An Evening with DAVID EPSTEIN, Author of Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

at this time I'd like to introduce awesome human beings we have on stage tonight to my left here is Molly Sullivan French she has 14 years of experience in television 11 of those years in sports Molly currently works for the film what happened in those other three years as a host and reporter and before that she was the Philadelphia 76ers sideline reporter for seven seasons a graduate of the University of North Carolina Molly currently lives in Philly further to my left is the man of the hour David Epstein he is the author of The New York Times bestseller the sports Jean and the book we're all here for tonight range-wide generalist romp in a specialized world he has master's degrees in environmental science and journalism and has worked as an investigative reporter for ProPublica and a senior writer for Sports Illustrated he currently lives in DC now if you haven't heard the big news David's new book range has just been listed as an instant New York Times bestseller in its first week we give it up for David as a bookseller this is actually a pretty big accomplishment it's not an insignificant feat so we're here tonight to keep the momentum momentum building for David and the book now I could list all the praise this book has received from the New York Times Malcolm Gladwell Daniel pink NPR Susan Cain Adam grant the Atlantic and many other more outlets and people but I'll leave you here my favorite blurb about the book from author Amanda Ripley quote I want to give range to any kid who is being forced to take violin lessons but really wants to learn the drums too any programmer who secretly dreams of becoming a psychologist to everyone who wants to humans to thrive in an age of robots range is full of surprises and hope it's a 21st century survival fit without further ado please join me giving a warm Harrisburg welcome to motley indeed Alex thank you so much I'm gonna put you on the spotlight here for a second because I think we all specialize in one way or another right I mean think about that for a moment Alex your Twitter profile Bookseller with hashtag TTP that's trust the process that's kind of a Philly thing so just a little highlight there but I you know I'm so excited to be here in part because my big takeaway from reading the book and I think it's such a vital read for everybody right and that's what we all share being under this roof that we're all gonna take different lessons but I think that the big takeaway for me is that there there's not one path to success but rather there's the most effective and efficient path to excellence and so that's kind of what I took from it how many experts do we have in the house how many experts come on don't be shy how many experts perhaps all right fair enough I like the Moxie over there I like the Moxie perhaps a better question is how many of us really want to improve at performance right Dave okay all right so case in point on the cover we have here at the very top I loved range now big words come in from Malcolm right that we talked about a little but why was that significant to have him at the top here well one I think he's one of the storytellers you know of a generation but also the rest of the words on that blurb are I think something like for reasons I can't explain David Epstein makes me thoroughly enjoy the experience of being told everything I thought about something was wrong which as a reader I just think it's kind of a cool blurb first of all but the the book part of the idea for the book came out of a debate I had with Malcolm previously where after my first book the sports gene as he would say I devoted several pages to attacking his work that's how he puts it and we were devoted to the the MIT Sloan Sports analytics conference was founded by the general manager of the Houston Rockets to have a debate that's on YouTube 10,000 hours versus the sports gene I was criticizing the science that underlies the 10,000 hour rule for four reasons I I can explain but he's very this was the first time we were gonna meet was for this debate and he's very clever and I didn't want to get embarrassed so I tried to anticipate his arguments and I knew we were talking about athletic development particularly and I knew he would have to argue for early specialization as a primary advantage so I just went and looked at I was the science writer at Sports Illustrated and I said I'm gonna go if that's the hypothesis let's go look at what the science of athletic development says and it turns out that pretty much everywhere you look athletes who go on to become elite to actually have what scientists call a sampling period where they play a range of sports often in an unstructured manner they they gain this broad variety of skills that scaffold later learning they learn about their interest they learn about their abilities and they systematically delay specializing until later than their peers with golf as a possible exception that we can talk about so I brought that up on stage and afterward when he came off he sort of said you know what you got me on was like I didn't have anything for that because it was incompatible with his hypothesis so he sort of became running buddies after that and started talking on her own time and we were invited back in March and in this one is also on YouTube and at the end he says I now think I conflated two ideas the idea that it's important to have a lot of practice to become good at something with the idea that in order to become good at X you should start as early as possible doing X and only X and so I thought the way he nuanced his view is very representative of some of the thinkers later in the book who developed good judgment about the world so that's a long story but so it was important to me because I think it was instead of seeing our debate as zero-sum I think we both went into it trying to learn and nuancing our views and it became like a very productive intellectual partnership for me it was very much a real recognize real moment because you guys both went toe to toe and a healthy debate I invite you guys to look that up on YouTube but research like we're talking before we stepped on stage here doesn't always say what we think it says right so I'm gonna stick with the cover I can hear Mary Poppins singing from my daughter's room because the cover is not a book right but I'm gonna stay with these keys and I think there's 12 of them count him up but the significance of that there's not one master key so it will break that down for us that's right so there was a there was a quote I loved when I was reading Arnold Toynbee this famous historian who sort of studied you know one of the themes of what he studied was just a social adjustment in a changing world and in response to technology and I came across this quote that I loved in his I think it was volume 12 of his study of history that says no no tool is Omni competent there is no such thing as a master key that unlocks all doors and so I put that as one of the epigraphs in the front of the book because to me it represented this he was in some ways he was talking about other historians who had these single theories of everything that clearly were not appropriate to the complexity of the things they were analyzing and I thought it represented this having many instead of having one master key you have many different keys or many different ways that you can approach a single problem and that's one of the strengths of the