Performance Expert Shares the SECRET To UNLOCKING YOUR POTENTIAL| David Epstein & Lewis Howes

but also just once you get competent at something it's like you adapt to that feeling of competence and then why force yourself to like I think you really have to proactively force yourself to be uncomfortable right and I think we gravitate toward comfort lifting the same weights the same number of times every day might stop you from getting worse but you're not like getting better welcome everyone to the school of greatness podcast we've got David Epstein in the house good to see you man how you doing good thank you for having me super glad you're here you've got a new book out called range which when I saw this come across my desk I said yes it's wide generalist triumph in a specialized world and very excited about this because my whole life I've been a generalist I've never been the best at anything I was very I would say I was a gifted athlete because I worked very very hard to become that but I was never the best most talented athlete on any team I've ever played on there's always someone who had more athletic skill or ability or bigger faster stronger but I feel like I had heart in a vision and I was willing to work just as hard if not harder than anyone else and this has been my whole life is like becoming the master of general ideas skills and having a collection of a lot of skills and I have no clue of having a collection being 80% good at a lot of things yeah or a hundred percent good at one thing that's the debate you know we were talking about this before about how parents and especially in sports or music they put them in one thing yeah violin piano and they drill it in them for eight hours a day yeah and that's all you do all year round it's like soccer in the USA it's like you just play select stockier all year round right you have no life and you get burnt out when you're 18 yeah you're exhausted yeah so why did you want to dive into this topic about generalists you know you mention a couple of interesting things by the way like we were just talking a little bit you were decathlete right which is like and then you talk about this concept of being good at a bunch of different things maybe you're not number one but but you know some people call this concept skill stacking where it's like you may not have to be the very best at an individual thing like that's only for a small number of people but if you can kind of cobble together skill in a number of different domains you sort of make this mosaic where you're not in zero-sum competition with anyone anymore because you're kind of competing on your own ground to me that's kind of like what what you've done right is you probably get are these different things you're like now you're not in zero-sum competition with anybody you're totally doing your own thing because of this like skill step yeah that's very much what's happening happen for me too but to your point about soccer and how I decided to write this book so the genesis of this there's sort of two things one was after I wrote my first book and sort of as Malcolm Gladwell would say devoted several pages to criticizing his work that's how he always says we were invited why were you criticized II his work well because some of the some of the work underlying the 10,000 hours rule so-called 10,000 hours was very soft right and there's a ton of work showing that there in fact you know the district 10,000 hours school so it doesn't even matter anything about you just pick something and you for 10,000 hours and you're gonna be amazing that's right but in fact there's a ton of evidence that shows actually learning about your talents and trying to match to those talents it's actually incredibly important so this message that like it doesn't matter what you pick just pick and they can go 10,000 hours I think was doing a really disservice and there was much more rigorous work in sports showing how important matching to your abilities and your interest yes I'm like you know the tallest person in school but I want to be a point guard you know it may not match my interest or my body type or my genes is what you're saying yeah I don't go be a point guard when you're built to be a center yeah I mean and it may be you can be a big point guard but like it turns out the way we learn about our interests and abilities is by like trying things and then and then changing so there's this huge one of my favorite quotes and range is from this woman named Herminia Barra who studies how people find what's called match quality so this is the economists term for the degree of fit between your interests your abilities and the work that you do it turns out to be incredibly important for persistence motivation performance all these things and her quote that I love is we learned we are in practice not in theory and what she means is there's like all this sort of you know personality quizzes that want to convince you take this and it'll just tell you you know or the commencement speech thing like envision who you'll be in 20 years and March confidently toward it but in fact there's this wealth of psychology research that shows we aren't that good at understanding our abilities and interests until we actually try something and then reflect on it and then zigzag so you have to learn who you are in practice as opposed to just introspecting this is so important because you know my nephew's 15 here you just matter he's like I don't know like I want to do this but I want to do that I think there's so many people who are 15 25 45 who have like I don't know what my purpose is yeah I think it is your purpose is to figure out what you want to do right now and reflect on it like you said in six months or three months or after from the practice see if you're good at it see if you love it if you can sustain the motivation like you said it's important if you're just doing something that's hard all day that you don't enjoy at all yeah it's gonna be hard to be motivated right yeah yeah and I mean nobody loves every part if there's right worse like but again you're like glancing off all kinds of stuff yeah I want to talk about so that that that idea of just like knowing you know when you're a teenager like you mentioning of what you want to do the investor Paul Graham you know of Y Combinator he calls this he says like ignore the traditional commencement speech advice in computer science we call that premature optimization where you're setting the goal before you know anything about yourself and that really jives with this research call don't set a goal I mean you can set a good so okay let me get to that so it just really dives with this research in range called the Dark Horse project okay that we were talking about me yeah and and a lot of people who end up fulfilled in their work right so that's so this is two Harvard researchers who are trying to figure out how people optimize that match quality right which has which is hugely important to their sense of fulfillment and it turned out that they're talking all these people not all these people were financially successful a lot of them were but they were all fulfilled but it was like from you know chefs athletes whatever midwives didn't matter what it was and these people would come in and they would tell the researchers like well don't tell people to do what I did because I started in one thing it turned out like I didn't want to be a lawyer or whatever and so I got off that track and I was behind and I did seeks it and then I got lucky and I found this thing that like they said don't tell him to do yeah but that's how that yeah and then like 90% of the subjects they found all came in and were like I'm a you know I'm an onion outlier right yeah so that's why they called it the dark what it didn't it was entitled that before they called it the Dark Horse project because all these people not all but like 90% of them viewed themselves as having come out of nowhere to find success in this area because they like cobble together these different experiences they were like 16 and saying okay I'm gonna go to medical school and I'm gonna be a doctor I'm gonna do this for 30 years and this is how my life is gonna be no some of them is set long-term goals eventually after a period of exploration but they were still very open to sort of you know reorienting their common trait was according these researchers was short-term planning essentially which is kind of like not what usually so it's always like what's your five-year goal right right right instead of saying like here's who's younger than me and has more than me they would they would say here's why I'm right now here my skills and interests here are the things I want to learn here the opportunities in front of me I'm gonna try this one and maybe you're from now I'll change because I will have learned something about myself and then they just keep doing that until they find these places okay if I change told us I think a lot of people say why failed in a year yes thing didn't work out for me yeah but from our examples of ourselves like the thing that didn't work out just set us up for the next thing yeah the next thing yeah yeah to having more clarity right and and the other thing is and I think this applies to both of us to those people didn't view so a lot of it was learning about themselves it's called self regulatory learning when you do something and you take time to reflect on it and and you'll see those people will then update their like self assessments of their skills because you learn about it by trying it and they end up analyzing their own like strengths and weaknesses more similar to how like their peers and bosses do because they get better self knowledge but they also tend to like not just view the experimentation as as lost time they bring like knowledge from one area and sort of fuse it with other areas so for me I was training to be a scientist I was living in a tent in the Arctic when I decided to become a writer right and as a scientist like studying something up there yeah Arctic plant physiology right and I was in carbon cycle and the Lea Lorca so that was acting from college you went to the other that yeah yeah okay yeah so I lived on like a research vessel in Pacific Ocean for a while and I moved up to the Arctic and all this stuff were you alone it was like a small crew there were probably 30 to 40 people in the Arctic okay you know either people who like we're gonna go work on a pipeline or we have like a helicopter pilot because if there's an emergency there's no other way to get out of there so like if you needed medical emergency and then like a couple scientists in some you know like mechanic and you're just doing research all day and logging your information and yeah that type of thing for how long were you yep I was up there for about half the year but you couldn't in the spot where I was you couldn't be there for how dead or anything yeah yeah because you like users not a good way to get supplies or not like that um but my work was getting you know so narrow