SSAC19: Making the Modern Athlete: A Conversation with David Epstein and Malcolm Gladwell

good afternoon and welcome to the 2019 Sloan Sports analytics conference my name is dawn Chong and I'm a first year MBA student at MIT Sloan and it is my pleasure to introduce today's panel making the modern athlete a conversation with David Epstein and knock'em Gladwell the panel will run for forty-five minutes and then we'll have ten minutes at the end Bernie questions if you would like to submit a question you can do so using twitter using the hashtag modern athlete and with that i will turn it over the panelists introduce each other should i should i go first sure my name is oh no we're gonna do see each other this is David Epstein he we met because I was reading his previous book called sports gene and he devotes several pages to attacking my work and I and I read the attack and realized actually that he was correct and so we became friends and we he's a very very good runner and we used to run together and he would leave me exhausted and then he's now written a new book coming out in May called range which we will be discussing I have the easier job here I guess this is Malcolm Gladwell the proprietor of the Twitter handle at Gladwell obviously many times best-selling author to the extent that the titles and coinage in some of his books I think are just have entered like popular lingo like tipping point and blink and outliers in a September the new book talking to strangers and the host of the podcast revisionist history and a writer for The New Yorker and depending what month and year you catch him a borderline world class mile runner for his age group that's very very sweet you say that but oh yeah that's the only thing I care about is how sad is that the only thing I really cared about was the last thing you said was bother my hunting prowess so we were just we were just in the waiting room here looking up the FAQ on Nicholas Sparks site who was a great 800 meter you know it's like one of the best-selling novelist of a generation and in his faq he prominently says like if you average my best times in the 800 meters they fall between this and this so he's obviously still like sensitive about his best times just yeah never in like high school despite all his I could never get over it so I would like to let's talk let's start by talking a little bit about your new book which fascinates me and correct me if I'm wrong but the kind of question that you're the paradox that you're trying to address is that maybe the best way to excellence at X is not by doing X is that fair I think that's fair to say not by doing X as narrowly and specifically and early as possible yes eventually of course you have to do X but yeah I think that's the case and you know part of the the genesis of it came out of our discussion here five years ago where because it was framed as 10,000 hours versus the sports gene and even though like we had a plenty of common ground you know I sort of anticipated that may be part of a corollary to your argument would be that you know a head start in specialized practice it's all deliberate practice that was insurmountable advantage so I went in and collated data from all the studies that looked at the longitudinal progression the development of athletes right and most of the studies we can talk about this a little later but most of the studies of elite athletes have like a real what's called a restriction of range problem basically where you're only looking at the finished product pretty much and so you can end up giving like really perverse advice to how to develop an athlete if you're only looking at elites like many years in the NBA there's a negative correlation between scoring and height so if you didn't recognize the restriction of range you'd tell like parents to have shorter kids for them to score more points in the NBA and so when I looked at this data what I saw was that the athletes who go on to become elite tend to be later specialized errs they do more sort of freeform play early on less deliberate practice wider range of exposure to different sports gain a breadth of skills learn about their own interests and abilities and they focus later and then they surpass their peers what wait I don't want to jump ahead to too much here because this is an absolutely crucial observation of yours but let's start with the paradigm with which you start the book which is the two two of the greatest athletes of our age each of whom represents a different way of thinking about this problem of how to be great that's right so the first one is Tiger Woods of course who I think is probably the single most famous example of athletic development or maybe of expertise development in the world ever and Tiger Woods was very unusual of course as a kid I mean he's there if you meet Earl Woods book there's pictures of Tiger balancing on his palm at six months old and he started golfing before he was one and all these things and that sort of became the model from which we extrapolate to like anything that people want to get good at and and part of the argument that I make in the book is that golf actually turns out to be like a really horrible model of almost everything else that people want to learn in the wider world but the other athlete I look at is Roger Federer who is certainly as well known as an athlete but his development story is much less well known where he was did an incredible array of sports mostly in a very lightly structured environment if structured at all when he wanted to focus on tennis his mother wouldn't allow him to focus on tennis had to continue playing badminton basketball and soccer and so he was like years behind many peers who were already working with like physiologist and nutritionists and focusing in and you know that doesn't seem to have hampered his development yeah say the least now so we have these two models we have Roger and we have Tiger and in the popular mind Tiger is the tiger is conventional wisdom Roger seems surprising to us before we go into this to talk about those two models in more detail why had why did Tiger win in the kind of popular imagination as a developmental model that's a great question I mean I think one it's so dramatic you know there's video of him as a two-year-old on television shows demonstrating his skill so it's just incredibly dramatic you know and so I think it's perfect for like