kind of people I write about so in Philadelphia were all about the process right so let's let's kind of start here when you first set out to examine this project what was your motivation what was your source of inspiration for this well so there was there was first that issue of so the reason the introduction is called Roger versus Tiger is because the Tiger Woods story is probably the most famous story of development of anything I would say you know and and I think there are six best-selling books just in the u.s. that were centered on extrapolating the tiger Woods model to anything else that you would like to be good at and the where's Roger Federer right we we all know him as a pro athlete we know him as well as Tiger Woods but nobody knows his development story which is that he played a ton of different sports one of which was tennis his his hip let's see skiing wrestling soccer basketball rugby badminton skateboarding I'm sure I'm missing a couple and his mother was a tennis coach he actually refused to coach him because he wouldn't return balls normally he when his coaches one to bump him up a level he declined because he just wanted to talk about pro wrestling with his friends after practice and one of my favorite stories when he became good enough because he was a good youth athletes and the reporter asked him if you ever become a pro what will you buy with your first paycheck and he says in Mercedes and and his mother's appalled at this and asks the reporter if she can hear the interview tape and the reporter obliges and it turns out Roger just said Mayer CDs and swiss-german he just wanted more CDs not a Mercedes and so it was a very different as as Roger Federer noted in 2006 my story is completely different from his and so partly my question was which one of these is the norm we hear one we don't hear the other which is the norm and it turned out that it was the Roger path and I kind of filed that in the back of my head and then when I got involved with the Pat Tillman Foundation of the foundation named for the late NFL player I was invited to talk about well I was just invited to talk because one of my former track and field training partners was a tilman scholar they give scholarships to aid veterans soldiers and military spouses in career changes and I decided to talk about late specialization in sports and research and since they weren't athletes they research it in a couple other areas and tack that on the last five minutes of the talk and it was like cathartic for them like this all started coming up and saying how they felt behind and being told that they didn't have like the normal resume for whatever they're applying for one of the guys was a former he was on SEAL Team 5 his undergrad degrees were geophysics and history and he was in Dartmouth and Harvard grad school at the time of the talk and he sent me this note saying I'm so relieved you know even told him so behind and I'm just like if this guy is getting the message that he's behind this is kind of crazy and so those it brought the sports stuff back to my head and I decided I think there's something to look into here yeah and to be candid Alex when you first reached out I don't know where Alex went he's very busy but I originally thought this was essentially just you know part two of the sport gene the New York Times best because you know David you've been all over all the the media outlets that I that I tuned into all the biggies right you guys have seen him left and right but really this is so much bigger than sport I think that we've all we've all had a bad boss or too bad is such a loaded word right but for the suits for the executives who perhaps are reading this book and from a management leadership level what do you hope they take away yeah I mean a number of things but but one of those is I think and this does have an analogy in sports actually is to diversify their pipelines because I think things like LinkedIn are actually making it much easier for them to find square pegs for their square holes whereas some of the research I highlight by woman named Abby Griffin who studies so-called serial innovators these are people who make creative contributions not just once but over and over and over and and when I was reading through her research it's like this very staid you know psychological surveys of these serial innovators and so on and and then and then eventually in in one of her works she sort of steps outside that and says ok now I want to give advice to HR people you're all screening these people out because you're making you're defining your job too narrowly these people have usually zigzagged they've often come from another domain they have a need to be in contact with people outside of their domain they tend to have more hobbies they read more and more widely than their colleagues they appear to flit among ideas all these things on and on and on and on they use analogies from other domains in order to problem-solve and one of the chapters about analogical probably using analogies to solve problems and so you're screening them out because you're you're making this to to narrow description and it turns out that's that's actually in some sports programs that have reformed like when the UK was not doing very well in the Olympics for many years and basically their revelation was to diversify their entry pipeline to allow these people who didn't have the perfect sort of resume for coming in to try to get in and so I would think for people who do personnel selection they they should be wary of that and and they themselves are often that right LinkedIn did research on a half-million members they have these great databases right because previous research is like 50 people and LinkedIn has a half a million to see what is the best predictor of who would become an executive and one of the best predictors was the number of different job functions that someone had worked across in their industry because they get this sort of holistic view but that's each additional job function saved them three years in terms of experience in getting to the to the c-suite but we don't hear that stuff we just hear precocity I was just a sorry one other thing I know a very digressive brain that I attempt to organize on the page but it takes time it's a reporter's dream when they just go no I know right just used to be like score more points than the other team and so I was just at this event for The Motley Fool which is like this investment publication ever and before we went up because I write about this in the book they put a poll up for the audience where they could vote with their cell phone which was what do you think the average age of a founder of like a blockbuster startup is on the day of founding now when it becomes a blockbuster and that the options were 25 35 45 55 and 25 was the overwhelming favorite right so we all know like when Mark Zuckerberg was 22 and said young people are just smarter like that sticks but research by Northwestern and MIT in the Census Bureau those just out shows that it's actually 45 and a half on the day of founding that these people have often zigzagged quite a bit before they can even identify that sort of turf that they want to compete on uniquely but just like the Tiger story that's the only one we hear and then Mark Zuckerberg story that's the one we hear and so we extrapolate from these stories that are not really helpful or real or representative all the science in this area so I sort of wanted to rebut that and which leads right into a