like really narrowly focused and and I started asking myself you know my the type of person wants to learn like one thing new to the world it's like very esoteric or shorter spans of time learning things new to me and translating them that was the latter and so I sort of say like you know fine that's like lost lost time and I'm behind you know so when I get to Sports Illustrated I get there how many years after that um well so then I decide I want to be a writer and I had to take some like you know very non glorious jobs in journal like my my first stable gig in journalism was working at the New York Daily News the tabloid in New York starting at midnight because I applied for an internship rejected because no experience no good experience and then they come back and say the guy who starts a midnight is like leaving so if you'll start at midnight you can do it right so nothing happiest Glenn daily news happens from midnight and 10:00 a.m. I assure you but it's great like boot camp you know or if you'd like tossed in and so I sort of like zigzag my way through a couple jobs get to si I guess when I'm like 27 or something like that as a temp fact-checker right whereas 22 year olds fresh out of college for being hired as for oh they're ahead of me right right some fact-checking stuff for like 23 year olds and stuff like that how did it make you feel you know at the time I felt like I was on a growth trajectory didn't even didn't didn't bother me I was like I got my foot in the door this place that I wanted to be into like whatever you know I work from there and but what I didn't realize was that this my very ordinary science skills all right I was like totally ordinary scientist suddenly take them there and I'm an extraordinary scientist I and it's Sports Illustrated because there's a huge number of people waiting in line to be the next NFL B reporter or the next baseball beat reporter so I start writing these like science articles and suddenly I'm competing with nobody right because nobody's waiting in line to do that so it's just a question of if I can perform well I have a job and so really quickly I like zoom pass low this is like science type of stuff yeah and everything you know from doping to like performance to anything that signs touch concussions like anything that medicine science anything that was like all no one will owned that yeah no one no no no one really wanted to do that stuff because it was a different skill and you know I can read these papers like the scientific papers data analytics right like that's exploding like so you know right in my wheelhouse all those sorts of things so I pretty quickly I had like more stuff than I could I can really do and so you know I had this crime reporting experience so again that became this incredibly valuable thing so suddenly I'm like having to you know I can't do any more stuff how quickly did you get to that point I think I went from temp fact-checker to senior writer in about three years and it happened so quickly that actually there's a paper where some of my my grad research got published in the journal of Arctic Antarctic and alpine tundra and it was so quick that you know because there's like it takes a lot of published scientific stuff then my contact info on the paper as a senior writer at sports oh wow that is the worst for that journal doesn't think so so what was happening pretty quick Wow okay so you learned about that stuff you started the you quickly realized that your skills from one thing ya didn't think would apply did apply totally I thought it was a sunk cost and it turned out it was and still is the most valuable skill I have like when I went with both of my books you know being able to get into the nitty-gritty of you know some pretty like cryptic studies and into the methodology and do some of my own data analytics and stuff like that has been a huge competitive mixer stands out huge no one's willing to put in that work time energy to create a work of art like that well and also I mean I wouldn't be like I couldn't have prospectively seen this right like when I was at si and you get contacted by people who want to work there or they want to work at ESPN or whatever they want to get into sports media and they say well should i major in journalism our English my first instinct was to say journalism and a second instinct was to say English and my third instinct was to go well I studied geology in astronomy so like maybe I'm not the best person you know so it was really blessing in disguise that I went off on this other track and ended up with these skills it's almost like an intellectual arbitrage opportunity you know you end up with these skills that are normal in one place and totally abnormal another place and that makes you more valuable more unique it's interesting when I had I've had Robert Greene on a few times you know Robert yeah yeah not personally but I mean I know he talks about that as well he was like you know I was a screenwriter starting out for TV then I started doing movie scripts then I did newspapers he did like a few different things things like I really enjoy any of them you know getting these skills yeah and now I write these unique type of books that no one else really writes yeah in that style that make me stand out and I love the lane that I'm in now but it took him 15 20 years of kind of zigzagging around the things totally totally to get to where he is now I mean and that's why these Dark Horse's right and again there were some people in the Dark Horse project who did follow a linear path it was just the small minority right so what is it a Dark Horse is someone who's fulfilled in their work the fulfilled in their work and they tend to often be very successful also the talented and fulfilled yeah yeah and but like that's you know exactly what we're doing with I got feel the same way like I want to be in my I want to be my ogre own ground so it's just a question of like how well can I do not where I'm in like zero you know I want to be like running the hundred meters of work where I mean zero comes some competition with a couple with other people you know right sorry about this matching thing how do we know what our best skills are our match you know how do we figure out this that's a good question and that actually brings up something can I like go back a little bit advancing because you were talking about like teenagers yeah and one of the the neat studies that I couldn't arrange was by an economist who was wondering about the trade-offs between early and late specialization so he looked at he found a natural experiment in the higher ed systems in England and Scotland where they're very similar except in England you have to pick a specialty earlier because when you're like 15 16 you have to start thinking about what tests you're going to take to get in a specific program higher-ed in scotland you don't it's sort of more like the American system you can sample a little bit if you want to and even even late in your college the Ballards yeah yeah and you know it even less constrained in liberal arts cuz you can go take like because I would argue sometimes liberal arts maybe that some of them don't have like enough of the like dabbling in science yeah and so this question was who wins the trade-off the earlier late specialized errs who are otherwise in these very similar systems and it turns out the early specialized errs did jump out to an income lead because they have more domain-specific skills whatever they're going into but the late specialized errs end up get to sample a little bit pick a better fit and so their growth rates are much higher when they graduate in a couple years after graduation they erase that income gap completely so they fly right by and meanwhile the early specializes start quitting their career tracks in much higher numbers well because they're bored or they're burnt out they were made to pick so early that like they made a bad choice right so it's like if if careers were dating like we wouldn't pressure people to specialize when they were 15 years old I don't think right and we spend as much time I think with her with our careers as we do with you know interest our significant others or whatever and we're completely different people from 16 to 27 the fastest I'm glad you mentioned that so there's this concept that talk about in range called the end of history illusion and this is the psychological concept that at every time point in life we say yeah I've changed a lot in the past based on my experiences and the things I've learned and but now I'm pretty much now I'm pretty much said and we say that at every time point in life and every time we were wrong and it leads to these really funny like this is just a funny one of those experiments but like if you ask people how much they would pay today to see their favorite band in ten years the average answer is 129 dollars if you ask how much they would pay right now to see their favorite band from 10 years ago the average answer is 80 dollars right because we underestimate how much our tastes will change over that time period and that's just like a silly example but at every point we underestimate how much will change our values are what we think our skills are the way we like to spend our time and the period from 18 to about your late 20s is the fastest time of personality change of your entire life so choosing early in that period or before that period is like truly trying to make choices for someone who does not yet exist right there still traces of Wow sure but but we change more than we think we do so that's a tricky that's why you should so if you're you have a daughter right as we said son son who's four months four months yeah yeah so say your son is 16 and he's saying dad yeah I got all my friends I like getting ready for college they're saying they know what they want to do when they grow up I have no clue should I start specializing in like one thing so I go to law school should be training for this or should I just have a gap year have fun like you travel experience things what would you say yeah so first I would say don't worry about being behind cuz there's the some of the worry about being behind comes from like these Tiger Woods and Mozart stories right and and we start over there three yeah and I'm swinging perfectly and Tiger even before that but yeah I mean he was already on national television it to raise three was like he was being media trained all three okay it's crazy um and but there's something we about those stories that we tell them a little wrongs delved into those and Tiger he showed this prowess and interest that his father then responded to as he has said my father never asked me to play golf mmm it was always my interest you know it's a child's interest that matters Mozart I went back through some of the letters of his childhood and there were some cool ones where like a musician comes to visit their household Mozart's father was a musician and and little Mozart comes downstairs and it's like I want to play you know I want to play