Daniel Kahneman's availability heuristic like the most dramatic thing sticks in our mind but also the way I think it's sort of a it's a hopeful story one right it suggests the idea that there is no such thing sort of individual differences that limit someone it's just this accumulative environmental exposure and accumulation of practice so I think it's a very hopeful message is a pretty simple one to tell and and it's just very dramatic but a couple of thoughts on the tiger model the precursor for the tiger model there were several but their best-known was probably the Suzuki method in music right an idea that comes to to the fore correct me if I'm wrong I don't know 60s 70s out of Japan saying the way to create a great musician was to get start playing at astonishingly early ages so there are the seeds of this notion that the minute your child can stand put a violin in their hand or a tennis racket in their hand but I'm still not satisfied with the with the question of why we find out so appealing is it is it is it as simple as that there is something emotionally seductive about the child's mastery of an adult game of a most sophisticated game I mean there's something on the early Tiger Woods videos or they were the two year olds who are playing Chopin are incredibly there they're addictive they're like the cutest thing you've ever seen right they're like cat videos yeah there are human cat videos yeah yeah human cat videos that's a good one the I wish I'd thought of that one if there's any time to make changes yeah no and there's a there's a lot embedded in what you just said and I think and you've written about this we're obsessed with precocity Yeah right in some cases we deemed someone a genius because they did something early even if their later development does not reflect that same trajectory we're totally obsessed with precocity and I don't think that's necessarily a good thing because you know we see it looks like the normal path and there's people get to X expertise and excellence via an incredible array pass but the norm is is delaying right and you know with with all the selection mechanisms that we have in the world even all this pressures that are forcing people to specialize we're still seeing that the norm is people who can delay that so there's obsession with precocity in everything like right people think it's great if their kid learns to walk early or to read early even though that has been shown over and over finish the thought I want to tell you something Sushi's thought to have like no predictive value for their ultimate outcome yes like whatsoever my brother who's an elementary school principal this is his favorite riff about how parents get so excited about the fact that their child will read early reads early and his whole point is well what's of what possible value is this when everyone learns to read eventually it's only useful to be the first at something if you maintain that advantage over the course of your life but not exactly and there's been and so there's been actually some some some really interesting work that I write about in the book where if you look at all of kind of the headstart academic programs that give kids like this incredible academic boost early on there's a ubiquitous fade out effect it looks just like it looks just like the curves of athletes where the people are specialized later are behind and then they cross over it's the same thing and the fade out is actually a catch-up because the quickest way to give someone an advantage is to teach them what's called closed skills which are the things that you can teach them and you can measure the progress right away and that everyone is going to learn anyway so it's not a lasting advantage so the more we push like kind of the hyper specialized model of development the more we focused on these closed skills that you can measure right away and the more that's an advantage that's just gonna fade out which is why there's such like one of the reasons why there's such horrible transference from like youth athletes with highlight reels to you know adult I've ever doing this speaking of in running if you go back and you look at the greatest milers in Canada as 14 year olds and then you re-examine the list eight years later to see who's still a great Meyler there's about one name that appears on both lists yeah so there's fade out as one of the people who fade it out and I acutely aware this phenomenon that it isn't in it in the case of and here we're getting into running Kevin Sullivan the greatest Canadian runner of all time he's on both lists but but he was he was Tiger Woods he was our he was a Canadian Tiger Woods a lesser species but um but I wouldn't so there's it but talk to me before we go on from this to return to the moment to the tiger advantage you said this tantalizing thing that it turns out that golf is the least useful model why what is about golf that makes it it's it's it's totally non dynamic right you don't need to use any anticipatory skills really which are judging where bodies and balls are going in the future I like everything in sports happens too fast for like elite athletes don't have any faster than normal reaction speed they actually have to learn how to process positions of objects in the field to see what's going to come next and so it just looks like they're they're moving faster and golf doesn't have any of those types of skills so it doesn't use any of that type of psychological chunking it's basically it's much more like an industrial task where you're trying to minimize deviation from unknown perfect movement as much as possible totally non dynamic right and so the analogy I make in the book to it is also things like chess that are totally based on repetitive pattern recognition constrained rules you want to minimize mistakes as much as possible which is why those things are also the easiest to automate and will have like the least value going forward the things that are most amenable to the kind of repetitive pattern recognition that make someone a prodigy in like chess or golf are the also the things that are most automatable yeah so are you saying that for this so let's turn to our thesis from the beginning that being excellent at X requires doing much more than X so are you bracketing golf and saying let's leave golf out of this particular golf and chess can we leave those out I think there's an argument to be made