chapter where the words jumped out for me the cult of the head start you're a new parent of four month old son props to that what you know parents we've got a three year old my husband's here you know a lot of parents in the mix break that down the cult of the head start in terms of sampling and we've got summer season on deck right what what do you hope parents take away from from this yeah so when I was when I was living in Brooklyn until now I live in Washington DC but there was a you seven travel soccer team that met across the street from me and I don't think right that anybody thinks six year olds can't I'm good enough competition in city of nine million people that they have to travel right this is they are customers for someone who is trying to keep them from doing all these other sports sampling and so this doesn't happen in some places like France where they have a more holistic development pipeline and they're not and it's not a zero sum between the youth coaches and me and the adult coaches so for me I think well so the cult of the Head Start is is what I refer to as sort of the V the headstart industrial complex that that tries to make parents feel that they will let their kid get behind if they don't do certain things and one of the other stories so some of the stories that are essential to this are the Tiger Woods one which shows up in a ton of places the Mozart's story and and we're telling both of those stories wrong by the way so as Tiger both of those fathers there are a number of books that talk about how the father's manufactured those kids which is not the case Tiger father was responding to his display of unusual interest in prowess in golf Mozart's the same I was looking at at at letters and found these letters where a musician who visited recounts Mozart when some other musicians come to play with his father he recounts little Wolfgang coming in and saying I want a place that can violin and his father's like you haven't any lessons like go away and he starts crying and so one of the musicians says I'll go play with him in another room so I'll stop crying and then suddenly they hear the second violin part coming from the other room and his father starts crying and they come in and the letter writer says little Wolfgang was emboldened by our applause to insist he could also play the first violin which he then does with with his own made-up fingering so I think first of all parents should not be worried about missing Tiger Woods or Mozart in fact if they want to increase the chances of that incredibly rare phenomenon they should expose them to more things and see if they take to it like that but the story I focus on is this one of the polder family that is as famous in like the performance literature but not as famous as Tiger Woods in popular literature and this gentleman lászló polgár whose family was basically wiped out in the Holocaust decided that he wanted to have you a hungarian gentleman decided that he wanted to have a large and very special family and he studied education and decided that he could turn he would turn his kids into geniuses he said normal education produces the gray average mass and that if he gave his kids an early specialized start he could turn them into geniuses and really this would be to show that you could do this to anyone you could turn anyone into a genius by early specialization and he picks chess too because this was at the time when you know the the chess was like a Cold War proxy for the for the US and Russia at the time and he starts training his his first daughter Susan at age three and she becomes really good by four she's going to like smoky chess clubs in Budapest and beating grown men and she goes on to become the best women's chess player in the world and in fact she's the first woman to qualify for what was then called the Men's World Championship and I think because of the things she did it's now just the World Championship not the Men's World Championship and her two other sisters became part of the sort of project or experiment one of them became an international master which is a step down from Grandmaster an the other Judit became the best best female player ever and up to that point and this is another story so like the book talent is overrated uses this story and says this is the key to get good at anything that you care about the problem is chess is what the psychologist Robin Hogarth calls a kind learning environment which means it is based on repetitive patterns it has a huge store of previous knowledge people preferably people take turns for a kind' learning environment the rules never change the next steps are very clear feedback is automatic and fully accurate after everything you do like golf and these kind learning environments turned out to be the incredible rarity in the world so they are as opposed to wicked learning environments where next steps are not often cleared rules can change feedback can be inaccurate or delayed that's kind of more of the work that most of us do and one of the problems with extrapolating from kind learning environments other than that most of the things we care about aren't is that they are extremely easy to automate which is why it's one of the reasons why chess is one of first things that was that was automated so as one of the and and then those even the companies have extrapolated from those kind learning environments and said well we can apply our a I to more complicated things so I don't know if anybody followed Google Flu Trends but Google a I got good at gaming and they said well now we're gonna use it to predict the flu and there's this big paper in the journal science saying Google's using search query information predicted the spread of flu in the US as accurately in it and more quickly than the CDC and but then it started getting worse because the rules don't stay the same for human behavior and about three four years out it missed by a hundred percent and if you go now Google has a holding page that says it's early days for this kind of prediction so we're gonna put it on pause for now right or you look at Watson and healthcare which was this huge high who's gonna transform healthcare right I'm sure you've all experienced how Watson has transformed your healthcare but so one of the researchers I researchers I talked to were worried it performed so poorly that they were worried it would taint the reputation of AI and healthcare going forward as one of the researchers I talked to said the reason Watson destroys at jeopardy and does horrible in medical research is because we know the answers to jeopardy and I think that's sort of the the the definition of the kind learning environment so we've we've extrapolated this headstart stuff that works in these in very particular types environments you have to specialize early if you want EHS grandma your chances of becoming reaching international master status or higher drops from one in four to one in 55 if you haven't started pattern study by age twelve so works in chess but chess is not representative of almost anything else that you would like to get good at see what I mean David makes us think and rethink and you're so smooth about it and that's what your writing is too when we we talk about grit and how you measure grit what's the trouble with too much grit whether it's draft day or the boardroom or the grocery store Wegmans on a honest Sunday what's the trouble with too much grit yeah that's a title of one of my chapters people probably heard of grit of the psychological