second violin and his father's like you haven't had any lessons like go away you can't play second violin without lessons he starts crying and so that musician who's writing a letter says I agreed to go play with little Wolfgang in the other room so he'd stop crying next thing you know they hear second violin piece coming in they're like what and the letters hilarious because it says his Mozart's father comes in and is kind of like in tears right and he's and the guy writing a letter says little Wolfgang was emboldened by our applause to insist that he could also play the first violin then he goes on and plays it with like his made-up fingering and right so Tiger and Mozart incredibly rare but you don't really have to worry about missing them because it was their parents were responding to their very unusual the desire in fact forced into something right and in fact their parents then facilitated a ton of opportunities after that but in fact if you if you you know those are incredible outliers but if you want to maximize the opportunity for that you should expose them to a bunch of stuff and see if they grab on to something like that so the approach I think I want to take as a parent is akin to this system I write about that the army uses in in range where the army had this very strict upper out structure for career tracks for high potential officers which of course it's the army and that worked for a long time in like the industrial economy where organizations were facing the same kind of challenges over and over so you could they were very specialized companies were much more specialized in in the industrial economy because it was what's called a kind kind learning environment you can you can assume tomorrow's gonna look like yesterday in your work world so people face the same challenges with the knowledge economy that goes away entirely and suddenly like graduates of the US military academy all of a sudden who used to you know go up and become like the top leadership of the army suddenly half of them are quitting like the day they can leave the military because they learn these skills they learn things about themselves in early 20s and now you can move laterally and work a lot more because there's more emphasis on like ability to create knowledge and problem-solve rather than these very special abilities all this stuff and so they start leaving and so first the army throws money at them that doesn't work the people are gonna stay take it people are gonna leave leave anyway half billion dollars down the drain then they start saying like all right we haven't developed you know a grit problem or whatever overnight we've developed a magic quality problem where these people are leaving because they're finding work they're having film it's immoral yeah they want autonomy over the career track and so the higher potential they were the more likely the army was to give them scholarships the more likely they were to leave as soon as they could right working exactly the opposite of the way you want and so they started programs like this one called talent based branching where instead of saying these high potential officers here's your career track go up or out they say we're gonna pair you with a coach here's some career tracks start with one the coach will help you reflect on how it fits your talents and interests then try another in another another and you'll keep bouncing around and so you have some autonomy and where you fit and network much better for attention than did throwing money at people because they want some autonomy over their career matching so I see my role as a parent as the coach and talent base branching to say here's a bunch of stuff you know I want to facilitate these opportunities for you try some and I'll help you reflect and how it fits you and what you learned said you get the maximum amount of learning from that experience so that's how I cut sort of view my role after doing this really cool so they would how long would they do each you know activity or career for in the army is it three months six months a year it varied it kind of varied how it was going and if they if they wanted to see a little more they could do a little more and this is developing very much right now so sometimes there are other programs like talent based branching where if by the time they got commissioned they had already changed their mind they could say like alright I'll take on some extra years if you allow me to change my career track to this thing over here I'm commitment with talent based printing they start by just dabbling like a couple months at first but then as they sort of triangulate those periods can get like a little bit longer interesting so you would tell your your son to you know what if they were like I just want to be a soccer player and from four years old till 18 he's an amazing soccer yeah he spends six hours a day he studies and does everything that he's booked you know yeah he's like you know dad I'm burnt out yeah I'm gonna do this anymore I can go get a full ride playing soccer I can go be on national team but I just don't carry what would you say to that situation I mean the first thing I would say is like let's take a break and see if you recover you know and if not like if after a break you still want to do this like you know nobody should be there's nobody to be forced to like go to the national team right so that would be I would try to manage it leading up to that right so when I lived in Brooklyn recently there was a u7 travel soccer team that met near me ray 7u7 travel team yeah what do you think anybody thinks in a city of nine million people six-year-olds have to travel to find good enough competition I doubt it like that's not in the interest of their development their iceape skill pretty much it's because they're customers for this league right and then you look at places like France and Germany which have won the last two World Cups where they have a French soccer player in the youth development pipeline probably plays half as many organized games really the u.s. player of the same oh they started reforming their pipeline about a few decades ago why do they play a half as many because they want is because all the science shows that this unstructured play early is the best for this kind of problem solving so there's two different kinds of knowledge using procedures and this is when you're studying math or sports using procedures knowledge is like your ability to execute ladies and certain technical skills making connections knowledge is this sort of broader knowledge that teaches you how to match a strategy to a type of problem and that's that's what you whether you're doing math but we're solving it you know using anticipatory skills to tell what's going on in the soccer field because things actually happened faster than you can react so you have to be like anticipating so I mean you know this from football like quarterbacks have to throw in a one half seconds all that film study is is teaching them anticipatory skills so when they see the chess pieces in a certain arrangement it instantly says like this is what's gonna happen in the future and the defense moves around to try to confuse them about what and so it turns out that this like unorganized play and is it's like a much better way of learning those broader skills so you have to go to Brazil the kids are all playing futsal which is you know food salts I get a small hole all over the backyard right bagel we're gonna sand one day cobblestones the next day different number of players all the time basketball court you know off the walls and so that huh is like a much so so Francis sort of trying to mimic some of that development they have this saying that there's no one of the guys who helped design the system and say there's no remote control for the players meaning like they don't try to micromanage them they have to try to problem-solve on their own and so they restricted the coaches from talking to like he's like 15-minute periods during development and because there's all the science that shows that like sport diversity early you know that elite athletes have this sampling period where they delay specialization - later than peers and I think that I think the multiple multiple sport thing is partly just finding the sport where they best fit but it's also just a proxy for this like movement diversity and learning these general skills and so I think they're trying to have kids in soccer but also incorporate the best of what the science says yeah this is interesting because I remember people trying to say you should just do one sport in high school in college I was in the carving' the Fringe where I was playing for sports in high school three sports in college and I was probably like the last you played three sports in college yeah and I got injured playing basketball I like sprained my ankle coming down from a dunk and rolled it and it was out for like two months and I try to come back and it was bad so I just did football on track the last couple years but I remember there was a guy in high school who only played basketball mm-hmm and this is interesting story because he only played basketball I was better than him as a basketball player freshman sophomore junior year for sure then he decided okay I'm going all-in on basketball he would just do jump programs sprinting he did this only offseason one playing football and I was doing track and baseball and I'm never coming in senior year and he was like it's fully dedicated from junior started to develop more as a human and an athlete and I was thinking hyung this guy's probably gonna be like better than me maybe he's gonna be better than me he's been training all year 12 months for this moment and I just came out of football practice right football last game the next day I'm in basketball I don't think of myself I haven't touched a basketball in four months I'm probably a little rusty but I'm still dominating you know and I was a little rusty my shot wasn't perfect I was messing up the dribble every now and then but I was like man I'm still dominating and you know still just as good if not better than this guy and I felt like I had a mindset that was stronger like where he was weaker in a lot of areas he had a weak mindset because all he was doing as training I was competing every single day in a sport that was mentally challenging and I felt like I had the edge even though I didn't train for those skills I had the athletic edge and so for me I've always felt like you know being a generalist is is the key to having that edge in sports look at the Heisman Trophy winner this year what's his name yeah Oklahoma yeah but he was like first-round draft pick and baseball yeah yeah yeah I had the number one pick and um and um sorry I'm drawing a blank on that but like woodland who just won the US Open did you read about him he was a really good basketball player it was college basketball player and like college basketball player yeah they just won the open yeah Wow yeah so I feel like these you know because I can't