like the work hasn't really been done but I do I think chess yes like I think there's a reason why basically I don't know there's something like 20 or something like that Grandmaster chess players all-time who have reached grandmaster status below the age of like 15 and the oldest one is like my age now because that's a phenomenon very much of the growth of computer chess where you can study many more and in fact if you aren't studying patterns like pretty seriously by age 12 your chance of becoming a grandmaster drops from like or an international master which is one level down from that from like one in four to like one in fifty five light instantly weight still 12 so yeah not six that's right that's right so yeah so you can delay it a little bit but yeah I think there are certain I think I think the main I I don't even know what the joke was there the joke is that our our perception of what it means to start something oh so distorted now that we consider 12 to be late oh well look when I was living in in Brooklyn across the street from me there was a u6 travel soccer team that would meet right because because five-year-olds can't find good enough competition the city of nine million people yet you know my I have an all-purpose rule for youth sports which is you should never have to travel to the game for a period that's longer than the game that should be the rule you say that but as a tracker and 100 meters would be totally on tennis no well track track accepted you're a miler where you're me no none of my none of my rules ever apply to the things I do there are always exercises in imposing by values with someone else wait but so so we're gonna bracket Goffin golfing yeah and the disc that you've just delivered to the golfing world is so fantastic I this is so we say knit golf golf is a kind of we've all secretly known it's a sort of lesser sport and now you kind of confuse that it it's a it's automatable you've likened golfers to chess players to kind of introverted you know socially awkward spectrum II people who hide in their closets I I I don't think I said any of those things no but there's a serious point here which is in other words so we're gonna catalogue the mistakes that we've made in falling in love with Tiger and forgetting about Roger I'm gonna get to Roger in a moment the first mistake that we have made is that we have been indiscriminate in our understanding of what models are useful for the kinds of things that most of us are interested in yes yes okay great now listen just hop on the other side and talk about Roger Federer's history it is not as well known right and it's almost like we're not in why are we not interested in what is it about that story that doesn't grip us well I mean for one there's no dramatic video right of him going on on TV so there's just not these like these clips that you can play over and over there's not the same obsession with precocity again and like what's the advice you draw from it like expose yourself to a whole bunch of stuff it's not like so easy to there is advice so walk us through the argument for doing it rub the roger way what is Roger learn by what's he playing he's playing soccer badminton and I mean before that he was doing just like an incredible array of everything from like skateboarding you know all kinds of physical literacy stuff right and this is and because I think it's part of it's about like general movement capacity right it's like Cirque du Soleil which is a Canadian company decided to have their performers learn other performers basic skills and these are so they're taking away time from these performers to have them learn stuff they'll never perform and found like their injury rates they measure their injury rates next to Canadian gymnastics they drop by like a third basically so I think there's some anti fragile aspect to doing this variety of things but I think there were there were a couple of hypotheses when I saw that this data one is just that the better athletes can just play all the sports that's one right the other is that the earlier you push selection the more likely you put the wrong person into the wrong category so this is crucial wait pause on this one because this to me is the most interesting of all the arguments this is talk about this okay what can I give number two then if that's and so okay and then the other one is that there's an actual skill development benefit to diversifying what you're doing that one I thought was not so plausible but in the intervening years you know soon we had our first discussion i started looking through all these soccer studies and there would be like say you know German researchers who would take kids at age eleven twelve or thirteen matched them for skill level tracked them longitudinally over the next couple years see what they do and find that the ones who did less structured soccer and more exposure to other sports informally would have progressed more by the time they checked in so now I'm convinced that there's actually also a skill development benefit to this yeah no actually actually I'm interested in both those this so the skill development thing so why is it you are you have better skill development in an unstructured situation than in a structured situation I think it's I think it's partly because first of all the game when you get to the elite level is totally different right like if we think of something like like tennis in amateur tennis is 80 some percent of the points are scored based on keeping the ball in play until someone makes a mistake and at the pro level that totally switches you have to proactively score so it's a totally different game and you have to be able to anticipate things in much more rapid manner and you're processing in a way that's much more akin to language so if you actually dig into the Suzuki method Suki himself was a late specialized or his father owned a violin Factory and in his I read his childhood memoirs and he writes about how all he and his siblings would do was beat each other up with violins like that's what they thought they were for uh-huh and then he heard like like you know Ave Maria or something on the radio and decided to take one home and try to teach himself to play and likened it to language acquisition so he read his actual tenants he says early on you want exposure but not this kind of drilling repetitive he says you know kids acquire language first