventually you'll come across something that hopefully would light a spark in that person. Totally. And also, and it's all a matter of degree, right? Like I'm going to continue kind of triangulating my interests through my whole life. I don't think I'm going to like get to a place where I'm finished. You know, I keep sort of doing this. And there are things involved in work that I love, that parts that I don't love, that I'm doing because I'm like, this is a habit I need to get this work done. And so maybe if not

being as curious as something that doesn't come as easily for some people, you have a lot of options now, audio books, you know, podcasts, like you can do things that have a lower barrier of effort than they would have in the past. And I think, you know, take advantage of that if that's, if that's one of your weaknesses or things like, you know, Shane Parrish, I don't know if you ever read like Farnham Street, he's doing this. We sort of realized, we connected because we realized we're basically like kind of writing about the same thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, in many ways. And so, you know, so I was giving some feedback on the next volume of the Great Mental Models project. And I think sort of part of what that project is, is him saying, look, if you're not going to be sort of as interested in the stuff the way I was, I'm going to kind of package it for you

so that you can do it without as much work. And so I think those things are available. Yeah. Well, I mean, look, I'm an old guy. I came up in a different era where you go to college and you take certain courses and you major in something and then you go to the career center and you look at these brochures for consulting companies and investment banks and you think, well, this is it, you know? And now with the internet, you could listen to, you know, countless hours of podcasts and audio books and just, you know, on the kind of theme that you explore of like exposing yourself to a lot of different things, there's never been a better time to be able to do that and to do it for essentially for free. That's right. This whole universe of knowledge is available to everybody that has a smartphone. Yeah. And again, not to like keep harping on Herminia Ibarra's work, but it resonated with me and my own career path, you

know, very much where, you know, we don't need to have this idea that like you hit on something and it's like lightning necessarily that that may happen. But all this stuff, when she was looking at these people who made successful career transitions and found much more fulfilling work, usually the spark came from, they met someone at a dinner party or they read about something they didn't know about. It was, it was, or the fringe of their network, they connected with somebody. It wasn't like their inner circle because they knew about that stuff. It was like chance exposure to something. Well, the Girl Scouts woman is a great example of that. Yeah. Yeah. And she, I just saw her the other day. It's Frances Hesselbein.

She's like a hundred, probably 102 now, right? She's 103 and a half. 103. Wow. And still teaching at West Point and running an organization in Manhattan. So she became a little bit of like a role model for me, actually, where she had to drop out of junior college. She was born in 1915 in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, and had to drop out of junior college because her father was passing away and she had to take care of the family. Got a job as like an assistant to an advertising executive. That was the only job she ever applied for. And after that, she sort of did odd jobs,

like helping her husband with photography studio and all these sorts of things. She called her job helping John, whatever was needed, she would do it. And in her thirties, a woman in her community came and asked her like, will you volunteer to lead a Girl Scout troop? Because the other leader left. And she says, no, I don't know. No experience, not a leader, only have a little boy, don't know anything about girls. And the woman finally tells her like, well, we're gonna have to disband these group of girls from modest families who meet in a church basement

if you don't do it, because everyone else has declined. She says, fine, I'll do six weeks and then find a real leader. And during that time, she sort of starts reading about the Girl Scouts, realized they're founded eight years before women could vote, you know? And the leader told girls,

you can be a lawyer, a doctor, an aviatrix or a hot air balloonist. Aviatrix. Yeah, and Frances realized she remembered being in second grade and saying she wanted to be a pilot and people laughing at her. So she ends up sticking with that troop

till they graduate high school. And basically she keeps picking up jobs in Girl Scouts where she keeps saying like, I'll do this for a month or two, you know? And she keeps realizing every time she does it that she likes it or she's making a big impact. They ask her to chair a United Way campaign when a woman had never done that before.

Still only two women have done that. And the most recent one was like a year ago or something. And so she does that. And it's like Johnstown has the highest per capita giving in the country that year. And finally, they want her to be an executive director of a local Girl Scouts council, which is actually a professional job. Everything else had been volunteering. This is in her mid-50s.

She said, no, no, no, I'm a volunteer. Like I've never had a professional job. And again, they say, well, you know, then this, there's going to be like the finances are all messed up. There's going to be like problems if you don't do it. So she's fine. Six months, you know, I'll do it six months, then get the book straightened out, get a real leader. And she gets totally addicted to it again. Right. And one thing leads to another, finally, they're interviewing her to be the CEO of the Girl Scouts. They're having this huge crisis where in the sixties, like society's

changing and Girl Scouts is like, girls need information about sex and drugs and careers and math and science. And Girl Scouts is stuck in, like, kind of home ec mode, you know. And she says, no, no, no. No, I'm living in Pennsylvania my whole life. I'm not going. And the previous CEOs had been, like, you know, the woman who founded the U.S. Women's Coast Guard Reserve and was a university dean. Frances was one of 355 local Girl Scout council leaders. So she goes to New York, doesn't want to take the job,

but her husband says, you have to turn it down in person. And so she drives her to New York and she's not nervous because she's not going to take it. She describes total transformation of the operation. Get rid of the old handbook, get a bunch of new ones that appeal to different ages, to girls of different backgrounds and get rid of the current management structure, all this stuff. And they invite her back as the CEO.

So this professional journey she started in her mid-50s, she becomes the CEO, basically saves the organization, gets 130,000 new volunteers, people she's paying in sense of mission, not in money. It explodes the minority participation. She commissions all this messaging specifically for minority girls. Like what she tells one of her, the artists is, if an indigenous girl on an ice floe in Alaska reopens this book, she better see herself

in a Girl Scout uniform. And she's being told while doing this, like don't, like focus on the finance problems first and then diversity. Like, I mean, she says, no, diversity is the problem. And so she goes all in on that and just like saves the organization. The cookie business becomes a third

of a billion dollars a year. And every stop in her life, like when I went to interview her and I say like, you know, what trained you for leadership? She waves me off and goes like, don't ask me that question. I never knew I was being trained. I was doing what was needed at the time. And that, I use her story as this example.

And then she, you know, even after she thought she retired, she didn't and now she's doing something else and working five days a week at 103 and a half. And I used it as an example of this research that suggests that the people who find the most fulfilling careers have that orientation towards short-term planning

where instead of saying, here's I'm gonna be in 10 or 20 years, like the commencement speech kind of thing, they say, here's what I'm going to be in 10 or 20 years, like the commencement speech kind of thing, they say, here's who I am right now. Here are my interests and the skills and things I want to learn. For Frances, it was like, what's an opportunity to serve? And I'm going to try this.

Maybe a year from now I'll change because I will have learned something about myself. And she just did that all the way through her whole career and is still doing that. Yeah. I mean, what I took from that is just her service-mindedness. Like that was what it was about for her. And then she's getting dragged into all these opportunities.