humor his name the guy who won the Heisman oh my I know I can't believe we're drawing a blank on this yeah because he won duh you know he won the Heisman Trophy it's a Tyler something no I know the guys name no Google the Heisman Trophy winner again the guy who wanted to Heisman but he's like playing baseball for six months a year yeah and then football for six months here he's the best player in both sports yeah yeah and so I mean right so when are it's just so he's just such a superior athlete like he's just better at everything but that first of all that would auger against like the 10,000 hour rule anyway because those you know practicing some other sports is in zero-sum competition with your main sport but separately from that I wondered about that if it was just are these athletes better for you like bo Jackson you know yeah yeah and and obviously there are traits that help across sports you know if you're fast you're fast right and whatever sport you're in but that's why I made sure like actually in the introduction of range to include these studies where like for example in Germany they looked at they were wondering the same question is it just that and so they matched kids head coaches evaluate the match kids playing soccer for skill at a certain age track them over the next several years and see who's better at timepoint too and it would be these kids that had played like a wider program shows not the ones who just did the skill for those years that's right that other skills the ones who did dabbled in more sports didn't matter if it was formal or not more athlete led unstructured play mmm-hmm less organized training and practice they do focus in eventually but that's sort of like it gets less and less over time right it's not as abrupt shift it's not to say you don't you know focus in at some point you have to be in a team you have to be organized yes yeah yeah I mean at some point like at some point there's some semantic issues here like at some point we all specialized to one degree or another interesting or other of course what's the guy's name Kyler Murray yeah yeah there's a Dunkin think there's a movie that drama recently I know there's a movie that came out also called chasing great have you heard of this in search of greatness in search of great yeah I'm one of the talking heads in it are you I don't see me I mean it's you're Ken Robinson oh they know you haven't seen yet but I saw I would met with the person over at WME who was in charge of like selling a movie yeah and she was telling me about it yeah now so when you were talking like this sounds like yeah it sounds like the movie yeah a great app because maretskiy incidents yeah Pele right are talking and then Gary rice yeah rice and they're just like yeah we had all unstructured play where we had be free to try things yeah this is my whole childhood I remember I didn't play football organized for Balt I was 15 my mom won't let me play but I would play in the backyard all the time diving in the leaves in the fall right now in Ohio remember we're playing roller hockey in the in the uh I was just playing whatever kids were playing I wasn't like I'm only gonna be on the select team soccer which I did that too yeah I was playing roller hockey in the parking parking lots with kids we'd put on the the blue bins for recycling bins we had those as our goals and you're just running around I didn't have enough money so I was wearing street shoes and everyone else have rollerblades it was just like we'd do that then we gonna play football then when you open a basket but we were always playing something unorganized yeah just making up our own games and it sounds like this is in that documentary or the movie that's what it was yeah yeah yeah and I mean I think I think and I think things are changing we've talked a bunch about soccer development I think things are changing for the better in the US as some of this is being no I should rephrase that I think some things are changing for the better and some are changing for the worse like the bad kind of specialization is accelerating in a lot of programs and while some other people are realizing like we should look at what like France and Germany have done and do that so it's going in both directions at once but what I think we're missing the most is like the street soccer culture I think that's that's what backyard streets want normal to be safe now that everyone wants me to safe right yeah yeah it's like gotta be a perfect grass right and I correct right exactly where you know they're playing on like you know in octagon and finish like a hole yeah you got nail sticking yeah be careful yeah I think that's what it needs to be just need to let people be unstructured right and just be an athlete you learn to be a better hat yes yeah the problem is it feels like getting behind right when you say I mean that's that's all I got on the select team you're not like learning right right and if someone sets up a structure right like a a you as like second grade national basketball championships now and so it's kids like throwing the one hand second grade yeah yeah and and and like the kids can't even shoot right right it's not good for their development they're playing on 10-foot rims and I don't think anybody thinks it's the best for their development right but it's like they're customers and if you're not in the second great game you can't be in the third great team and so there's these systems that are often working against where some of these countries that have like a more holistic national pipeline like Norway there was just a great HBO real sports about sports in Norway Norway like exploded the Winter Olympics like it was the best performance ever and they've like gotten rid of kind of a lot of the aspects of formal competition before age 12 and their sports like entirely just like it don't have fun go jump around on the skis and they'll still compete like you put kids in they're playing like even if it's unstructured they're gonna commute let's race yeah so it's that's not a problem and they spend less time traveling and doing the stuff that isn't even like participating in the sport anyway right now Wow interesting and it's a really good really good special yeah so tell me more I wasn't Steve Nash about this actually recently and he was not he lives out here yeah no he didn't he didn't even pick up a basketball to his 13 played a whole bunch of other sports he's a huge soccer guy yeah and I I'd like to use him as an example because he's not like you know he's like I don't know like six - in ways yeah he's like a normal he's like a soccer player on the basketball court yeah and so so it's not like oh okay well he's 610 or whatever so he's a freak he looks like an average did yeah so he's I was talking about this recently and he's exploring starting like a sports academy that would allow people to do that sort of sampling an unstructured play you know up through age whatever 13 14 which is sort of what I don't know if you're tennis ball tennis at all but like Andy and Jamie Murray so Andy Murray you know one of has been one of those players in the world for a long time their mother Julie Marie started an academy for tennis players where like people are willing to give their kids to her because she's Judy Murray so she's got this imprimatur of you know the mother of these great players but then it's just like oh they're gonna play through the tree branches it's like the stuff they would probably do on their own but it's like okay because Judy Murray says okay right I think that's a little bit of like what Steve Nash is looking for he's interesting we know a lot about optimal development for athletes not everything but we know a lot and he says like if the Steve Nash stamp is on it then people will parents will feel okay you know doing it which i think is true so something more about the matching process how do we figure out this matching for ourselves in our careers yeah we're saying you know we're in 2025 you feel like you're not sure what you want to do you feel like you're already behind you're not making any money yeah living at your parents home and the basement or something yeah how do we figure out what's our matching process yes itself matching that's that's really tricky right because it's it's so individual and I think that's a reason why it sometimes takes a while whether it's the Dark Horse's or like so I think we should start by not feeling behind because especially early on I don't feel behind when ever else's it's a trap degrees and six-figure careers it's tricky it's tricky and you're the minutes tent and now you're a fact-checker for twenty-three year old and that's when you see a role yeah yeah worked out okay but you know cuz you're you have to view that early time is like learning about yourself you can't you can't go wrong really right like I wanted to learn that I wanted to be a scientist for the rest of my life that's not what I learned that turned out to be very valuable thing to know but if you look at so for example like when we were so obsessed with precocity right and getting ahead and all this stuff so like when Mark Zuckerberg he once famously said young people are just smarter when he was he was 22 like he had interest in saying that and obviously he's bright guy whatever but there's and I was at a you know Motley Fool the the investing I was at an event of theirs recently and based on something I put in the introduction they put up an audience poll that said guess what the average age of a founder of a blockbuster startup is on the day of founding not when it becomes a blockbuster 25 35 45 55 overwhelming favorite was 25 and then it went down sequentially from there the answer is 45 and a half three is according to recent brand new research from the Census Bureau MIT and there's a few outliers like a Zuckerberg the more a poor I've had 20 years of experience failing and just like the tiger and Mozart we like you know we fall prey to what Daniel Kahneman's availability heuristic we know those really dramatic stories so we assume they like represent ever the field when in fact the reason there's such dramatic stories is because they're the operators basically and so these entrepreneurs usually have to do a lot of bagging to get to get where they're going and so I think the approach to take again is is like the Dark Horse's to say so from for myself when I got because I was a college athlete a runner too and you know runners I'll keep like training journals here's what I did time what was your egg Hunter time 151 and good where'd you go to school Columbia nice it's pretty good in the one level does kind of average write it like a deep I mean I was all east but I wasn't you know like gonna win and certainly was not gonna win the national championship I any stretch of the imagination right I had Nick Simmons on do you know him oh yeah I mean he's a freak oh yeah we competed in the same national champ oh really Oh III see there's a guy there's a guy that I think had he come along too because I mean he I'm a