they acquire the sound first before you teach them in the grammar and I think that's similar with these sports skills you want people to learn like a baby you want them to be thrown in immersed because they're gonna have to learn this stuff so that they have to execute it so quickly that it's unconscious yeah I mean the only way you do that is being thrown in struggling striving you know having to try to come up with stuff as opposed to sort of learning these repetitive procedures in a much more like explicit manner which will not be fast enough to execute as the levels go up and will not be creative enough as the levels go up yeah so like instead of you know if you go to Brazil right the kids aren't playing soccer they're playing futsal I'm like a space this big that's on the sand and the ball is on cobblestones it's bounce all these different ways and so they're getting like six times as many anticipatory judgments that they have to make even when they don't make the ball even they don't have a ball per minute as like American kids and CAD amis who are playing on full-sized fields right in France it's just won the World Cup overhauled their whole development system a few decades ago too they have about half as many games in elite French soccer player as an American will and they this one of the guys who designed it has this phrase there's no remote control for the players the coaches aren't allowed to talk except for like these 15-minute like boxed moments and the kids have to do problem solving on like small field so it's much more teaching them this physical problem solving instead of those closed skills you know and I mean you've written about this in youth basketball right if you want to teach people certain skills that everyone's gonna learn later you can make sure to win at youth basketball but that doesn't actually develop the players and yeah very good way what about this is a not a frivolous question it is also the case that unstructured play when you're young is more fun yeah and I wonder how many people are lost to the system simply because they become convinced that this thing that they're being required to do four hours a day is not fun at all yeah I think that's a that's a really important point if you look at there's some really interesting tennis about there were these kids if if out of Scandinavia that included people who went on to become like top ten in the world and if you look at kids that are really good young someone spots them and says this kids got something but isn't that refined so if we just put them on the program then they'll really be great and all of those kids basically end up dropping out because they they don't they become inflexible they get put in what's called a restrictive environment especially the girls and kind of told what to do and taken away from all the things that worked right like Andy Murray's mom runs a camp where basically her imprimatur allows her to charge people to like send their kids to her and just like let them be kids and play these like kids games and so I think the fun you know it is a big it is it's obviously an important aspect is why they fall in love with it and they don't know their own talents or interest until later right like I think like you know that wait so that brings us back to number two but okay but I will I will make in passing all of these predictions these observations you've made are of beautifully borne out in the case of Roger Federer so if we think of skill acquisition being facilitated by a broad range of experiences at an early age he is someone whose level of breadth of skill dwarfed his peers if we think of physical develop physical literacy he's someone who stayed healthier longer than most of his peers and if you think about love of the game why is the man still playing at 36 and 37 he loves tennis I mean way more than anybody else right I mean compare him to the who was the guy who famously would read paperbacks on the side Kevin Courier oh yeah remember him yeah yeah I mean he was reading books at the change between the changeovers I mean that's how burned out he was at the age of 20 what was his name courier Jim Jim Courier yeah but now but now I want to go back to the one that fascinates me the most which is this problem of sampling so this idea that if you select out a child at an early age for a specific sport how do you know that's the right sport yeah I love this notion we unpack it well I mean mostly you don't right so it the earlier you push selection the more you select based on things that have nothing to do with their eventual development like like physical so I mean one of the interesting things I never hear anyone talk about in the NBA is like the later you have your growth spurt the taller you are likely to become so the earlier your your deselecting people because they haven't had their peak height velocity yet as the physiologist would say the more likely you are missing the people who are going to have the biggest growth spurts so is it a big surprise that like Michael Jordan Scottie Pippen Dennis Rodman were like maybe today well at least not Jordan but Pippen and Rodman probably would have been out of the pipeline today by the time that they had their growth spurts right Yanis looks like he's been going through puberty since being getting drafted right yeah right and I don't says the guy who like grows prepubescent facial hair still but that's important so you want you want to keep the pipeline as open as possible so you're not deselecting people these young ages like Adam Silver said yesterday you know maybe we should have these professional development academies that are sort of more professionalized for youth basketball players and I get that because I think the AAU system is a disaster and I think those those teams are more likely created around a player with potential than the player being you know subsumed in them but that might be helpful for them like learning life skills but the early the the European soccer clubs in a lot of ways are sort of trying to undo some of that and like broaden their pipelines for these these later developers and late bloomers like France did so I think any time the earlier you push selection the more likely you're picking you're putting the wrong person in the wrong spot so in you know what economists refer to as match quality the longer you can delay selection the more likely you are to