Like she's kicking and screaming to not do it. And they keep saying, no, you need to do this. And so she's reacting to her environment. Yeah. Her upward mobility is her resisting it almost the whole way. Yeah. And she becomes, you know, Peter Drucker, this famed management expert, calls her the best CEO in America at the end of this. And so she won the National Medal of Freedom, which is the highest civilian award that you can win. But it was always like that.

She would sort of get pushed into it. She would see an opportunity to serve because that was important to her. And then would sort of get sucked in and realize like it really fit her. But another of the lessons for me from that was like, you can't just figure this out a priori. I wish you could, but you actually have to try stuff sometimes to figure out like what works for you. Right. I mean, when you look at, look, you know, retroactively back on the history of your trajectory in your career, is this the result of some scheme that you whiteboarded and said, this is what I want to be doing? Whichever, they're clever.

I'm just, I know for myself, I don't know how I got here. I don't know. I'm just sort of gravitating towards my interests now in a way that I didn't know how to do as a younger person. And I'm curious, you know, as somebody who's looked at a number of successful people across a number of disciplines,

how many of those people are in a similar situation where, you know, like the Girl Scouts woman, just, you know, found themselves in a place they never would have thought because they didn't have, you know, there's this pressure, like you gotta have, what's your five-year plan, What's your 10-year plan? It's all scripted and you're on this path versus, you know, looking at the people that are super successful and saying,

no, it's more like this. It's messy. It's unpredictable. If someone were to say, how do I get where, you know, to where you're at? Their answer is like, I have no idea, right? That's so interesting, you know, and that, I love that like the 10-year plan, the investor Paul Graham says in computer science, we call that premature optimization because like you're

setting the goal before you sort of know who you are. But to that point, like I can fit together all my pieces in retrospect, but I couldn't have done it prospectively. Yeah, looking backwards, it's like, oh, of course it all lined up to make this happen. Like, oh, of course it all lined up to make this happen. Right, of course. But so when I was at Sports Illustrated, and you'd get asked a lot by younger aspiring sports writers, like if I want to work at Sports Illustrated or ESPN or whatever,

should I major in journalism or English? And my first instinct was to say journalism, right? And my second instinct was to say English. And my third instinct was to say I studied geology and astronomy. I have no idea, right? But even my instinct was to say like, well, obviously you should get a lead if you can. Yeah. Right. But, and that's so, that feels like the right thing to do. But, but to your, to your question of how many of the people sort of do the Francis Hesselbein,

I mean, I use her as the lead in to this research called the Dark Horse Project, which is about how people find fulfilling work. And it didn't start with the name, The Dark Horse Project. The way it got there was these two researchers at Harvard were studying people who find fulfillment. A lot of them were also, you know, materially successful, but that wasn't, but not all. That wasn't necessarily a requirement. And they would all come in and say, like, well, don't tell people to do what I did. Because I started on this other path, you know, and I thought I was going to be a doctor, a lawyer, whatever. Right.

And then I sort of zigzagged, and I stopped a couple things, and then I ended up with this weird opportunity. And so you shouldn't tell people to be like me. And most of them describe themselves that way. That's why they called it the Dark Horse Project because they all viewed themselves as having come out of nowhere. Except everyone's a dark horse.

Right, right, yeah, the vast majority. There were some who were linear, but a very small number. Yeah. It was a much smaller number. And so how do you square that with this conventional wisdom that, you know, you can't score if you don't have a goal?

Like, you know, we're all set up, like everyone's this dark horse and yet they're telling everyone else to adhere to this paradigm that actually isn't how they got there. Yeah, yeah. No, and I think it's, and some of the dark horses did set,

you know, medium or longer term goals, but it was like after this period of experimentation, basically. So it's not to say you can never set goals, but they were much more oriented toward moving forward from like the opportunities right in front of them. And that's for me been for sure the way my most important projects have come from these,

you know, some conversation I didn't expect or some interaction that I didn't really expect. So now when people ask you, you know, what should I do to be a journalist? Yeah, now I... You got to be honest now. Yeah, no, I mean, I sort of try to tell them what my background was. And I think there are many different ways to get to good outcomes, right? There's many different possible paths as there are people. But my suggestion would actually be to study something other than journalism, right? Find these other interests. Like you'll be able to do the journalism

and you're gonna need stuff to write about. And you'll learn a lot of the sort of boots on the ground stuff, like just through the practice. And so I would encourage them to like have a little bit of that sampling period in college and study something else. Like that, one of the match quality studies I loved was this economist

who wanted to see, he used the English and Scottish school systems as a comparison where they're very similar except for the English students have to specialize earlier. And what he found was that those students, where the Scottish students can sample a little longer, he found the English students jump out to an income lead after college because they have more domain-specific skills. But then the Scottish students pick better fits because they get to sample. And so they have faster growth rates.

So they quickly erase that income gap. And then the English students start quitting their career tracks in much higher numbers, even though they have huge disincentive from doing so because they've sunk more time in it. And so I would kind of share stuff like that, I think. Like share some of the evidence with people and say, the one or two years you're going to put into experimenting can pay big dividends. And if you're going to be in journalism for a long time, like having another model of how to think about things is really, really useful, right? That can really set you apart. Well, also, if you want to be a writer, you have to live life. Yeah. Even if you're reporting on other things, the best writers are the people who have rich life experiences from which to draw upon.

Totally. Tom Lake, a writer who I really like, is at CNN now, was at Sports Illustrated. I remember him once asking me how I got onto a certain story. I wrote this story about Lance Mackey, who won the Iditarod four times in a row. story. I wrote this story about Lance Mackey, who won the Iditarod four times in a row. And he had won, he had done this like several times in a row, had won like the two longest races, both the Iditarod and another like thousand mile race. And I wrote this story about him and it was great. I loved it. You know, some of it ended up in the sports gene and it was just this wonderful experience. And he was sort of like, how in the world did you end up with this guy? And I was

like, well, after the Vancouver Olympics, you Olympics, when you work really hard, nobody keeps track of you at SI for a couple weeks after the Olympics. And so I was like, so I went dog sledding. And met someone in dog sledding and kind of started asking questions and they started telling me about this guy Lance Mackey and whatever. And so I go up and he's like, fine, you can interview me as long as you work in my dog yard while we're interviewing. So this was the hardest transcription I've ever had.

It was barking and all this stuff. But I remember Tom saying sort of like, this is a good reminder that the way to find interesting stories is to live an interesting life. Yeah, there's no question about that. When you were describing the differences between the Scottish and the English educational system, I was curious if in the course of doing all this research,

you came across one country who's really figured out the model that you think is going in the right direction. Is there any country in terms of their educational system that is doing things that are in line with these ideas that you're exploring? That's a good question. I mean, I think Finland is a good one, but I also am always hesitant to draw too strong of comparisons between Finland and the U.S. because there has been a lot of like, we should do what Finland does. But we have a lot of social complexities that they don't have. And so I think it makes them easier to sort of implement

some of these kinds of things. Like they're very oriented toward like nature education earlier and kids' education toward like multilingualism and towards these like sort of much more holistic. And they end up doing like phenomenally well on international tests and all those things. But again, they have some, it's a very small country that's very financially well off

and they don't have some of the challenges that we have. On the sports front, I think Norway, there was just a great HBO Real Sports looking at Norway, how they've basically like banned formal competition below the age of 12. And they heard about that. Exploded the Winter Olympics, you know, like best performance ever.