huge fan right being a fan of the 800 meters and he's like was the best American ever like a decade yeah crushing it and I didn't have like athletic skill he's just like a short Konami guy and and he so I think had he come out and what people would you know I think there was sort of because I'm like total running geek that there was people sort of felt like he wasn't working as hard as the next guy when he got out of college right and I think he his plan was genius which was he's gonna come along slow in development where a lot of the people who were sort of stars in college who were much higher you know sort of prospects than he was in college come out and they're like grinding right away and they're injured and then they're back and then they're injured for a long span he stayed healthy and just got a little better and a little better every year but I have a second a second and I wonder if he had been you know a division 1 star if he wouldn't have been able to develop at that pace he did and had this like incredible career you know I wonder I don't you know I don't want to put words in his mouth but I will call him I wanted her because because all these all these runners who were in his cohort who were like the Division one stars who were like these are gonna be our next Olympians like so many of them ended up just battling injuries forever where does he just got better and better and better and better every year till he got to the top and then like stayed there and he didn't have the Nitro typical body type or stride he just like I don't know he was willing to work hard and stay consistent like you said yeah and consistent and like not not feeling rushed it seemed to me where where some of the best runners it seemed like when they went from college to the pros suddenly they're going from being the very top of the pack to being not the top of the pack it's almost like they're trying to pack it in so quickly and so I think he had a lot of patience that's it you know and I'm speculating about that just following from afar but it's unusual for this guy to come from you know if you'd think of all the people who all the Division One stars and he surpassed everyone right but anyway so I think I think I think the approach to take is so so when I got done with running and I kept this like a a training law you know I sort of transitioned that in my professional life it was like here's my goal that's what I'm gonna do and I actually found that that did not work so as well for me as it didn't running where it was like very concrete and the goals were very easily measurable everyday all these sorts of things and so I switched that and started sort of based on some of the research that went into this using what I call instead like a book of experiments where it's more like when I was a science grad student I say here's something I'd like to learn or try or an interest I'd like to explore or some some person in some line of work who I'd like to like find out a little bit more about here's my hypothesis you know I'm gonna go try it and then I'll come back and like see did I learn what I was hoping for was I was interested in that as I thought and I just keep doing that and that's been like a much better way of me kind of like because when I was 16 I was positive I was going the Air Force Academy I was gonna be a test pilot and I was gonna be an astronaut right and I've gotten like linearly less long term goal directed as I've gotten older and more and more like one two years out now all the most important projects nothing that have been my most important projects are never anything that I predicted far in advance it's always like responding to some opportunity at the moment and so I've almost like given up on things still fine to make the long-term goals long as you're not like holding to it too tightly interesting so that that's that's been my approach and I have no idea what I'm doing next none really here after this book you know it's like no I left my day job to finish it right as soon as I finish the sports gene which was kind of just like surprise bestseller I left Sports Illustrated and went to this investigative startup called Pro Publica because I was like alright that's kind of my sports capstone project in a way like now I need to develop some new skills so I go you know down the hierarchy of a new organization but learning totally new skills reporting about drug cartels and bad science and medical care and all this stuff and that added so much to my you know it's those additional skills that allowed me to do this kind of book which is much broader than my first one you know it's interesting because for so many years in the last ten years I have I've always had this desire to learn and grow personally and so when I was injured recovering from an injury playing football I started salsa dancing I was like what can I do I couldn't work I couldn't really work out because I had this big cast on my arm from here to here so I was just walk around like this like kid from Rookie of the Year and I came off could you yeah I've heard about our fastball and shall I break your honor okay and I started salsa dancing I lived near salsa club and I would go out every week and sit there in terror I was so terrified of just being in the room with these incredible dancers because I couldn't do that skill and it was completely foreign to me you know they're singing Spanish music I don't even understand it mm-hmm I'm the only white person there pretty much and every week I would go there cuz I was just fascinated to watch these guys dance with these these women and I started to build relationships with some of the regulars they would come say hi to me they'd be like hey come and dance and I would say no I don't make you look bad no I'm so terrified I couldn't dance I was like I'd only make you look bad eventually after a few months a couple girls finally dragged me literally Kevin yanked me on the floor it was the most embarrassing moment in my life at the time because I was just like everyone around me is laughing at me everyone is way better than me and they're all probably saying that I should get out of here I'm doing the basic steps with this girl for a few minutes sweating staring down at my feet the whole time thinking everyone was laughing at me and then I look up and no one cares at all nobody who knows I'm there it was a moment I switched to me I was like okay I'm gonna go all-in on this thing and try to master some skill this thing I have it is passion for this desire to learn and over the next three and a half four months I went all-in I mean it was my life's mission to become a great salsa dancer all day long I listen to salsa music I was a truck driver at the time so I was going from Columbus to Cincinnati and back every day was about six-hour trip driving car parts for napa auto and I would listen to salsa music the whole way and imagine myself dancing I would come home at night I would watch YouTube tutorials practice in the mirror by myself and then I would go out and practice at the clubs and I did this for a few months until I became essentially fluent at salsa dancing and I've used that that skill has applied in so many area of areas life now as a public speaker it's given me more confidence on stage in front of people and less worried what people think about me it gives me more poise the ability to kind of float more as opposed to be rigid yeah it allows me to connect with people different languages all the time because now I can understand people with a different skill set yeah you know anywhere in the world and find a salsa club and meet friends even if I don't speak the language I have the confidence and the skill set yeah so it's like this I'm always trying to think of new things every year that I can take on it's like an experiment or just a desire to learn something you know I'm learning Spanish right now taking singing lessons I'm always trying different things yes and it may never make me money it may never be a career but it helps me in my life yeah I think that's an important thing we should all be thinking about is like what's the skill that I can take on every year something new that's a challenge maybe I'll never have anything to do with this again or maybe it's another tool that I can add in my tool belt and just whip out whenever I need to and just give me that confidence and you don't know until you try it and I think there's a couple profound things there one of which is this is sort of an aside but this you know one of the big five personality traits in psychology is called openness to experience and your willingness to try new things and and this is a personality trait that predictably declines like quite a bit starting in like middle age and going down become less open to so that's open to trying that things right 30 40 50 yeah but it turns out and then like it really accelerates when you're older but it turns out that if you sort of like force people to try new things like like one of these studies was training older people on certain types of puzzles that they had never you know like this is like problem solving and even if they didn't get better at the problem solving stuff their openness to experience got a little better so it's sort of like buck that trend so for one I think you will maintain and we know open to an is-2 experience is like highly correlated with creative achievement right so I think one you'll you'll help like buck that trend of your own decline and openness to experience but even more profound I think is what you're getting at there is we tend to settle into these like ruts of competence right see I talked to the economist Russ Roberts who knows he can talk about this he said it's not a rut it's a hammock because it's so comfortable like you really have to work to get out of it you don't push yourself to learn right it's right because you you already had things you felt competent in presumably right and and here boar's I think right I felt like a king in sports right like I knew what I was doing right but here I was like right horrible right right and so but it's so important to be willing to do that and we were younger we're willing to do that right like you learn a new language you jump in and like you sound like a goofball and then you get a person learning but then we get less willing to do that and I think that really limits you know I think it's part of that natural decline of openness to experience it just happens unless you proactively battle against it but also just once you get competent at something it's like you adapt to that feeling of competence and then why force yourself to like not I think you really have to proactively force yourself to be uncomfortable right and I think we gravitate toward comfort there's there's a funny analogy that when I was doing my first book it didn't go into the book but I ended up reading a whole bunch of scientific literature on speed typing okay this sounds really dumb but really how fast you type yeah and did you did research on it I was reading the research