improve match quality what the person is doing so what are the they really the decision about what sport to pick is often the parents decision it often is independent of the athlete yeah I'm or herself right it's yeah I played the sport as a child or this is the sport that is easy for me or pleasing for me or it's based on a superficial criterion that if you are tall at seven yeah you're likely to be pushed towards basketball yeah I mean if you're tall at seven you're more likely to be taller as an adult you know you may or may not yeah but you're more likely to so why before we move on you said that thing about you think AAU is a disaster but can you evaluate a you in the specifically in the context of the ideas that you're developing in in range yeah well I think I think for one we hear like a tremendous amount about how youth athletic development should occur every day like if you listen to commentary in a game you'll probably hear something that either talks about that or implies it and and as far as I can tell like none of those people who are delivering the information have read like one sentence of like a century worth of work on this area which of course like provides opportunities for people like me but that AAU is some of it and I think it's very like balkanized but is invested in selling this message that send your kid to me like I'm the caretaker I know how the pipeline should work and all the science says something different right lifters a you like second-graders national championships and stuff like that or or again to go to golf there's this like diaper Division World Championships where the kids like fly to Singapore and there and their dads like tell them what club to use and how to angle it so they're literally outsourcing all the cognitive aspect of the game and they're just like a joystick you know were like a bundle of motor skills and these kids when they're being taught like it's a totally different game when they're when they're that age and so teaching them the adult skills like this guy Ian Yates who's worked with this incredible range for UK athletics usually incredible range of world-class athletes told me his biggest problem is people come to him and say I want my kid doing what X gold medalist is doing right now not what X gold medalist was doing when they were 13 years old right and I think AAU is selling the ability to sort of advance that progression when all the evidence suggests you know maybe they're not harmful enough to ruin the kids who have really high potential but but probably enough to deselect out people who would get to the top if they still had access to the pipeline yeah yeah what do you know what age au starts I haven't checked like my watch lately no I'm not I mean I know I don't know really I know they have a last time I checked I know there was a second-grade national championship yeah kids you know we're like eating the ball like this but I don't know if it's gone younger than that yeah no but let's play with it so let's talk about for a moment about what an optimal program should look like so you just had a son yeah so it let's imagine that you had great designs on the athletic future of your son yeah this is my plan to get everyone to stifle the competition tell me so if what what should what should an optimal athletic development trajectory path look like if you would like if you are if your interest is in producing a world-class athlete I don't know what it looks like I think early on if we're talking about like most of the team sports anticipatory skills early on should totally focus on physical literacy doesn't matter if it's a sport or not like teaching them how to use their body basically whether that's outside whatever it is expose them to as much stuff as you possibly can because they're also gonna if they focus in on something they're gonna have to do a lot of work so that you're gonna want them to like it I think from what I know of it an ideal to be sort of Esther Ledet Kahoot became the first woman to win two different sports at the Winter Olympics at this last Winter Olympics where she wasn't focused on teenage categories she still plays she won in skiing and snowboarding she still plays beach volleyball and windsurfing and just did this incredible diversity of both team and individual sports gaining all this incredible variety of skills and then you can learn the like sports specific stuff more quickly once you've got those skills right it's like it's it's a little like language learning in that way I want to be careful about the language acquisition research because some of it I think is like kind of shoddy but one that I think holds up is people who like grow up bilingual they may be delayed a little bit in showing certain language skills but if you then give them like a fake system of grammar they will learn that language better than someone who's only monolingual it's like you've created this sort of palette that allows them to learn new skills henceforth more quickly and so I think you'd go for this just like for the skill building this general physical literacy and because you want you have to maximize their match quality think more people than ever are selected out either by their nature or by their nurture from becoming an elite athlete and so you really have to expose them to enough things that they can try to optimize their match quality or fit in where they fit best now are there let's let's dig a little deeper here are there some clearly we don't want this kid playing golf at an early age since it's not a real sport so what sports you're you really have it in forgot what sports should I mean give me give me a kind of short list of I mean and it is also the case right that if we're talking about learning physical literacy and building a kind of platform that we can use to excel some yeah then all sports are not created equal yeah so are the ones that you think like should it be gymnastics some combination of gymnast in gymnastics I don't know why I said that miss Pressy strikes me something they would be really really useful to do at an early age is that if I think so I mean if I were if I were designing it and incidentally women's gymnastics is you have to specialize early because you have to be prepubescent right so female gymnasts have shrunk from five foot three to four foot nine on average last thirty years because it's it you know lower moment of inertia for