I think in limited cases, there's like the way Japan teaches math, where they do, instead of this using procedures knowledge, they, if you go in, there'll be like a blackboard that takes the whole wall of a room and they'll work on one problem, the entire class.

And the kids have magnets with their name on it. And they're asked like, what's an approach to this problem? And they come up to the board, they put an approach on. And the problems will incorporate like several different types of concepts that can be brought to bear. And their suggestion may be wrong, but they get to put their name magnet on it and you follow it and you sort of take that on one course and then

another kid suggests something else and you follow all their different courses. And by the end of the class, you have this one problem that's covered a whole blackboard and all your sort of false starts of attempting to solve it. And there's a word for this called Bansho, which is this, a word for that type of blackboard writing in Japan that like tracks the intellectual journey of the class. is this a word for that type of blackboard writing in Japan that like tracks the intellectual journey of the class. And they really impart that sort of that making connections knowledge where you have to connect concepts to try to solve a problem to such a degree that one of the researchers I talked to said, we have trouble labeling like the types of lessons when we, they videotape Japanese classrooms because there's so many concepts in each problem that it's hard for us to say it's, they're teaching this concept right now. And so I think, you know, there are aspects

of different countries, the way they operate like that for Japan. Yeah. Well, they're learning how to problem solve in a very dynamic way that then is applicable across multi, you know, a multitude of disciplines. And they're learning how to approach something complex and figure out their own process for solving it, as opposed to like, all right, you carry the one. And you learn the system for solving a math problem, but you don't really understand what's actually behind it. To an incredible degree. So when I was reading some of these studies about the math knowledge that college students have, like sometimes you could be fooled into thinking they knew a lot because they could execute certain procedures. But then if you changed a problem just a little, it was clear they had no idea what was going on.

Right. And sometimes, you know, to use like a very distressing sort of lower math level example, there was like one of these college students who was being studied was, you know, given like, whatever, I don't know, it was like 500 plus 200 equals 700 or something. They say, well, how can you check if this answer is right? And I said, okay, well, 700 minus 200 equals 500, right? What's another way you could check if this answer is right? And they couldn't come up with 700 minus 500 equals 200 because they'd been told you subtract the one to the right of the plus sign from the one that's on the other side of the equal sign. And you're like, holy cow. Like you can, so someone could get by doing that

until you really like probe that they don't know. You can pass this understanding, but you don't actually understand because our entire educational system is set up on breadth, not depth. Yeah, yeah. Well, it's set up on, I would say on this using procedures knowledge,

on learning this using procedures knowledge, which is to me sort of the opposite of the kind of breadth you need, where you need these like broader conceptual models. Right, I see what you're saying. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What about the idea that when we're very young, we're able to learn things in a very facile way.

Like you teach a very young child how to, a different language, they can pick it up very quickly. In my own personal case, swimming, like if you learn how to swim well when you're six years old, you'll have that for life. You try to teach like a 30 year old how to swim, who doesn't know how to swim,

it's like, they're never gonna, they're just never gonna get to that same place. So what is it about that early period in childhood development that applies to kind of these ideas that you're working with? Yeah, well, I think you have an enormous, I think we used to think that you sort of built up these neuronal connections,

like as you did stuff when you were a kid. And now the model is more like you have all these neurons and you sort of prune things away and strengthen the ones that you're actually going to use. So it's sort of you like trade a measure of cognitive flexibility for more efficiency in the things you're actually going to do. And, you know, I think those are important periods to take advantage of and to know like what are the things that you should expose people to in that time like language we do it totally backward right like we it's like the last dollar too late yeah we do it totally backward and and again I think there's evidence that if someone's bilingual in that phase like before the age of 12 basically

they have an advantage for picking up later language. Or if they've played multiple invasion sports before about that same age, then they'll have an advantage for picking up more. So I think the most important question would be what things are like that, where if we sort of give them a broad base, it will facilitate this later learning later on. And I think a lot of sports are like that, languages like that, and I think maybe a lot of other things are like that too. So, you know, if someone does find something that they truly like love and it lights them on fire, like that's totally great. But I do think that some of that broader base early on can scaffold this sort of more later specific learning. There's a sense of relief with this book in the sense that I think there are a lot of people, you know, look, yeah, there are certain people who find that thing that they're great at and that they absolutely love when they're very young and they can then do that their entire

life. Like, you know, they picked up the guitar when they were five and, you know, they have a whole career into their nineties, you know, doing that one thing, but those are the rare exceptions. And I feel like there's so many people who, who just like feel bad about themselves because they haven't found that thing. And what's great about the book is that it's like, you can exhale, like you don't have to be that person. You can try all these different things. And it's a, it's a pressure valve release to encourage people to explore and not feel like they have to, you know, fall into this specific niche or they're falling behind. Yeah. And I mean, it's, it's a little bit of a relief for me in that way too, because I really don't know what I'm going to do next. And I really have gotten like, everyone probably asked you

that, right? Yeah. Yeah. Um, and, but I'm less embarrassed about saying that than I was in the past. Um, partly because I can at least say like, well, I'm, you know, living by my tenets that I was writing about here. Um, but I do, I am much more, so where I used to have, like, after I got done with running, I used to keep, um, pretty assiduously a training journal and would have pretty specific goals and these sorts of things. And I started doing that in my personal life after I got out of running and realized that actually like wasn't super helpful for me. It was, you know, either I got to that goal or I didn't and it wasn't actually helping me move there in a way. And so now instead I have what I call a book of experiments where I use it the way I did when I was a science grad student.

Here's something I'd like to learn about myself. Am I interested in this? You know, do I think I could be good at it? Whatever. Do I have access to training in it? And then I'll try something and then, you know, be sort of a scientist of myself and write the conclusions. And that's really, I'm just doing that to prompt reflection in myself. And I've found that to be much more useful to me than the kind of training journal that I did find useful when I was a runner. Right. It's hard though.

Like I don't wanna show up at a jujitsu class and be the worst person. I don't wanna put myself in those situations. And generally I don't. Like I wanna do more of the things that I'm good at. I wanna train the discipline that makes me feel encouraged. But when I have the gumption to do that, you know, makes me feel encouraged. But when I have the, you know, gumption to do that, it always ends up being a good thing.