on it yeah and it turns out that what we all do is we get better just by practicing and then you know 50 to 80 words a minute we plateau and that's good and you're just naturally plateau there and you can get much faster what you have to do is like turn a metronome up a little bit follow that speed no matter how many mistakes you make just go and then you do a little bit you know every couple days and you can get like twice as fast Wow but what it suggested to me is that our natural proclivity for whatever reason is just to settle it at very good and not to keep but way below where you can get to why I don't know I don't know but I think that's like sort of how we're wired is to get to like really good but then and then like stay in that like rut of comment specifically it got it was challenging to get there and we know it's that much more challenging to get more other words like ah yeah yeah but and even but it's like you'll get to that 60 words a minute just by trying to type and then at a certain point the improvement stops from that and you have to like do this more proactive stuff so like one of one of my favorite writers one name Jhumpa Lahiri she you know it's like one of the writers of her generation a fiction writer in in the English language and decided to up and move to Italy and start learning Italian and only write in Italian and you're like here's someone who's one of the most successful writers of a generation decides to go and leave the language that she made her living in her name in and she said it's because I wanted to get away from the feeling of myself as an expert and get back to that like we better feel like that yeah that concept of like the Zen the Zen concept of the beginner's mind right so I turned a cue from her when I got stuck in this book I was stuck with some of the structuring of information so I took an online fiction writing course right suddenly I'm a total beginner like no one cares I wrote a best-selling book before all right everyone is like you suck in this fiction thing totally yeah do your basics talking to 101 right exercises where it's like you have to write something today with only dialogue something tomorrow with no dialogue and after I do the no dialogue thing I go back through range stripping tons of quotes realizing that I had unconsciously been leaning on quotes to do explanation where I should have been writing and it's like it made me aware that I was doing stuff unconsciously it I was leaning on stuff out of having write but getting out of my comfort zone sort of like woke me up about the things that I had been doing unconsciously and now I'm sort of committed to continuing you know one of the reasons I had been like career changing from these place where I was very comfortable as a senior writer at Sports Illustrated and you're like you know whatever I mean I was in like my early 30s as a senior writer decides I'm very company job yeah but making good money but I always felt like and you have a lot of cash you're doing that you know doctor call whatever and then you know so I go to leave this startup where I have to like describe what it is on the phone but like that's how you get those skills right like doing the same thing you've lived in the same weights the same number of times every day might stop you from getting worse but you're not like getting better you know I'm not growing yeah yeah that's interesting man why did we have this obsession at least in America it feels like that we want to be the best though we want to be the best we want to be number one of what we do and that's why we want to specialize from like damn years old until whatever why do we have this craving or desire is that a global thing or is that just an American thing I said just my thing that I've felt through my life you know I mean I think there and I'm just speculating here but I think there are a lot of people around the world who obviously want to be the best at stuff but but I do think this is something like more culturally ubiquitous in the United States you know a lot of places where like a huge number of people are really like striving and we have this you know incredible entrepreneurial culture right like I was reading Fareed Zakaria one of his books and you know super interesting guys a CNN show and he was looking at sort of I mean he was actually talking about liberal education but in that context he was looking at like entrepreneurship in different countries news like in Japan they have a very well-trained workforce but they do not have a lot of the things that support entrepreneurship like like this culture of a risk-taking in the u.s. we don't have as good of a trained workforce like our you know our students aren't coming doing as well on these international tests but we have this incredible culture of like try to make a submission right and NVC you know putting all this money into these different go for at all yeah hit the home run exactly and so I think and if you look at like Finland which has one of the best school systems in the country they score really really well on an international test but if you look at the test distribution it's they bring the low end up really well they do a really good job of like not letting kids like fall way behind but then they don't get that many up into the to the upper echelon either and I think it's because they sort of like you know they focus a lot on not letting kids fall behind but not so much on like the ones who are high-flying like accelerating them like crazy they can and so here you know for better and sometimes worse I think we have like a much more polarized approach but for the people who are really willing to take some risks and like to be the high flyers there are a lot of like cultural structures that support that sort of style to say what do you think your superpower is my superpower is my inefficient search mechanism for what I'm looking for research education yes inefficient and I used to blame myself for this you're like why is it taking me so long yes I used to say I'd go down some right so first year both my books I don't write I just tend journal articles scientific journal articles a day every day for the first year and that would kill me I didn't make it every day but but I mean this is where the science background helps a lot cuz I can talk to them quite and I know which sections to start reading first you know I don't read it like an order but and at first I would I would go down some rabbit hole where I get curious about something and I could surface a week later like how did I ever think what had was written anything is like there's no way or even called like this something I'm interested in nobody else you know and I used to chastise myself for that and think of how can I get more efficient how can I get more efficient and now I sort of realized that it's doing that sort of inefficient search that is a little bit akin to like what VC's and inventors do where it's like you have to throw a lot out there for some things to stick and that's kind of how I find stuff that other people aren't looking at and connected because I cast such a broad net that I that I find a lot of good stuff though other people aren't looking at but it also means I'm necessarily gonna drag up a bunch of stuff that isn't useful yeah but I've gotten myself in a workplace where you know partly because of skill and also very much because of luck you know that that I can get supported to do that to take that time and have that that expansive search that like becomes my advantage Bobby quick deadlines for yourself right stents no longer a I got the resources to not be like in a quick deadline right right you know and I mean I had this Riverhead night I publisher with this book who-who you publishes some of the authors that I loved and pink I don't know if you ever had him on it or not you don't have mono okay great guy Marlon James one of my favorite fiction writers um you know they they believed in it and we're sort of like take your time well you know and go dude I'll need this in six months you can take it - yeah and like what you know what better gift can you have than someone who's like take your time do your project but also isn't there something to having a deadline oh yeah so I'm having pressure as opposed to just do whatever you want I was it taking yeah but for me I'll have that pressure on myself so that's not a like I don't want the project to drag on forever right and so what another guy like I write about in the book of Duke Ellington or the saying I don't need time I need a deadline cuz he could have a long deadline but he was gonna start right before you know he was genius but I think I need time and a deadline right so I would still get a deadline from the publisher and like I'm gonna turn it in that day it could be two or three years hence it's coming in on that day cuz I'll work up to that day but I put a lot of deadline pressure on myself and I don't want it to drag on forever so I don't need so much of like someone lighting a fire under me that I kind of can do on my own what's your mission moving forward you say you don't have another project you're not sure what you will do or no not yet but I said like you know I noticed all my my most important projects came out of things where I was like reading talking to people with no impaired and purpose and I started to see that trend among some other you know creative type people that I admire like Christopher Nolan a director and Erik Larson nonfiction writer who wrote devil in the White City and his other great books but I would see quotes where they would say like you know what but someone would ask them like what's next and they would say between projects I just need to like read widely with no apparent purpose that was kind of like I'm not crazy like you know and so I think that's the phase I'm gonna go into a space and time and explore what everyone explore and see it comes to you right yeah yeah and and because it's always these things are too much you know there's like 35 pages of scientific citations in this book like this stuff is too much work for me to do something that I'm not what I don't also want to know the answers right so I need to find something that I want to spend a lot of time with because like I'm also personally really curious about it not just that I think if I were gonna go for the surest like you know good selling book after the last one it would have been the sports gene - I don't know what that is right that's what I was being encouraged to do but it needs to be something we're like I want the answers that I'm hoping readers also one basically huh how do we know when we found fulfillment in the path that we're taking that that's a difficult question right cuz for me I think this is always gonna be a work in progress like I don't think I'm ever gonna get to a point where I'm like I'm there as a writer or in the sense of fulfillment where like I always view myself as a work in progress which is one of the reasons what I'm willing to take like a beginners course and