twisting air and and better power-to-weight ratio but if I you know could replace the golf courses I would put in like sort of like indoor padded Park or like physical problem solving courses basically so that's what I would do if I were like the Emperor of promoting physical development but fortunately since the US has such a large like we have a greater participation base than the rest of the world so we basically burn a lot of people with non optimal development because we can you know and so we're not really pushed to do better in a lot of ways because we have this incredible funnel but we I want to keep going with the rules here it was - let's do David Epstein's rules for parenting so no travel got a month under my belt so yeah no travel squads clearly I mean not not early ya know what like what age would you would you be willing to let your son join of traveling yeah it's a really difficult question because the systems are setting up to force you to have to specialize even if it's not the best thing right if someone says like well you can't be on the sixth grade team if you're not on the fifth grade team and then you can't be on the high school team then you're forced to yes I think you really have to balance awesome that that's a separate problem but let's just optimize yeah so if you could choose yeah how late would you wait for specialization oh I think probably mid teen years at the earliest mid two years at the early I mean and that's just going based on the data when you see that cross over and I don't know if that means that's when it's actually optimal or that's when you're getting toward like later in high school but that's when I would do it but I would continue if they could continuing them in like like the Cirque du Soleil I mean because those people are incredible athletes well I mean a lot of them were Olympic medalists and they're still continuing to diversify and I think a lot of pro athletes would benefit like we do a reasonable job of selection and curation for pro athletes but I would argue not the best job of actually developing them and I understand that like you get these NBA players they're such you know like from what I've seen of NBA players like strength training it's like not rigorous they're like pretty coddled I think once they get there because they're so skilled you kind of just don't want to break it it's like a china shop right but that also means you sacrifice optimal development yeah and so I think we're not doing such a good job of making them the best they can be necessarily you know we have a good funnel so the ones we're going anyway come through but I would add diversification to current Alita I'm always amazed whenever you hear as someone who listens to an endless number of of sports podcast you know they'll talk about some NBA player and they'll say so-and-so and when he has terrible footwork and I always think if only there were a way to teach a highly skilled athlete have a better footwork okay someone should invent like so so the greatest footwork of any athlete I think active now is Vasile lomachenko you know who was the fastest fighter just recently pretty recently to win world title three different weight classes he's father exposed him to boxing early then he took four years off to learn traditional Ukrainian dance okay and when he gets asked about it like so do you credit dance for your footwork and he's incredible he says like I think that helped but also it was like the soccer the volleyball the basketball and all that stuff coming together just left boxing for four years sabbatical for you traditional Ukrainian dance and to me he has the best footwork of any currently active athlete in the world and anything yeah maybe it's traditional Ukrainian dance really I think it's just that diversification diversification yeah the way I would go back to so pro rata why boxing was like an AJ Liebling in the sweet science wrote like boxing is the that's the one sport boxers and drummers are the ones we have to specialize early right and then you have a Silvo mischenko and Deontay Wilder the heavyweight champion I interviewed in Beijing when you won the bronze medal having started boxing like 20 months earlier than that for the first time despite all of the systems that deselect people who don't specialize these people are still rising to the top yeah but now the on the question of a professional athlete are you saying that maybe there may be useful gains from diversification even past the point of selection and maturity the issue with them of course is what is the best use of your marginal time in right summer right so if I'm a MBA player are you saying that I should at least think seriously about my whether my marginal hour in the summer is better spent playing soccer than shooting practising my sweet point shot or doing something you're not used to you have to practice your 3-point shot of course and I think that that balance depends on how good someone is at something already but even if you want to get better at your three-point shot like we know that period izing or it's what's called I write about this a lot in range called interleaving where you mix instead of practicing the same skill over and over and over you mix it up you should go away from practicing that do something else and come back and do it again and you'll make better use of your time you'll optimize your time and you should vary it right like Shaquille O'Neal should not have been continuing to practice from the free-throw line he should have been practicing from 2 feet in front and 2 feet behind because his problem was he didn't have good motor modulation so he shouldn't have just been doing the same thing over and over you want to vary these challenges up and that's kind of a principle we know from all sorts of physical training that you shouldn't just do the same thing over and over and over again yeah two other questions we I see we have a 15 minute sign warning us but I wouldn't talk about two quick things one very quickly injuries we haven't talked explicitly about it we had talked about but it does strikes me as being a huge part of this story since injuries are the most significant limitation on the development of young athletes and we do am I correct have evidence to suggest that this kind of early diversification is a pretty is a protector against particularly overuse injuries early and late diversification yeah