That's interesting. I mean, you have found things. I would say, like, you've done a much better job than most people at finding things that really do interest you and sort of continuing to, like, mold your life around your interests. In some ways, yes. In some ways, no, though. You know, I think I still stick to, like, okay, I'm good at this. I'm going to stay here. Yeah. But most, I mean, you're a lawyer, right? Most of them are still, probably most of your colleagues are probably still lawyers. Yeah, that's true. Right? So we're not talking about a real high bar for people like sort of molding their life around them, unfortunately. But I think we do, we get in these like ruts of competence, right? I was

talking to the economist, Russ Roberts. He said it's a hammock of competence because it's so comfortable that you don't want to get out of it. And I think it's like an illustrative example. This will sound really weird, but I was at a certain point, like reading all the speed typing literature, okay? Like how do you get faster typing? And it turns out that most of us will get up to, you know, 50 to 80 words a minute, and then we'll settle there naturally. But actually you can get much faster, but it requires you to basically take a metronome,

tick it up a little bit and follow that speed, no matter how many mistakes you make. And then you just keep doing that little by little and you can like double your speed. But it suggests to me that we sort of will naturally, with experience we'll get better, but then we'll like some, for some reason, naturally plateau at a level of like very good.

And it's like, you know, if you go to the weight room and lift the same number of weights at the same times every day, you won't slide backward, but you might not get better. And so I think even within your thing, it's important to do things that make you like a little bit uncomfortable. Well, it becomes like this asymptotic curve. Like, you know, at some point the amount of work that you have to put in to get incrementally better just becomes unjustifiable.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But then you can do these sorts of things like this skill stacking, right? Which is where you don't have to be, once you get to that, you're starting to approach that asymptote. You don't have to, you know, if you're running like the 100 meters, like then, you know, that's like total zero-sum competition. You know, a 0.5% total zero sum competition, you know, a 0.5% difference between competitors is a blowout. But in most of the world, we can take sort of a little of what we're good at a little bit of here. And if you stack them in a unique way, you're kind of competing on turf that no one's competing with you with. Right. And that's, I think sort of something that's been useful for, for both of us.

This might sound like a little woo woo, but but what I found, as I get older, it seems like time accelerates. It's like, what, it's Christmas again? Things happen with increasing rapidity in my experience of time. But when I take an opportunity to do something that I have no experience in, and I get outside my comfort zone

and invest myself in some new activity, time slows down. Like, I don't know if you've had that experience in your own life and I don't know why that is neurologically, but I find it to be true. No, I've totally had that experience. And I can only guess at the reasoning, which is like, you know, when certain things are kind of more automated and they kind of move from these, like your prefrontal cortex to these more sort of automated parts of your brain, you are doing that sort of unconsciously in a way, right? And I wonder if that sort of dulls our in-the-moment-ness

in a way where like you're, it's just happening on autopilot. It's easy to not be present for your own experience. Right. And so it might be comforting and you feel competent, but I do think there's something kind of lost there. Like when I think back on, there's some like short parts of my life, like when I lived in the Arctic or I lived on a ship for a while, like those parts weren't that long, but they were so different that they feel like such long and important and impactful memories to me because they were so different that they feel like such long and important and impactful memories to me because they were so uncomfortable and so unusual. And so, you know, it's everyone's choice,

but for me, that's kind of the life I want to live. I mean, with the journalist aspect of what you do, it allows you to tap into all these different worlds and, you know, become part of subcultures that you wouldn't ordinarily experience. And I would imagine that that, you know, that aspect of what you doures that you wouldn't ordinarily experience. And I would imagine that that, you know, that aspect of what you do would keep you, you know, fresh and engaged. I mean, and it also brought out things in me that I didn't know where, like,

when I talk about these if-then personality signatures and range, where I was like a shy person, naturally, but in my journalistic role, I'm not shy. And so it, doing it kind of got me and, you know, brought out some personalities. And so doing it kind of got me and brought out some personalities. They're called free traits, when you can sort of take on a personality trait that you don't sort of have in the rest of your life. And so I enjoyed finding out that about myself, because then I felt like, oh, I can probably do this in other things. But very much to your point, like when I was science, aiming to be a scientist, my work was getting so narrow that I really started asking myself pretty quick, am I the type of person who wants to spend my whole life learning one thing new to the world? And we need those people for sure.

Or the type of person who wants to spend much shorter spans of time learning things that are new to me and connecting them and translating them. And I was definitely the latter. And that's kind of the lifeblood of the work I've gotten into now. Interesting. Well, there's sort of a fundamental premise in the book. It's a call to action to embrace being a generalist, but implicit in that is that at some point you're gonna specialize in something.

Like if you wanna be really excellent, like there is the rare polymath, but dabble in all these things until you find that thing and then find your lane and specialize in that. So, you know, it's sort of like why generalists triumph in a specialized world. Ultimately, you're still saying, like, at some point you're going to have to specialize. I mean, I think it's very much, you know, a semantic issue at some level. And, like, I have to admit that, right? It's like, what even is a generalist or a specialist?

I can tell you in the patent research, it's based on how many different technological classifications someone worked in. In comic book research, it has to do with how many genres someone has worked in. But each of those areas of science that I cite defines it in a specialized way for that area. And so in the wider world, it's like a semantic issue.

And how specialized or not am I? Like I, to a scientist, having come from science into writing, I look very non-specialized. To other journalists, I might look quite specialized because I'm always doing the science stuff. So I think it's sort of context dependent.

And so my real hope is to, you know, I think we need both specialists and generalists in every field. I like how Freeman Dyson styled it, the physicist. He said, we need frogs and birds. The frogs are down in the mud looking at the details. The birds are up above integrating the knowledge of the frogs. He said, the problem is we're telling everybody to be frogs and that's not good for a healthy ecosystem. And so I think, you know, this discussion of how broad or specialized to be is important, I think, either implicitly or explicitly to everyone.

And my hope is to make that conversation more interesting and productive. And I think that's like the best thing I can hope for. Yeah, and I think it depends upon how you define or think about what specialization is. And I think in this freelance economy where people are empowered to cultivate and craft careers that never existed before, you can be the specialist of you in certain respects. Like, who else has the life experiences that you – like, there's no one else who could write this book other than you. So you are a specialist in being David Epstein and writing Rage, right? Now the semantics are going to converge all the way. Right. Well, like in my case, it's like, all right, I was a lawyer. I was an athlete. I've done these certain things. And so when I host a podcast, I'm able to bring a perspective that,

you know, someone else, you know, couldn't because they've lived a different life. And it reminds me of, you know, Sam Harris has his waking up app and then kind of, he makes these prefatory remarks about why he created this app. And he's like, you know, I'm a neurologist. I spent all this time doing meditation and, you know, I have experiences with like these six things, none of which I'm the best at. There's people, there are better meditators, there are better neuroscientists, all this, but who, there's no one else who has some level of expertise in these five or six things, which makes me really the only person

who could create this app that speaks to this variety of issues. Yeah, totally. And that's that kind of skill set. So he's specializing in being Sam Harris. Yeah. You know what I mean? Like not in being a neurologist

who also has a meditation app and a podcast and writes best selling books. Yeah. Yeah. I mean that, and that's kind of skill stacking, right? He says he's not the best at any one thing, but he sort of creates this ground that only he's competing on if he exactly things. So there is no competition really. Yeah, no. And that's, like I said, that's the way, like I didn't want to be at sports illustrated running a hundred meters, you know, with all, because there's, it's because there's like 50 people in line to be, you know, for that sort of in that kind of zero sum thing. And so 100 meters, you know, with all, because there's, it's, because there's like 50 people in line to be, you know, for that sort of, in that kind of zero-sum thing. And so I think, you know, you want to get on your own ground. And sometimes it's interesting