I think maybe whether implicitly or explicitly for you like clearly you also view yourself as always a work in progress so you wouldn't be doing these other things always and so I don't think there's ever a point where I'm gonna get to like I'm now I can just chill because I don't really want to chill anyway but I have felt that over time you know sometimes I take a turn to work that I don't think fits me as well but that over time I keep moving in a direction where I'm feeling more and more fulfilled by my projects and so I don't think there's an end to that but taking that approach of like really reflecting and zigzagging being willing to try new things I think you should be feeling like you're moving in a in a direction where your projects become more fulfilling and that sort of been the case for me even with sometimes you know two steps forward one step back but it's definitely been in that general direction what is your biggest insecurity oh gosh I mean not constantly having posture syndrome well every time I put something out yeah but but you know also very specifically I get super nervous before I speak to like I love doing it because it makes me feel the way I used to before I raced but I also still get super nervous I before I give a TED talk literally like sweaty palms literally I think everyone part out for a TED talk and there was even some other crazy stuff there where like they had a technical malfunction and I like standing up on this state you know like looking at like whatever Cameron Diaz and Will Smith like just standing there and I thought I was going to give the talk without the visuals they edit that part out for the start but but yeah did also you know coming from science I realized that like I don't know if you read Shane parish's stuff at Farnam Street at all anyway interesting writer and he he wrote this section of it but he and I we realized we're basically writing about the same thing from a different approaches he he runs a business called Farnam Street and he's doing this project called the great mental models and it's these volumes of books where he's talking about like the different models that people in different domains take to like think about their problems and so it's sort of diversifying the way you think about things and one of the sections of one of the books is called the map is not the territory and what that means is a map isn't useful if it's so detailed that it is actually the territory you need to see right if it's if you make a globe too detailed it becomes the world and that's not useful for you so so how do you make these like useful approximations and summaries and I'm constantly doing that with science and I'm very you know it's I lose a lot of sleep over it because you cannot share the work in the same way to scientist what if they were sharing it with one of their peers so the question is how can you boil it down so it's useful and and in an approximation you know a map of the actual work but without being actually inaccurate and like the the difficulty of doing that will make sure that like I never come off a project being like I nailed it like no matter how well it sells or anything like that it'll always I'll always keep thinking of like maybe I should add a little bit yeah yeah is there ever too much of a range where I'm working on ten different things at once yeah and nothing gets better and nothing gets good you know yeah they're like so many things we can work on at one time we're actually maximizing it or wasting our energy no I think so cuz I think I think there can be a difference between being a generalist and being a dilettante which is where you're like spread so thin that you don't get that interested in anything ever right a lot of the generalists I write about our people who will dive into something with a lot of curiosity and then they'll get out and dive into something go all-in on some and they merge these things yeah or at least or at least in a with a serious effort right that's just like and in some of the research and hear about inventors for example they actually quantified generalists and specialists by the US Patent and Trademark Office has 450 different technology classes and they'll say a specialist is someone who spends their time working in you know one or two of those classes a generalist is someone who might work you know across dozens of those classes and the dilettante SAR ones who don't go that deep in one and don't go that wide and those people actually don't tend to make very much in the way of contributions the specialist and the generals both make contributions separately the dilettante don't make that much the polymaths the ones who will sort of dive deep into something get out dive into something else but they'll have like one area they're anchored in and then they become very broad they make the biggest contributions and so I think it's it's good to keep an eye toward like where you can sort of anchor yourself and have like areas of competence but ultimately there are these they're these phrases that keep coming up in range for people who study creative achievement and one one psychologist calls it network of enterprise you know another woman who studies cereal into Vader's cereal innovators talks about like they have one of them described as having like fishing bobbers all with like little thing projects attached to them lin-manuel Miranda's have many apps open in my brain right now of course you put it more rest yeah and what they find is that these these network of enterprise people have different things going on and they're not necessarily doing them all at once but they'll have these different interests they'll move on to one maybe they'll get stuck they'll move to another one and they keep like circling back and they all sort of end up informing one another in a way so interesting this this guy's Santiago Ramon Iike hauled Nobel laureate father of modern neuroscience Spanish Nobel laureate wouldn't sort of describe this and he would say like the most creative scientists have this this broad network and his quote is basically to him who observes them from afar it looks as though they're dissipating their energies when in fact they're strengthening and channeling them right it's just so funny you say this because my CEO who you'll meet his name's Matt he he called me Picasso he's like I don't know how you do it like you've got so many things in your head that are always like you come back to stuff you do this your painting looks like a Picasso or he's like I'm more like a Michelangelo lover I just I love to see how it is and like structure and how it is but you're just kind of all over the place but it always works out in a beautiful way yeah and by the way Michelangelo let's talk about Michelangelo a sec right so there's this Michelangelo painting didn't like painting right probably his rivals got him that gig to keep him out of sculpting and so he's forced to do it wrote some poems about gave up art for a little while just to write poems most of which he didn't finish one of which was about how much he didn't like painting and there's this idea that he would see a figure inside of a block of marble and just draw it out like taking a figure out of a bath of water it turns out not to be true was written in a biography by a guy was like a famous fabulist basically and Michelangelo actually left like 2/3 of everything he ever touched undone because he would start with the block of marble he would decide to try something else do something else and run out of stone and discard and go to something else Wow so it's sort of an interesting metaphor for this idea that oh he just saw the finest erotic and when in fact like he left almost everything undone because he didn't see that and so it's just sort of an interesting I mentioned this in the very end of the book is this sort of interesting metaphor for how we should think about ourselves because that's sort of part of this mythology of like you just see the finished Radha I just chiseled away what wasn't supposed to be exactly exactly exactly and so whereas the reality is like most of everything he ever touched he didn't finish right gonna throw away you know six months on something in message and we'd start over because he'd try to do something different then you don't have enough marble left or whatever though yeah well what is it that all in your mind from your research all the best athletes scientists you know billionaires entrepreneurs have in common are there any things you think they all have in common I mean obviously the athletes at the top of the top we know that they have more unstructured activity as a child you know child develop yeah what about is there any common themes from the top athletes billionaires rock stars in your mind I mean I think they have to have some tolerance for I think we give a lot of lip service to a tolerance for failure but I think in practice like you know go to a conference and see people like failure is great learn from failure failure fear fear and then you talk to someone who's like actually failed at something at work it's not like anyone was like that was great you know yeah you need to do your job better yeah so one of the one of the places that I write about in range is 3m the company which is like it's you know it's always listed on the world's most innovative companies but all the other names you've heard like Google you know Apple all the stuff and then it's like 3m and their inventions are created from post-it notes to like high-tech you know aeronautical engineering stuff and one of their biggest inventions that I profound here is called multi-layer optical film which is in all phones a hype everything we've got in here because it recycles light inside the device so that you can get brighter picture with less battery power or longer and that was a place where when I was talking to some other scientists they were like if they've decided that the question you're trying to answer the project you've taken on is a worthwhile one and it fails you can still get promoted off that like if it was clearly a worthwhile question like if you put together those questions like this is something we for sure need to know the answer to whether it works or not like you can get promoted totally off of that even if you don't figure out the solution that's right and maybe there really isn't one you know maybe you bump up against some like theoretical limit or something like that but one of one of the women who's one of their corporate scientists woman named Jess reset corporate scientist means you're like the top 20 inventors out of there like whatever six or seven thousand or something she said that she had been promoted before off of failures cuz they were like this is such an important question that you've sort of realized you know exists that it's so important to take on and it leads to these other questions right and so I think they've sort of institutionalized some of that tolerant you know you can't be feeling all the time lose a billion dollars on a project yeah