construct of grit and it's based on a twelve questions survey most associated with Angela Duckworth but and the survey rewards half the points for perseverance essentially your resilience and the other half for consistency of interests so if you sometimes don't finish a project or your interest change you lose points the most famous study of grid was done on incoming cadets to West Point the US Military Academy and it it turned out that grit was a better predictor than traditional measures of who would get through what's called beast barracks it's like the orientation at West Point that's physically and emotionally rigorous and most people get through it but grit was a better predictor than were this thing called whole candidate's score and so that sort of lit this grit fire where school systems started testing for grit companies test for grit and things like that but there are a number of problems with some of if using grit that way and some of the critique of grit that I have in the book comes straight out of the researchers papers like they were pretty honest about some of these limitations they've just sort of been lost in translation so for example those those gritty cadets if you then zoom out and watch you know look at their career progression about half of them drop out of the army on the day that they are allowed right so have they lost their grit over the course you know of that progression no it turns out that they've developed other interests so well I guess in that sense maybe they have lost some of their grade because they would score differently on the grid survey and the army at first thought that this was indeed a great problem but they couldn't fix it then they thought it was a money problem so they started throwing money at their most talented officers to try to get them to stay the ones were gonna stay anyway stayed and the ones who want to do other stuff and took the money and the ones who want to other stuff left here's your career path go up or out they started what they call talent based branching this phenomenon of West Point cadets quitting was only since the knowledge economy it's like since the 90s where you can get certain skills and transfer them laterally in a way that you couldn't when people were doing more repetitive tasks so I think I think the rise of the generalist is in some ways rising with the with the knowledge economy but and so this talent base branching program they started where they take an officer they pair them with a coach and they say here a bunch of career tracks starts sampling one at a time the coach will help you reflect on how this fits your interests or abilities and then you'll start a zigzag until we get you better what it kind of is called match quality the degree of fit between your interests your abilities and the work that you do which turns out to be incredibly important for your motivation for your performance level and what these researchers who study that their basic conclusion was when you get fit it looks like grit so when you put someone in the right spot they start displaying all the habits that you associate with grit and that this is not actually a stable characteristic that runs across everything you do and I mean right I was a college athlete some of the I would say greediest people I ever saw on the 200-meter runner not just any college athlete that's the most grueling race walk side note there for you I think the mile is the most grueling but it's probably one up from whatever you train for but the right some some of those athletes were the super gritty on the track and total chickens in the classroom and vice versa and it's like demonstrably true in psychological research that grit is not the stable characteristic anyway and so I think it made the focus on more testing for something that is purported to be a stable personality trait and that is is clearly not it's it's a it's like psychologists who studied to say it's a state not a trait it's it's a function of the situation you're in as opposed to something that's inherent and unchanging in your personality another phrase that comes up in your book lateral thinking versus weather technology and you say that this is the Golden Age of opportunity here this golden age of opportunity for generalists why so that I love that phrase so can I explain that for you please yeah lateral thinking with weather technology so that phrase comes from this guy named gunpei Yokoi japanese man who didn't score well on his electronics exams and so he had to take a job in Kyoto at a low-level job as a machine maintenance worker at a playing card company in Kyoto where all his better scoring colleagues went off to big firms in Tokyo and the playing card company was in trouble and again he's just a machine maintenance worker and but they were they realized the president realized they had to diversify from playing cards because that wasn't cutting it anymore and Yokoi realized that he was not equipped to work on the cutting edge but that there was so much information becoming available that he could just combine stuff that was already under well understood and cheaper in ways that specialists could no longer see because they were so narrow so lateral thinking meant taking information that was ordinary in one area and taking it somewhere where it becomes extraordinary and withered technology meant technology was already well understood so we didn't have to be at the cutting edge so he started just doing that and that company he started a toy and game operation at that company was called Nintendo which was a 19th century playing card company prior to him starting a toy and game operation and all he did is try to come look for technology that had been left behind what people were racing to the cutting edge and combine it in new ways so one of his great breakthroughs was the Gameboy which used a processor that was a decade outdated a screen that looks like you know like rotting salad for grayscale shades of graphics that smeared across the screen when it moved quickly and came out right when Sega and Ataris color handhelds came out and yokoi he recounted actually this was a cool thing because there's a little lucky for me none of his work had been appeared in English so I hired some translators translate his work and it's like great I've got some new stuff that's new for Americans so it's lucky research find um very savvy yeah but so so the the color ones are coming out yellow he recounts his colleague coming to him and say like bad news Sagan Atari are hitting the market right before us with color Oh hitting the market for us and Yokoi says are they color and his colleague says yes they are and yellow he says then we're fine don't worry about it because he realized the stuff that was important to the consumers was the gameplay the number of games they would have that durability the battery life and so using this older technology he was able to make it cheaper sturdier could go for weeks on batteries and it was sort of like how iPhone app developers are now because the technology was understood they started pumping out tons of games where the game development was much slower for the newer technology in fact in the research of this I went to my parents house in Chicago in the basement dad's here yeah yeah and I picked up my gameboy which was my old gamer which was like covered in some black stuff I couldn't figure out what it was flipped it open the batteries had expired in 2007 and 2013 and I flipped it on and played Tetris for a couple