to hear you make the point that like, that's a sort of generalization that becomes its own specialization in a way. Right. Because like one of my favorite interviews was with this guy, Oliver Smithies, the Snowbell Laureate, who was studying to be a doctor. And then he saw a chemistry lecture and was like, that seems awesome. Like, I'm studying to be a doctor. And then he saw a chemistry lecture and was like, that seems awesome. Like, I'm gonna go take that. And then all of a sudden, as he put it, now I'm not afraid of biology

and I'm not afraid of chemistry. And he sort of pioneers biochemistry, which now is viewed as its own specialization with its own subspecialties. But at the time was like, whoa, like bold hybrid, very broad. You know, so sometimes those sorts of things, that generalization can just become its own specialization over time.

Right, well, it's back to that idea of cell division, right? Yeah. Like an increasing specialization as we kind of progress as a culture and a society. Yeah. So when you extrapolate from all of these ideas, we talked about education, but let's talk about the professional environments, like the workforce. Like how would you reimagine how we structure traditional work environments that can create more fertile environments to encourage generalization

so that you can create a workforce that actually is happy doing what they're doing and they're finding that place where they can actually excel and be fulfilled. Yeah. I think, I think some of it again is to, to try to incorporate some of, and I say this only because it's like been working for the army where they had this incredibly, and, and there's always going to be some barriers to lateral movement in the army. Like you can't get rid of that because of like ranks and all these things. But if, if an institution that hierarchical can adjust in a way that allows people to sample

such that it improves retention, even in what's like in many ways, the most hierarchical organization we can have in society, then I think other workplaces should take a cue from that and say, well, we have a lot more liberty to allow people to sample and to maybe provide some of that coaching and reflection when they're trying things, you know,

and not just give lip service to them failing, right? Because I've been to a lot of these conferences and everyone's like, failure is great. And then, but then when I talk to people about when they actually failed, like nobody's like, great. Like that was a problem worth taking. In rare cases, there are some,

like the 3M inventors, they said they would get, that was a problem worth investigating, even though it failed. But that's rare. Usually, you know, so I think we have to have more than just lip service to failure and build that in and allow people to do some of that zigzagging inside.

And to give a specific example, a podcast that I love that I was on recently was the Bill Simmons podcast. It was a very popular podcast. Yeah, I listened to it. And when I was there, like he was, you know, ESPN's most popular writer. And then he went to HBO and that basically failed there. And then he started the ringer. And that

was like, when I was around there and I was only there for a little bit, just seemed to me like one of the happiest workplaces. And what, as, as Bill took me around and introduced me to some people, and I already knew some people there from sports media, what occurred to me was it was be like, oh, we hired this person as just an online editor, and now he's the director of content because we let him try this other thing. Or Mallory Rubin, who I had worked with before, they hired her as just an online editor,

and then they're like, you want to come try to talk on a podcast? And now she's a brilliant podcaster who's becoming famous in her own right. And I think once he had people internally, give them a little chance to try different things in a way that like wouldn't damage anything and would make them feel empowered.

And so he, and some of these people have now become like famous in their own right. Right. And it seemed like a really happy place. And I think that's part of the reason because they have a little bit of ability to try some new things without having to just leave. Well, because Bill embodies that sensibility.

Like he's done that in his own career. Like as he said on the podcast, like he had that, you know, he had the show on HBO, it didn't work. And yeah, but I learned something, I moved on and that informs how I make decisions about other things going forward to create that kind of open environment where people can find their niche over time. Like it's pretty cool. I mean, he seems like, I've never met him, but he seems like an awesome guy. Yeah, totally. And really, I was just like, it was just interesting how much people like living there and what they were hired to do and what they're doing now.

Right. Yeah. Because, because Mallory, I had, she had been one of my colleagues at Sports Illustrated. Right. And was like stuck in a very narrow lane. So even for me to now see what she's doing, you're just like, oh my gosh. She started as like a copy editor there or an editor or something like that. Right.

Yeah. And at SI, like whatever, I think she was working at Sports Illustrated for kids, whatever it was, she was like stuck in a narrow lane. And so to see her now, you're just like, gosh, there must be so much like talent lurking, you know, that we just like haven't given people the chance to realize. Oh, there's no question about it. And, you know, he's, you know, in the grand scheme of things, he's running a small organization. Like if you, how do you scale that? Like if you look at a Fortune 500 company, it becomes calcified over time where you have some marketing executive who's reporting to someone else and that person's decisions are really informed mostly by, you know, trying to please their boss or, you know,

not losing their job. So they're going to like sort of tow some party line that fits within the rubric of like how they've always done it. And to step outside of that and say, actually, let's stop putting all our money in billboards. Like we should be doing podcast advertising when they've never done that before is a risk that is not necessarily encouraged. Yeah, no, totally. And, and, you know And I remember this reminds me of some of Adam Grant's work that showed that people actually become less creative when they become middle managers. It's not like it's just selecting or they become much more risk-averse.

And I think this is some of the reason why these larger organizations can get disrupted by these tiny agile organizations. Because they have all the resource advantages and yet they can still get totally disrupted. And so I think you'd have to take on, try to start with small groups inside of, because you can't change. Big organizations are like these oil tankers.

You have to start steering 40 miles out from shore to get it to the right place. But I spent some time a couple years ago with the data analytics team at UPS, which I never would have thought would be an interesting company. But it is interesting because they face- Just because it's brown. Just because it's brown, yeah. How interesting can it be? I'm into brown.

Yeah, no, totally. They're kind of like, yeah, brown packages. But they face this thing called the traveling salesman problem, where it's a math problem. What's the best way to connect a number of different stops? And they used to be like 30 or 40 stops.

And with the rise of e-commerce, where they're delivering to a lot more individuals, it's like 120 or 140 stops. And there's more different combinations of how to connect those stops than there are like atoms in the universe. And that's not even taking into account traffic or anything like that. And the fact that they don't like to take left turns because that's when the accidents happen and all these other things. And when I went there, it's, you know,

these mathematicians, it's run by a psychologist that actually runs the data science team. A psychologist who's just, like, interested in data science. And you're there and you're realizing, like, so they had to make this, like, custom mapping and, like, routing tool that the driver then sort of uses and informs. And the driver tries to, like, beat it.

And if the driver beats it, then it, like, sort of incorporates some of that. But they were telling me, like, the algorithm is the algorithm is the easy part in a lot of ways. The change management is the hard part, because this is a big organization with a ton of different levels and a lot of history of doing things in a certain way. So they had everybody in the data science team had to work as a driver for a little bit, including the mathematicians.