yeah there's a promotion yeah yeah but if you look at these inventors like from Thomas Edison - you know Nobel laureates to create these like supernova successes they actually have to create a ton of crisp or for years right and and that's they just don't you know nobody hears about that stuff or if they're a writer a musician like they don't publish that stuff or whatever and so I think you if you're gonna perform it at a really high level you have to stretch yourself and that means like sometimes it doesn't work and you have to be be able to sort of bounce back from that and have that resilience and willingness to just you know lose sometimes yeah well sometimes Wow what else should people know about this being a generalist um what else should they know about being a generalist good question for someone listening right now I think what's the next step they should take well so I think getting your book so so - right that's right your life will be solved that's a short answer to them chapter ten is about how people develop good judgement about the world and it's about in these incredible 20 year long study that's separatin yeah fooled by expertise yeah fooled by expertise and and it's about how when people have certain habits of mind they actually be developed worst judgment in terms of predicting you know business and political and economic trends in the world if they have these certain habits of mind where they they tend to see the world through kind of like one mental model and and that's often these are people who have had a very narrow specialty for their career sometimes people who have investigated like one specific thing for their whole career you know like an academic not to say all academics are like that just as an example they will get worse judgment about the world as they accumulate more and more credentials because they can like fit any story to this like one you know model of the world that they've developed whereas the people who develop better judgment are sort of self-conscious about not having an area where they're expert and they have these they aggregate perspectives or what the research who did this he says they have dragonflies the dragonflies their eyes are made of thousands of lenses that each take a different picture and then it's integrated in the dragonflies brain and that's what they do they go like hunting for different people's perspectives from different domains on a project and then they sort of integrate it and so they are like the definition of intellectual generalists and they turn out to be have such good judgment that this researcher basically entered them in a in his tournament against intelligence analysts US intelligence analyst who have classified to access to classified data these people are just volunteers who have a general interest and they destroyed them to such a degree that like now the intelligence community you know like wants to work with them and a lot of things so so I think that's like having really good at jeopardy yes okay I know a lot about everything right except except the difference engine from jeopardy is that these people the things they're trying to predict are things we don't know the answer to right it's like will will the Nikkei closed above 9,500 will there be a military class in the East China Sea that will change you know take it cost at least 10 casualties by a certain date like the most difficult questions and they had to be really hard and they had to have very defined dates so you could score people Wow and so that that chapter is about like the development of good judgment about the world and and some research that really influenced kind of my approach to teaching as well interesting this is a question I asked towards the end it's called the three truths ok so imagine since you only plan out six to twelve months ahead and now in your life you don't point out the rest of your life how need am promoting this right now imagine it's the last day for you 100 200 years from now as long as you want to live but it's got to pick the last day yeah and imagine you've created everything you want to create in your life and your book you've won on the right every idea had you've tackled it you've taken it on you've got a range of expertise now yeah and you've got the family of your dreams everything's happened I kind of got that right now so there you go that you know let's imagine you have to take all your work with you when you pass yeah so no one has access to your books or your work or whatever you create in the future but you get to leave behind three things you know to be true about all your experiences in your life three lessons that you'd want to leave behind for the world they wouldn't have any of your work they'd have a piece of paper with your three troost what would you say on yours some I like sort of advice yeah you're three you know wisdom by the way I can never imagine getting to a point no money how many years I'd live that I would have liked written everything I wonder right I read everything I wonder read about worse yeah first of all this is gonna sound really like dumb and pedantic but I think people should spend more time outside oh yeah like with nature yeah first of all I think just as much as we put emphasis on deliberate practice we need to put some emphasis on deliberate like not practicing and the kinds of recuperation and rejuvenation you need and like getting outside and I think Shelley I think that's a really important thing secondly I think we should don't don't feel behind and what you're doing I think that's just a you know if you're more oriented toward finding things that work for you than feeling behind and and that's already enough to to propel you then feeling behind doesn't doesn't really help right so like my julius ceaser famously saw statue of Alexander when he was a young man and and supposedly cried saying he you know by my age had conquered so many nations I and all this time have done nothing right pretty soon that was a memory and Caesar was the head of the Roman Republic which he turned into a dictatorship and was murdered by his pals right so he peaked early right so don't don't worry about that behind stuff now you don't know when you're gonna when your times coming so just sort of I just say release that pressure it's not helping you to feel behind and thirdly I think when I was reporting on sports and sometimes on doping and I was wondering you know why am I doing this sometimes and I started to ask myself what is it that we want from sports like what's the core of sports and games and activities I started reading this philosopher named Bernard suits Canadian philosopher and there had been this this challenge in philosophy where philosophers had said there is no single thing that unites like no conceptual thing that unites all sports and games and Barnard suits wrote this brilliant book called the grasshopper it's like a parable and he says that's wrong that the uniting factor is the voluntary acceptance of unnecessary obstacles it does how he framed it all of these things these these contrived rules of sports they all involve the voluntary accept of unnecessary obstacles and to me that's sort of like you know I'm kind of an existentialist so I'm like you know take life and add meaning it's up to me and to me a lot of that meaning comes from the voluntary acceptance of unnecessary obstacles and so I would keep that frame in mind and try to find like what you know volunteer Lee accept obstacles that are their meaningful to your personal growth yeah that's interesting because life is like a game yeah yeah I mean people view it differently but for me it's yeah it's take the game and add meaning yeah exactly it's right like some of us find meaning and running in circles around it yeah and that's a commence a net and that's not right that's important like that's how we make our meaning yeah that's interesting I would acknowledge you for a moment David because I think it's really cool that you could be the example of taking a life path and thinking here to do one thing but then zigzagging constantly in creating works of art which I think that's what they are to really serve people at a higher level who are overcoming or we're really facing challenges in their life you give them the tools with the science and the data to back it up to help them improve their life so I really acknowledge you for your gift your talent your consistency on zigging and zagging and creating a consistent inconsistency exactly because that range is allowing us to to improve our lives so I acknowledge you for everything man you're gonna get a great heart but you're very wise obviously as well they can get the book right now it's called range wide generalist triumph in a specialized world and make sure you guys go pick this up where can they connect with you online David Epstein calm and I'm at David Epstein on Twitter so not only is the reason I'm having Instagram but haven't been posting anything so get you all there man I know I know where all the young kids are at I know I know the great was that any other one of the young kids yeah okay I'll get a photo with you all make sure to post it on there your tag you get your followers this is the final question it's called what's your definition of greatness you I should have this so on hand having been in the in search of greatness movie but and in dan yeager just asked me this recently too but but I because I think there are two things here one like you know you you've been a track and field athlete and field athlete and so we know full well there are people who are running in the same pack one of whom is being lazy at the front of the pack and one of whom is being an absolute hero at the back of the pack because those people are very like different in their natural gifts right and so would I only say that that person was leading but being lazy is great like that's a tough definition for me so so to me I think it's a lot more about you know making the most of what you got like optimizing optimizing your abilities and and when I think of greatness I usually think of doing something a little bit different to not just doing something that people have done before but also doing it well so so to me it's very much about continual improvement and making the best of what you get awesome David thanks man thank you thank you for having me my pleasure you

Channel: Lewis Howes

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Keywords: lewishowes, the school of greatness, business, self help, motivation, David Epstein, potential, the best self, hard work, goals setting, sports science, passion, research, lewis howes, david epstein, lewis howes interview, inspirational video, self improvement, how to become successful, school of greatness, inspiration, motivational videos, how to unlock your ponetial, high performance, success habits, keys to success, david epstein ted talk, high performance habits, wisdom, advice

Id: VYE3TGFks_M

Length: 75min 36sec (4536 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 03 2019