minutes before it burned out so that became the best-selling video game console the twentieth century and and set the philosophy for Nintendo from there forth like so with the Wii they realized that that cutting-edge graphics was not the problem it was the complexity of gameplay so they just made the controllers easier to use and then Queen Elizabeth you know got video playing Wii bowling or whatever Nepal so that became the philosophy for Nintendo and and if you look at patent research so I try to I use these stories in the book but I try to ground them in in what the science says about this more broadly because I don't want to do the thing I'm criticizing people of of saying you know here's this one person use them as the example if that's not what the science says so patent research showed that from about the middle of the 20th century to about the late 80s people who focus their work in one technological class so the Patent Office has about 450 technological classes we're making bigger contributions but starting in about the 1990s that changed and it became people who are spreading their work across a larger number of technological classes and merging them for their projects so I think this is this yokoi success sort of was it the front edge of this this phenomenon that developed more broadly and you know it's clear why you're one of the best science riders in the game but you were recently on Bill Simmons podcast which if I typically if I mentioned this Boston guy in Philadelphia I get 86 but the Sixers and ethics aren't playing so I digress but you guys did mention the what was it the Dark Horse project and short term opportunities which I found fascinating can you break that that down a little bit for us yeah the Dark Horse project was this study at Harvard essentially of how people find match quality work that fits them and in the the criteria was actually they were actually looking at fulfillment not a lot of the people were successful in the ways that people like to measure money or whatever but but fulfillment was really their their dependent variable and so they started as they were doing the research and talk to their subjects what they realized was these people who were fulfilled would often come in not all of them but the large majority and would say don't tell people to do what I did like I started in this other thing I thought that was my life's work then I got off and it took me a while to figure out what I want to do and I did this and that and then I combined something to do my own thing and they'd say like so I'm a total outlier and then when like 45 over their first 50 subjects were like I'm a total don't tell people to do what I did you know they started to realize that there was something going on here so they actually named it the dark they renamed the project to be the Dark Horse project because most of these people viewed themselves as Dark Horse's having come out of nowhere to do what they did and they're basically their common trait was sort of like the anti grid in a way now that they weren't resilient but the part of the survey had asked about consistency of interests where instead of setting these long-term plans you know like the commencement speech advice to picture who you're gonna be in 10 or 20 years and March confidently toward it which is the investor Paul Graham is noted computer scientists call that premature optimization because you don't know where you should be going yet the Dark Horse is all had this common strategy of short-term planning where they wouldn't look around and say here's someone who's younger than me and has more than me they would say here's what I'm right now here my skills here my interest here the opportunities in front of me here's a hypothesis I have about something I want to learn or try so I'm gonna try this one and maybe you're from now I'll change because I will have learned something about myself and they do this like lots of zigzagging until they get to a spot that fits them really well is just doing this short term planning and spending a lot of time reflecting on how it fit them it's called self regulatory learning and doing that kind of reflection and so that really is not I mean even they realized that wasn't the advice and this that resonated with me a lot personally one because I was living in a tent in the Arctic when I was for sure decide to become a writer but but also even then when I got to and entered si as a fact checker this amazing story in itself and they so once I became a senior writer there you know you get contacted by aspiring sports writers saying well what should I do if I want to work at si and the question was usually should i major in english or journalism and my first instinct was to say journalism and my second instinct was to say english and then my third instinct was they have no idea I majored in geology astronomy but even for me it was such a strong compulsion to say like well obviously you should get a head start right so only now I started become comfortable like not giving that advice it's it's hard to internalize it's okay to zigzag my final question here cuz I see Alex with the mic he's gonna pass it off to all of you now you can take the stage and ask him but what study what study surprised you most when writing this book is there something that you can single out for us yeah there was one both because it was he was surprised counterintuitive to me and because it was such a cool study so is this one done at the US Air Force Academy and they wanted to study there's a chapter on on learning techniques basically and in this study they wanted to they wanted to study the the impact of teaching quality essentially in the Air Force Academy provided this incredible experiment that you could never recreate in another way because they bring in their freshman class every year and those students all have to take a sequence of three math courses calculus one calculus two in a follow-up course and they are randomized to professors for calculus one then they re randomized for calculus two and then they re randomized for the next course and they all have to take the exact same test and it's graded by committee so there's no subjectivity to it and so you have this incredible experiment where you're randomizing Andry randomizing people so you can really see the impact of the teacher over the thousands of students so he had a hundred professors that were in the study over a decade and what they found was that the better a professor did in calculus won at causing their students to over perform based on those students characteristics they came in with on the calculus one exam the worse those students then did in the follow-on courses so for example the professor whose students did the fifth-best on calculus one exam that practice one professor the students rated him the sixth best was dead last out of a hundred and how those students then went on to do in future courses they then underperformed in future courses so why was this well the researchers found that this was because the way to get the quickest short-term improvement was to teach very narrow curriculum and what's called using procedures knowledge which is essentially how to execute procedures over and over and over until they become automatic the professors whose students struggled a little more in calculus one but then went on to over perform in their their future classes they rated their professors lower because they felt more frustrated learned making connections knowledge where there they