The CEO had worked as a driver also. And so they said that was such a crucial thing in helping that change management, because suddenly we realized just passing down your algorithm from like, you know, like bestow it upon people, like make it work was not working. So they actually had to settle for not quite as optimized of a system, but one that actually worked for what people were actually doing. And so by working at these different levels of the organization, I think they realized sort of where the cinch in the hose was in a lot of those cases. Yeah, yeah, it's interesting.

I mean, because theoretically, academically, like these ideas that you're talking about should inform how we reframe corporate culture, right? Like let's allow people the freedom to move around. Let's help them find their place. people the freedom to move around. Let's help them find their place. But the human element of that quickly, you quickly realize it's too disruptive in order to get anything done. Yeah. Right? And psychology, you know, gets very complex in terms of what people's motivations are here. Yeah. Yeah. And I also think if people are working in sort of those kinder learning environments where they can face the same challenge over and over, then I think their interest and their ability still matters.

But the breadth of experience I don't think matters as much in that case. So it might matter for getting their match quality. But like for industrial era, sort of the stuff when organizations were very specialized and people faced a very narrow range of tasks, I think specialization is fine. I just think we've kind of stuck with that a little too much. But I do think it's changing. But the way that we're seeing it change is, like you said, where people are cobbling together these careers by themselves, right?

And is there a way for institutions to allow that to happen internally in a much more flexible way? Yeah, that's interesting. Or are we just going to do it like, I don't understand. So, I mean, you know, if some institution had sort of like, you know, would wholeheartedly support me doing a project like this book, I'm sure I would have done it internal to that institution,

but I couldn't. So I had to go do it on my own. But I sort of think like there should be places that would allow that, you know? Yeah. But this is, I can't imagine how all consuming it was to write this book. Yeah.

Would you be able to actually hold a job and be productive in that while you were creating something like this? So the book would have to be like my job, right? Yeah. They would have to, am I reporting stuff along the way or whatever it is, they'd have to view that. Instead, basically what you do is you go to the publisher and get like a grant essentially to do the work and then hope that it- Yeah. So, I mean, in some respects you work to the publisher and get like a grant essentially you know to do to do the work and then hope that it yeah so i mean in some respects you work for the publisher yeah it is it is a if you put a different lens on yeah yeah you pitch your project to them and if they approve it then you get the funding and you do it yeah so that's like a very amorphous kind of kind of job

one of the things that you said to uh brad stolberg and that in the outside piece was he asked you something like you know where do you see the future Stolberg in the outside piece was he asked you something like, where do you see the future of the professional environment? I can't remember exactly what the question was, but you said like, I think the vanguard right now is seeing the expansion of these coaching modalities in the professional world, like taking what we've learned from sports

and applying that to, you know, the executive suite to help people not just be better at like being more productive, but in learning how to like navigate the psychological landmine of dealing with people and empowering teams and the like. And you're seeing that with like, you know, I used to look at like, oh, I'm a coach, I'm an executive guy. I'm like, what is that? Like, what kind of nonsense is that? But the more I learn about it and think about it

and read about it, the more I realize like, yeah, of course, why wouldn't we be doing that? Yeah, and I think at the higher levels of performance, you know, and we both know this from sports, like there becomes a point where you can't like tell somebody what to do at a certain level. They have to like, the good coach, you know, sort of walks hand in hand with them

on their development journey and help sort of figure out what's working for them, whether that's a type of training or, because you can no longer just say like, do it this way. Right. And so I think that's the part where it's really analogous where, you know, sometimes people get to become executives or even if they're lower level and then it's like everyone's a yes man around them and all these sorts

of things, right? And sometimes like their decisions are very, like I got obsessed with War and Peace for a little while. And basically War and Peace is like Tolstoy's novel form argument against the great man theory of history. He says like, he uses Napoleon and says Napoleon was a, in effect, not a cause of these like larger movements going on. And he does this historical reporting

that shows like some of the commands he was issuing could not have gotten to the battlefield like in time. Like the information lag was too long that like he really had no control over what was going on. And I think that can, like executives can become very divorced from like how their decisions actually play out or like the kind of chain of communication

to an organization. And I think that's sort of like, nobody's helping them with their development a lot of times because they're just surrounded by people like who are trying to curry their favor. Who are kissing their ass, yeah. And so I think anyone can develop from that sort of someone who is the outside observer in their personal development and is like helping them reflect on things and identifying some of their own weaknesses and some of the other problems. And so that was incredibly powerful thing for me in sports, right? And I would love to have it in my other endeavors.

Yeah. I would love to have it if there were someone, you know, who would just, you know, fair warning to my coaches. I think I told Brad, like one of my favorite editors at SI called me the athlete who only hears the boos. But I think I've gotten a lot better at that, by the way. What does that explain that? It was just like, I would do some project that would land well. And then like the editor would be like, you know, and I'd be like, this person's criticism, like I'd be like all fixated on it. Yeah, that's human though.

You're winning, you're winning. Don't, you know, block that out. And, you know, but I think it would be, I think I'm better at that now. But that's a warning to my prospective coaches, if anyone hears this and wants to be my coach. But I think it would, like, I took in, when I got stuck with this book, with structuring, because structuring the information was a real challenge for me. I took an online fiction writing course. It was taught by the author of Mudbound, Hilary Jordan. And one of the exercises was we had to write with all dialogue.

One was with no dialogue. And when doing the no dialogue, when I go back and realize I'd been leaning on quotes to do explanation in a way I shouldn't have been doing, I stripped like probably a hundred quotes and replaced them with writing. And the scary thing to me was I didn't realize it got me sort of off this plateau and block. And it also sort of made me realize I was leaning on a certain technique without even being really conscious of it. And so it would be really useful for me to have somebody pointing that sort of thing out that like, you're doing this all the time. Like you're leaning on this sort of tactic all the time. And it took me taking that like a fiction writing class to get sort of bounced out of that. And I'd love to have it like more consistently. Yeah. It's interesting. You, you, you, I heard you say like, oh, you, you even take like

introductory writing classes, like just to refresh yourself or ground yourself in the principles and the fundamentals. And, you know, it's one thing to be like generally science writers, you know, there's a, there's a specific sort of prose methodology that you typically come across. But you have this amazing storytelling ability that meshes with that, that I think really makes the book come alive. So whatever you were doing, it worked. Thanks. I really appreciate that. And I think this is another, I told you sort of Frances Hesselbein, who's a character in the book, kind of became a personal role model for me. So I've kept up with her because she's very much like the living embodiment of like leadership is not what to do, but how to be.