yeah and again that the Cirque du Soleil date I think shows that as well as anything but yes I don't like to focus on that as much because I think when it comes to parents they're not really concerned about the health message honestly more of the skill development but there is that that data right so it's really interesting where in terms of the sort of growing epidemic of adult style overuse injuries in youth athletes like things that will affect their career forever or curtail their development its negatively correlated to family socioeconomic status so this is like one of the few like health epidemics that hits people who are well-off because those are the ones who can afford like all the travel teams and all the personalized coaches yeah so it's like this incredibly perverse thing and at the same time we've seen this Canadian researchers John Cote who looks at where do elite athletes come from I've seen the odds of an elite athlete of a kid going to the pros are much increased if he comes from a smaller town and it's getting smaller and smaller because those are the places where they aren't the competition isn't so hard when they're 12 but there forced to specialize they're allowed to continue dabbling longer so I think with the good intentions of speeding kids up we've basically made sure that elite athletes don't tend to come from those places anymore where we you know have the most available to them is there's a protective effect and like a helpful match quality effect from Sam it's super interesting so the very the impulse set that that the Little League parent has to quote give their children the best opportunities quote to develop their ability may have the perverse effect of holding the child back totally I mean if your goal is to win the Little League World Series then it's probably good yeah but if you're trying to make the best twenty year old it's not the same way as making the best ten year old yeah and wonder the point I want to talk about it will get wouldn't get some of these questions here and that is cognitive diversity so I remember I think I told you about this once I remember having a conversation with someone who works a lot with tennis young tennis players in the in the developmental strata of the so basically 150 through 250 in the ranked tennis rankings and says not surprisingly the great predictor of who makes the leap and who doesn't is not quality of your shots or your physical any any aspect of your physical game it is whether you can whether you can learn to adapt your game on the fly when you when something's not working in the game can you recognize you have to change he said some kids can and sub kids can't and so he's identifying a kind of some kind of cognitive emotional psychological component and I was when I heard that I thought that strikes me is the kind of thing you can only learn off the court doing something else like that so I there's another sort of benefit here but it may not be a benefit that comes from you may not learn that from doing another sport maybe this goes to something that you and I wrote maybe it comes from like learning to take criticism in a in a classroom or maybe it you know I mean and even even to the extent you do learn it on the court I think this gets to one of the underlying premises of why like facing these physical problem solving situations different context is important so it's called there's like a huge body of literature on this over the transfer of skills right and if you give people whatever math problems or naval threat simulations if you give people similar situations over and over and over on that day they will master it and look great whereas if you give other people all these like mixed up environments they'll look terrible and they'll come out saying I learn nothing and if you bring them back a month later the people who think they learn nothing and had this incredible you know diverse experience will perform better on everything including the thing that the other people only study for that one day so they're developing this like this these these base abstractions that they're then allowed to mold to new situations it's called far transfer of knowledge so an intern math it's like instead of learning a procedure to solve a known problem they're learning how to match a type of problem to a strategy and I think that's very similar there's a huge body of literature on this more on cognitive skills to what's going on with the perceptual expertise of athletes and why it's important for them to face this incredibly diverse array of scenarios because they're building these abstractions that they can then flex to new situations yeah that's what they want they want knowledge when you're specializing the kids you're teaching them how to deal with sort of known situations usually but what you want is someone who has these capabilities that can adapt to anything that's thrown at them particularly things they've never seen before yeah what's striking actually is about we're listening to you is how much the optimal way of preparing an athlete now starts to resemble more and more the optimal way of preparing an intellectual yeah well and I mean it's it is I mean most most of range is about non sports and you and I have actually like right we wrote a little bit about that we did just slightly David and I were asked by my cousin who is the who is the editor of the Journal of ophthalmology to write an editorial in the Journal of ophthalmology which is the most prestigious academic journal I've ever written for was very exciting I felt honored we we wrote a tutorial but it was a really fascinating study to this point who was about a can you an ophthalmologist is required to read to make very sophisticated diagnosis based on a scan like looking at essentially someone's an x-ray or a cat scan or something and the question was in medical school if we take ophthalmology residents and we send them down the street to a museum to take art history lessons and learn to look at works of art do they end up having better diagnostic skills as ophthalmologists than their peers who stayed and did extra time at the Medical School and the answer is the ones who went down the street ended up as a way better up diagnosticians which is exactly the point it is that the medical school has done the exact same mistake that AAU and Little League do which is they over specialized and they forgot