have to tie together concepts instead of learning how to execute procedures they learn how to match strategies two types of problems and when you have to do what's called transfer which is taking your knowledge and applying it to a problem you haven't seen before which is what modern work basically requires that learning in a way that causes you to figure out how to match strategies to problems instead of execute procedures is crucial and the scary thing I mean it was and it was just so deeply counterintuitive to me that and this became one of the themes of the book that the things that you can do to cause the most rapid improvement and it causes the learners to rate their own learning the best can undermine your long-term development even though I sort of knew that in sports where we know that the way to develop the best ten-year-old is not the same as the way to develop best twenty year old it was just deeply counterintuitive for me in an incredible study so that was a real surprise you guys have questions alex has the mic marvelous I listen to you being interviewed on wi tf2 so now I really have a good background it's yeah thank you I appreciate you coming for more of me yeah I want it to come I'm tired you're my own voice so well I was wondering how well the people that you found are the good generalists the generalists who I don't want to say our success of us I don't like the word success I can deal with uncertainty and even prefer it and like improvisation yeah oh sorry okay that's an interesting point one of the one of Abby Griffin who studies the serial innovators phrases that I left out was high tolerance for ambiguity and and I think the chapter that bears the best on this is chapter 10 which is about some work that people may that's the work that is probably the most familiar to people in the book and it's about judgment essentially testing people's judgment and ability to predict political and economic trends and the study that went into this actually this was I guess this one was let this one was as surprising to me when I first learned about it I just learned about it a while ago and this is this is a professor at Penn in Philly named Philip tetlock who in the 80s started realizing that experts at that point on American Soviet relations would make predictions that were totally authoritative immune to counter argument and mutually exclusive and so he wanted to decide you know who would be right and he didn't want to hear them saying the things we hear pundits say on TV times which is there's a strong possibility that right so he would study what what percent people think that means and it's incredibly variable but so he started a 20-year study required 82,000 predictions of things that would happen in the future political and economic trends and they had definite deadlines for each prediction and you had to give percent chances of different outcomes and it was scored in this kind of elaborate way and the conclusion was basically that the more narrow the specialist what he called the Hedgehog's so this from this from this philosophy essay by Isaiah Berlin the Hedgehog knows one big thing and the Fox knows many little things the Hedgehog year someone was the worst they were basically because they would bend every every possibility into their lens of their single specialty and that dovetails was something that Daniel Kahneman you know won the Nobel Prize for illuminating cognitive bias cause the inside view they had this one lens and they knew so much information inside of it that they could fit any story to create it whereas the Foxes sometimes had near expect of expertise sometimes didn't but either way they roamed way outside of it aggregating perspectives so they needed specialists I don't mean a denigrate specialist maybe we need both but they would use them for information instead of opinions they had very high tolerance for ambiguity they updated their beliefs a lot right they flip-flopped like crazy like we punish politicians for flip-flopping I think so yeah yeah absolutely it is improvisation so they would see their own ideas as hypotheses in need of testing and they would constantly update their mental models tetlock likened it to dragonflies so dragonflies have thousands of lenses on their eyes that each take a different picture and then it integrates in the brain and so he would identify them as as like these mental model collectors and that that the follow-on study to that was sponsored by IEEE ARPA which Commission's research on the US intelligence community's like most pressing challenges and to their credit they decided to have a prediction tournament and say you know Ken University led teams beat our intelligence analysts who have access to classified info and you guys don't have classified info and so tetlock and Barber Mellors his wife and collaborator decided to look for people in the general public who had those wide-ranging interests that they had looked for and they beat a market of intelligence analysts with access to classified information by 30% right with no access to classified information wide-ranging reading habits not only that huge tolerance for for ambiguity but when they were put on teams of 12 together their their individual predictions became 50 percent more accurate because of the way they would politely antagonize each other basically and and update their mental models and if you watch their conversations one of which I exercised improvisation they're like constantly changing their ideas and sort of triangulating like this and no grand theory like jazz music so yeah there's a chapter 3 is on music so this this parallel the parallel is not implicit in the book question in the back hi one I want to first thank both of you for coming to Harrisburg in the Midtown scholar to speak to us today so I'm a Sports Illustrated subscriber I've been getting the magazine since the 1970s when I was a kid and just a few days ago in the current issue there's an article about a 13 year old girl in California who's a soccer phenom named Olivia Moultrie so I you know read the article about how obsessed she is and she's training like crazy to be the best player in the world then I went online google their name you know watched a lot of her videos I mean she's got amazing skills for a 13 year old girl so I put up you know after listening to your talk I'm wondering if she's doing the right thing just putting so much focus into soccer like if you could speak to her and her parents what advice would be a soccer community has read his book I mean the soccer community very right yeah yeah yeah when I started writing about this specialization stuff I get these messages from Europe saying like maybe you're dumb American sports but like not in our sport and so I started looking and I'm like no actually a lot of the research has come from soccer so right after Germany won the World Cup they had a study came out that followed the development of a bunch of their different leagues but also the players went on to the World Cup and it found more unstructured play more other sports didn't matter if it's formal sports you know not more organized practice and amateur league players until age 22 right and then they did another study where they matched kids for ability at age 11 and 12 tracked them over several years and see who got better and it was the kids who did more unstructured stuff because at first I thought maybe was just gonna be a talent selection issue but then there's studies starting up hearing like that so first of