Like just her interactions with everyone are just like the world would be a better place, you know. And she had this saying, you have to, well, she actually, she learned it from someone else. You have to carry a large basket to bring something home. And this was when she was at her first Girl Scout training event. And one of the other, you know, prospective troop leaders was saying like, I'm not really learning anything from this. It's also basic. And another woman said to Francis, well, you have to carry a big basket to bring something home, which means like, if you keep an open mind, you know, you'll get something from it. And so like, this sounds kind of funny, but recently there was a, you know,

like a, like a Japanese culture conference at a hotel, a couple of blocks away from me, like largely based on sort of anime stuff like that. And I saw, oh, there's like a beginning, like anime narrative class. It's two blocks away. Of course I'm going to go to that. You know, so you go there and it's like, you know, there's only a couple of people there. I guess that wasn't the popular draw for most of the people or whatever, but it's like, and we're talking about like, what is character and what is plot? And I'm taking notes because I'm like, you always will learn something from this stuff. You know, I don't want to ever get to a point where I think I'm not a work in progress as a writer ever. Well, that's a Duckworth growth mindset.

Okay. Right there. A Dweck growth mindset. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right? I also heard you talk about how learning how to edit film actually informed how you structure your book as well, which I thought was really cool. Oh, that's funny. I don't even know when I last said that. You really did your homework. I don't know where I came across that, but it's very apt.

So, flesh that out for me. So, the way this came about was a friend of mine, my name Jeff, he was a film editor. mine, my name, Jeff, he was a film editor and he got some kind of repetitive stress injury where he wasn't supposed to like use the mouse a lot more because his arms were hurting. And so he just talked me through what to do. So, you know, he was doing all the brain part and I was just like the motor skills. And what I realized in doing this process, like editing is basically documentary, was you get all this film and you cut it up into all these little chunks right and all and that so that's like what reporters call your string right you gather string it's all this stuff and then you decide which chunks you're going to keep the rest of the stuff

hits the editing room floor and then it's just a question of how do you order those chunks basically and so that one out point feeds into the next in point and so that's how i started thinking of structuring my own writing which is just how do you go from one out point, which is a section break or a chapter break, to the next end point so that it feels like, especially if you're taking on these sort of amorphous questions like I did, so that it feels like an escalating exploration

of this question. And I started to become attuned to that in like some of the masters, like someone like Wes Craven, where some of the material in his films, I think is like patently ridiculous. And yet, because of the way he structures it, he can often keep you like, maybe I'll come back from that commercial break, even if it's ridiculous, just because of the out point is interesting. And so that's how I think of structuring my writing is my outline is

in points and out points for each section break and then each chapter. And then I try to like write between them. And I noticed, by the way, just in some separate reading, I don't remotely, I just disclaimer, I don't remotely want to compare myself to James Joyce on any level here. Okay. But I read that in some of his papers were these color coded sentences that he had, and he was like, and he would put them in different places and just write between like the color coded sentences. And so to me, I was sort of like, and he would put them in different places and just write between like the color coded sentences. And so to me, I was sort of like maybe similar to this. You write the in point, out point.

Right, those are the beats. Like that would be the plot beats in a film or that art of like bringing somebody right up to the commercial break with the cliffhanger and knowing exactly after the commercial how to like segue into the next section is a version of you trying to get people to turn the page and engage with the next chapter. And also to try to represent something

of my own intellectual journey as I go about it. Because the way I go about it is sort of, here's this question I have, what research can I look for that might sort of like falsify this or bear on it? And so a little bit, and because again, there are no perfect answers to questions like this. My approach is like, can I take the reader along on the intellectual journey that changed my mind about some things? And so I try to sort of organize it in that way too. Yeah. I would think of it almost more like a documentary that functions as a narrative, the react film, because you're somebody who spends like an entire year just in the research phase. I can't imagine the volume of information that you're trying to collate.

That's the change. And organize, you know? So what does that look like? Are you putting cards, you know, up on a wall and moving them around and trying to figure out like, well, where does this piece inform this? And how is this all gonna work? Like, that just seems monumental in the sense,

in the same way that a documentary filmmaker has got hundreds and hundreds of hours of, you know, maybe they've been following somebody around for years. How do you take all of that and create a story that moves and has those beats and that three act structure? It's, it's difficult. And it's one of the reasons why, you know, after my first book, my then agent said, like, just don't let it be five years before you have another book out. It's been six. This is one of those reasons. And it really does. Five if you count the paperback.

Five if you count the paperback, right? Yeah. Yeah. But fair. Okay. That's good. You give yourself a break. Yeah. But it really becomes a struggle for me sometimes, like because I'm consuming things so quickly that sometimes things start connecting. I'm like, where did that go? You know, I have to find it again. And I have things like laid out very visually and all this stuff, but I do start-

In longhand or do you do this all digitally? Everything, everything. But like one of the ways I'll consume a lot of papers is I used to go to, when I was in New York, I would go to the Columbia Library where I had alumni reading access. And there were four computers that were simultaneously logged into every journal that the university subscribes to. More than that, hyperlinked in the citations.

So if you wanted to bounce right to a citation, you could just do it. So I could read tons of papers really quickly. And I start a thing I call a master thought list. I've asked my wife before, because people would start asking me after my last book, how did you write it? And her answer was, you went upstairs and came down two years later. Right. Which is, there's some truth to that, but. Yeah, but not helpful. Yeah. So this master thought list, I basically start putting down stuff that I think is interesting and that bears on the question, whether that's some quote or some paper or whatever.

And as, and I try to tag it with words I think I would search if I want to come back to it. So this is like an electronic document. And as those sort of, I keep tagging things with the same words, I start moving those things closer to one another. And when there's a bunch of them, I put like a larger tag above it that's like, this is a topic. And then I put a bunch of words that I think I would search for that topic.

And then as, and I call each of those tags I would search for that topic. And then as, and I call each of those tags and as more of the tags start accumulating, then I start moving like ones closer to each other. So it sort of ends up being like that storyboarding process kind of. Yeah. Going from a generalization to something very specialized. It also helps with the citations process. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I guess in some ways, like, yeah, that could, that could be like a container that could fit anything though right eventually if we say like everything

everything has to become something and therefore it is specialized in whatever it is so I'm just thinking about that yeah I guess that's true right all right well let's end this with like some final thoughts. For somebody that is listening to this

and they're perhaps stuck in a rut, they're in their cubicle or they're in their lane at their job, they're not feeling fulfilled, they feel like they don't have the bandwidth for so much lateral movement, how can somebody kind of engage with, aside from reading the book,

which everybody should do, like how can they start to engage some of these ideas in a way that can help them kind of shake things up? I would say, and because I'm going to give this advice to myself right now, because I'm not sure what I'm going to do next, is start your little book of experiments. Like get it. Identity doesn't change overnight. So you're, if you, you know, you need to change, right? So like there's a Freakonomics study in there by the Freakonomics economist that shows pretty strongly that if people think they want to change, they basically should.

By the time you're thinking like you might want to change, already you clearly should. So start that book of experiments. Don't worry about like finding the thing that like lights your hair on fire. You may do that, but usually these kinds of, working is part of your identity and it usually changes a little piece at a time.

So reach out to the fringe of your network. Take a class on something you don't know about. Start exposing yourself systematically to little things. Having the book of experiments will force you to reflect on it. Did that ignite a new interest? Is it something that might cater to your talents? And just keep running those experiments.