all I think Chris Ballard wrote that right because I think he was calling me for something and I didn't call him back so oh well I meant to so new book and new born he'll let me off the hook and my first answer is I don't know what that family is doing overall so I don't I don't think it's a problem to practice a lot or practice hard I think it's a question of what else is going on and you know if you go to like the French soccer development pipeline or in Brazil the kids are playing a ton but they're playing futsal they're not been playing soccer those kids who go on to become the pros in futsal has small ball and you'll play one day they're on sand and the next day they're on cobblestones and it's you know this big space the sizes stage or a basketball court and and I think the thing about playing different sports is really just a proxy for diversity of movement and diversity of problem-solving I don't think it actually matters that you put on the jersey of another sport and so I think futsal is a great developmental sport in that way and so if she's getting that stuff in then I think it might be okay like Cirque du Soleil for example and it makes them less fragile started having their performers learn the basics of three other performers disciplines not because they were gonna perform them but because it dropped their injury rates by thirty percent it makes you less fragile for some reason we have theories but now I don't know that any is right but it just does and so I think it depends what else she's doing really but I think what you want to be be worried about is there's a famous study of Swedish tennis players from youth to the pros some of whom went on to become top ten in the world some of whom went on to become top hundred in the world and one of the real patterns that emerge there was when a girl who got identified as talented really young she would get taken away from what she was doing that had been working and put in what the researchers called a more restrictive environment or someone would say like oh you did your thing but now we can make you really good and then they put them in and they lose all that self-directed play and now they have start drilling and most of them were gone by age of 17 right so so I think there's a devil in the details I don't think it's bad to play a lot but I hope she's getting an improvisational play a lot of diversity of movement and that she doesn't get put in that kind of restrictive environment that will and and that was way more with girls that were good than with boys you know so I think there's a lot of Devils in details so I wouldn't just automatically say because she is good young that they're doing stuff wrong I'd have to know like more about the specifics because I don't think it just I don't think there's like I wouldn't tell people like make sure you're bad when you're young you know question the back yeah there was a lot of you know memorable and compelling stuff in your book and one of the most was one of the most memorable and compelling was the drop of your tools oh yeah do you say could I say something about it yeah this was he said he felt the most memorable chapter which was also the hardest like chunk of writing I have ever yeah I went just about killed me um this this chapter is called learning to drop your familiar tools is about how specialists can often get like so attached to certain procedures or tools that they sort of cease to realize that they are work in a certain situation when the situation changes they don't anymore and the dropping your tools is from this sociologist named Karl Weick who noticed that these very elite firefighters smokejumpers and hotshot firefighters who go into wilderness fires when they would die they would die with their tools still next to them and when they were close to safety even if they had dropped their tools they could run and survive and most of them still wouldn't and that kept happening and so they would go into a fire something unusual would happen and they'd be told to drop their tools and they wouldn't do it and even so that reports would say that they'd find the bodies and they'd still have their tools and in some cases when one would drop it and survive they would do weird things like look for a safe place to put their axe or dig a hole and bury it right cuz and and they'd report saying I couldn't believe I was dropping my axe and these things and so for him that was sort of this allegory we then started looking in other disciplines and seeing that certain types of training could sometimes cause specialists to be very effective when a situation was repetitive but that those tools would become you know they would no more realize those were external than their own arms and they would they would cease being able to improvise essentially and so in he looked through airplane accidents and the primarily the the most common cause of human decision error in commercial airplane problems was sticking to like the same plan when to any outside observer it obviously the situation had change and this wasn't a good thing anymore right like like people would stick to a plan when like running to the ground because they were going through familiar procedures when anyone on the outside could see that wasn't the thing to do and so I get into this in in other fields and particularly with with NASA and some of these things and how you can diversify so this part gets to late in the book I talk about I move away from individuals and talk about organizations and and systems and this chapter is more about how organizations can essentially diversify their cultures in a way that knocks people out of that sense of just automatically using certain types of procedures and tools we have time for maybe one or two more questions hi thank you it's a song yeah there it is okay thank you so much I actually look forward to reading I haven't gotten a chance to but what you were talking about and maybe you were just maybe you've touched on it is human centered design do you know about that with organizational development and I was reflecting that a lot of what you were saying sort of is the philosophy but behind human centered design because one step is to then look outside of the organization and find an analogous situation in a totally different industry yeah yeah I mean so chapter 5 is all about analogical problem-solving and how the best problem solvers instead of taking that inside view where they look at all the details of what's right in front of them they will look taketake what Condamine Tversky called the outside view where they look for problems that have an analogous deep structure maybe different surface features but an analogous deep deep structure and they look across a lot of them and and that's sort of what they use for problem solving and so in that chapter it looks at scientific labs and and how the use of analogies is like predicts how whether they'll make breakthroughs and not analogies from outside their domain and in one study I loved where this woman in Northwestern named Dietrich enter is probably the world's expert in analogical problem-solving like using you know partly what rated related to what you're talking about and she did this study where she basically gave a long story short students these problems and asked them to identify that the structure of the problems and this is sort of explained in more detail in the book but and the students were good at doing it within their major but the only students who were good at doing it outside