And when you hit on something where you want to get a little deeper, go ahead and do that. But don't like just keep that experimentation process going. It doesn't have to be a flying leap to start learning things about yourself, but you do have to be a little uncomfortable because you're going to dabble in things that you don't feel as competent at yet. But get, get out of, get to the fringes of your network, the so-called strength of weak ties. People usually get like new jobs from people who are on the fringe of their network because they already know the stuff that's sort of closer to the core of their network.

But so that's what I'm doing. I'm running, I'm using my book of experiments now and I'm, you know, pretty soon where I'm gonna be talking about this book less, I'll be more active in running some of those experiments. It seems like patience is important with this because I think that people do feel like they feel bad because they haven't been struck by lightning and they feel this pressure or that everyone else is having these kinds of epiphanies that they're not and this sense that they've got to figure it out right away. more of a lifestyle or a mindset to just be constantly engaging different parts of your brain and your life experience in new and different ways,

there's a trust that takes over where like you just, you're gonna be naturally guided in a direction that will ultimately lead to different kinds of opportunities and that chance encounter that might lead to this other thing that can set you on, you know, a different path that you just can't see right now. Yeah, or it gives you some knowledge that you can, you can a different path that you just can't see right now. Yeah, or gives you some knowledge that you can merge into another domain.

I mean, I would say if you're not struck by lightning, like that's okay. There's no way to like force that to happen other than exposing yourself probably to some things and hoping. But if over longer time spans, when you're changing what you're doing, if you aren't moving in the direction

of better match quality with those changes, then there's something wrong, right? Then I don't think you're doing. If you aren't moving in the direction of better match quality with those changes, then there's something wrong, right? Then I don't think you're kind of in that dark horse approach where you say, who am I today? What are my skills and interests? What are the opportunities in front of me? Which will I try?

And then maybe a year from now I'll change. So, you know, over time, I think you should be moving toward that match quality. And don't worry about the lightning. Like you can't force that anyway, but you can have this approach to being a scientist of yourself that means like your strategy will move you toward better match quality in the long term.

Good stuff, man. Thanks for having me. Thanks for talking to me. It's my pleasure. Yeah, it was great. Range is the book available everywhere. It's almost impossible to miss it. I was in the airport yesterday

and there was like a whole rack, like outward facing, like it was the most visible book of like any book in the airport bookstore, which is a good sign. Definitely got out of the gate faster than I expected. Crazy, man. You must be in super high demand

to talk at all these conferences and do all kinds of stuff and be really outwardly facing right now. Yeah, yeah. And I obviously wanna get the book out there because I worked hard on it. You know, at the same time, I'm like a bit of a, an introvert, so I need some like time of my own. And at some point, like I'm kind of a voracious reader and I'm doing like, with a book out, I'm doing like the least reading I've done in like years, you know, but, but no, it's great because, well, I didn't really think, I didn't know until my last book that speaking was like a thing that people would invite me to do.

And I get very nervous before I do it, the same way I used to do before races, no matter how many times I do it. It's just like a race. Exactly. And I found that I really enjoy it a lot. Like I like doing the aesthetics for like the visual presentations. And it's brought me into contact with all these people in lines of work and walks of life that I would not have met otherwise. And I've actually totally loved that. And it was totally unexpected.

So that's one area that just opened up for me that I didn't expect. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now you're like this guy who's speaking to all these businessmen. Yeah, which is super weird. Because I'm like, you know, for a long time, I'm just like, what are these? Like, why are they? But I sort of get it now that like people are interested in performance or interested in performance. They don't care if it's a chef or a midwife or a pilot or an athlete or whatever. Cool. Do you have any

public events that like, if people go to your website, if they want to come and hear you speak or check you out, is that where they should go to find out? I'll list them on my webpage. Yeah. And I'm also, I'm just at David Epstein on Twitter. And like when I have events coming up, I stick them up there. But also davidepstein.com. So they're both easy. All right, man. Cool.

Great to talk to you. Thank you for having me here. Feel good? Feel great. Some of my favorite people have been in here. So I'm kind of like, I feel like I'm in a good lineage. Super honored to have you here. The book is amazing. And once you finish that, read The Sports Gene as well.

And I'll put links up in the show notes to everything. You can go on a super deep dive into David's world and come back and talk to me again sometime. I would love to. Cool, peace. Plants. So that was me and David Epstein. What do you think?

I thought that one was pretty great. For more on David, please check the show notes on the episode page at richroll.com. And let David know directly how this one landed for you by sharing your thoughts with him on Twitter at David Epstein. Also, please do not forget to pick up a copy of his latest book, Range. It really is incredible. If you've already read it, pick up the sports gene. And also, be sure to check out his massively popular TED Talk. It's really cool, and I've got links up to all of this stuff in the show notes.

Finally, if you're a fan of plant-based cheese, here's your opportunity to be one of the first people to enjoy Julie, my wife's new commercial artisanal, mind-blowing plant-based cheese line. It's called Shreemu, and you can learn more line it's called shreemu and you can learn more and sign up at shreemu.com s-r-i-m-u.com if you'd like to support the work we do here on the podcast subscribe rate and comment on the show on apple podcasts that really helps new people discover what we're doing here you can also of course tell your friends about your favorite episode easy peasy share the show on social media Take a screen grab of the episode you're listening to. Throw it up there. Tag me. Sometimes I reshare that stuff. Also, subscribe to our YouTube channel. For those of you who might not know, all of our podcast episodes are also visually available on my YouTube channel,

youtube.com forward slash Rich Roll. And hit that subscribe button on Spotify, Google Podcasts, wherever you listen to this. You can also support us on Patreon at richroll.com forward slash donate. And I thank you in advance. While we're on the subject of thanks, let me appreciate the people who work very hard to help put on this show today. I do not do this alone. Jason Camiello for audio engineering, production, show notes, interstitial music. Blake Curtis and Margo Lubin for their video genius, creating the video version of this podcast, and Blake doing double duty on audio today. Jessica Miranda for graphics, Allie Rogers for

portraits, DK, David Kahn for advertiser, relationships, and theme music by Analema. Appreciate all of you guys. I will see you back here next week with another New York Times bestselling author. Her name is Kelly Corrigan. She's delightful. She's amazing. You're gonna love her. And here, I will leave you with a small taste

of what's to come. And until then, explore, inquire, try new stuff. Lots of stuff. See what you like. You may find something you love. Peace, plants, namaste. It's more ordinary for me to be stuck than to be in flow. You know, it's interesting.

I've been thinking a lot about talking about work and talking about the thing you're working on and whether that's a good thing or a bad thing. I had heard a writer say once that they never talk about it because part of the reward of having written is being able to finally share it and talk about it. And if you give yourself that reward prematurely, you're less motivated to complete the work. And I think there might be something like that for me, which is to say that I totally relate to you thinking maybe I'll just podcast forever. Like, why write a book? Like, this is so satisfying. And this right now is so satisfying for me. Like,

I could do this all day long and way more satisfying than writing. I'm only glad to have written. I'm almost never happy when writing. Thank you.