of their major were these students in what was called the ISP program the integrated science program those students had no major they had a minor in like six different things they just take classes here and here and here and here and they learn how to identify you know so there's this classical research finding that can be summarized as breadth of training predicts breadth of transfer what that means is the broader your training is the more you are able to transfer that knowledge to things you have never seen before so if you're gonna see the same thing over and over a narrow training fine but if you have to see problems you haven't encountered before then that broad training builds those conceptual models that you can that making connections knowledge the thing was when I went around Northwestern and asked other faculty about that ISP program they were like not good at those students get behind and so that spoke to me because here you have the world's expert in analogical problem solving on your faculty saying these of our students are the best problem solvers and her colleagues saying like behind which I'm just like that's just like gives me a headache you know so this will be our last question to the left I just have kind of going along with what you were saying about like the breadth of training breadth of transfer everything it seems to me and this is just how it stuck out to me but was focused on hey let's give diversity of play at a really really young age or and now here once we're in college yeah I don't know if you should major in English or journalism because I didn't do either of those things and Here I am a writer but I I teach high school and so I kind of wonder then - what does that sort of look like either being pushed up from the younger ages or pushed down from the higher ages like do you have an opinion or thoughts on how we make something that is very very structured kind of at the heart of it like four years of English four years of science four years of this into a more generalized field to kind of better equip kids moving forward yeah I mean that's a that's a huge structural question and and let me start a little older than that which is one of the studies I liked of an economist who looked at the higher ed in Scotland in England and England you have to specialize mid teen years because you have to decide what you're gonna apply to and University in Scotland basically the same education system except you you don't specialize as soon and you can actually continue sampling if you want to quite a bit and he said who wins this trade-off and it turned out that the early specializes do jump out to an income lead they have more skill specific I mean domain-specific skills but by the later specialized errs pick better matches and so their growth rates are higher so by year six they catch and pass the early specialized errs and you're the specializes start quitting their careers and much higher numbers they're basically made to choose too soon so they make worse choices like I like to think of it as like if we thought of careers like we do dating we wouldn't tell people to settle down so quickly right because you learn things about yourself and you can make better matches and by the way the period from your late teens to your late 20s is the fastest time personality change over your whole life so you're in the position of choosing something for a person you don't really know yet and so I think oh and the other thing so the reason I brought this up listed the kids in England very often picked things that were related to things they had done in high school because that was what they knew right so it's sort of limits their match their ability to make match quality so I would love to see maybe a little more of that kind of talent based branching where you make more things available and one of a teacher or mentors role is to say well how did this fit you you know and how did this let's reflect on how this fit but there are also things that that kids have to learn right and and that's difficult and so what I think I just saw a math study this was 13 year olds I think what age are your your students so it's close and so this is a tip that's only semi related but this is in chapter 4 on learning strategies so this study these 13 year olds in math classrooms were randomly assigned to different types of training for math some of them got was called blocked practice they get a problem type AAA type bbbbb type ccccc the other got what's called interleaved practice and this is in chapter 4 which means no you never get the same problem type twice or if you do it's randomly it's all mixed up but they all studied the same problems come test time the interleaved group the interleaved group more frustrated right says they're learning less come test time when they have to transfer destroys the block practice group the effect size was on the order of taking a kid from the 50th percentile to the 80th percentile right obviously I picked 50th percentile because at the top of the curve a standard deviation doesn't move it as far so I just picked the most you know impressive example there but but so I think some of those techniques without changing structural things about education we could be doing a lot better the problem is they make the kids frustrated mate right their teachers worse if the test is like short term you know that that could be a problem because it it they have to it takes them a little while to get that learning and so I think the the testing you know I think it's like the ten year old sports coaches if you incentivize calculus one professors in the airforce or teachers in high school to make the best eight year old team then that's what they're gonna do and not set the person up to be the best 20 year old so I would start with trying to have a little bit more sampling trying to make maybe can connect types of problem-solving across disciplines but without changing anything just mixing up the sort of learning styles so in Chapter four is about those those learning techniques well yeah but I mean I think about this a lot because there's so many forces that play in the education system and teachers are asked to or held accountable for so many things that are not in their control really and and so so I actually think one of the structural things is that we need to build some bridges from teachers to other domains they can understand that challenge better and then we can all support it better rather than just like testing and now they're doing a crappy job you know so so I think the structural change needs to come also from outside in the rest of society to support this this kind of learning and and and developing experience you know and bringing people from other domains into schools or creating opportunities for kids because I just don't think like teachers are already asked to do a ton and and I think held accountable for things that they have a little influence over in my opinion we go to poor David thank you that's a just one other thing I would say is I love independent bookstores and I think like we all want bookstores in our neighborhoods and there's a very easy way to support them which is buying the book here instead of on Amazon so you don't buy my book but obviously this is a beautiful bookstore so maybe by elbow so thank you very much for having me here thank you guys [Applause] you

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Length: 55min 25sec (3325 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 11 2019