that that optimal just need a foundation of skills in in in doing this thing of trying to look at something and make sense of it and that that study was really interesting because the the researchers said we know that these visual skills are like the most one of the most important things in our business why are we not better at making people better at it and so there has tried this other thing of going over and giving them lessons on how to look at art and they came back veteran right and and I think you could make the argument was it the looking at the art that was better or was it what we know which is stepping away from the skill you're practicing and coming back to it which made it better and my guess is probably some of us both yeah but we don't know what's up a really interesting point which is we do not mean in this discussion we've been having to single out the sports community for making the Tiger error in fact we're everywhere in society we're making the Tiger air medical schools are making the Tiger air right that's that was the point of that of that particular study that this we have all been infected by this pernicious notion that the way to get better at X is only to do X yeah and that doesn't mean it isn't a way to get better but is it the best way to get better is it the way to optimize yeah optimize development and I think you know I mean the reason I the reason I wrote about this is because I think there's a lot but I think there are certain classes of tasks where the answer is yes and many more classes of tasks where the answer is no yeah weird I'm very confused by how much time we have left how much time do we have left 7 minutes 10 minutes Oh last time we could do some questions Malcolm what kind of shoes are you wearing is the first question there on wait what kind was that the answer there these shoes are called ons cool there's Swiss I only wear them I wear no other shoes which I realize now is a mistake to what extent it's a good question I was asking for that to what extent is commercialization professionalization of youth sports driving early specialization in other words our Nike Disney and those with a financial interest responsible for perpetuating this system as a way of thinking is this talking about that so there's a this is all happening in a very particular commercial climate yeah I mean I think there's no question that the interests in the increasing specialization of youth sports is driven by adult interests not by right the interest the optimal development of these kids or else they wouldn't have these massively increased odds while coming from these places that don't have as much specialization I don't know the extent to which I mean you know like TV properties are really driving that I know I see lots of like youth highlight reels and I don't think most of those kids are going to continue on the same trajectory right because but we're obsessed with that precocity in that head start right I think of this as like the the Julius Caesar issue he supposedly famously saw statue of Alexander and said he's conquered so many worlds and I had all this time have done nothing when they were both like 25 and like pretty soon after that he was in charge of the Roman Republic and like pretty soon after that he turned it into a dictatorship and got murdered by his own pals so like he peaked early I think it's fair to say and I think that's the case for a lot of youth athletes as well so I don't think it's just this like institutional purposeful nefarious system I think it's also there's been a lot of talk about how social media changes the whole ecosystem that's that's that's all I think you know what's I will I do think there's an interesting point in that question which is it may not be overt or explicit but part of what has happened I mean one of the big points that I hear from you is that there is a qualitative difference necessarily a qualitative difference in way that a sport is played at the age of 10 that in a way it is that in the way it is played at an elite level at 22 yeah and yeah yes and so what just to pick on Nike for a moment or what apparel makers and such have done is they have removed this the the the distinction between the apparent cosmetic distinction between youth sports and adults sports right you have you can now outfit the six-year-old so that they are wearing a precise version of the adults I mean so they encourage this kind of thinking that what's going on at six is just a it's just a smaller scale earlier version of the finished products I mean maybe that's I don't think that is necessarily delivered and it's meant it was meant in an honest way but in a perfect world we wouldn't let seven-year-old baseball players dress up like adult baseball players right we would like to we need to find ways to reinforce the sense of what they're doing is not the same I hadn't thought about it from like a sartorial aspect but yes I do think we need to reinforce that aspect there's a great a really interesting book about this if anyone's interested by this guy sigh Remo who's better known as like the father of intercontinental ballistic missiles called extraordinary tennis for the ordinary player and he makes this distinction he says because up until the very elite level the game is dominated by errors here's how you can win at the amateur level without being really very good you know at the elite level I don't have as much for you because a lot more stuff goes into that but he draws this like very scientific distinction saying the game is so different I give you these huge advantages at the amateur level that don't hold anymore at the elite level and that's kind of what's being sold I'll give you these advantages that that work here but they they don't work and in fact in many ways inhibit performers later on yeah yeah somebody was saying I remember once talking to someone who said it the way to win it in in kind of mediocre youth tennis is simply to do nothing but lob in just wait for the other person to make an error yeah yeah which is you can imagine how appalling that must be to watch right but ya know there's all kinds of are like full-court pressing in youth basket yes for compressing a youth basketball it works the same way what is um there's a some interesting look at these questions or they talk about Federer yeah oh so this let's just come back to the thing that brought us first together and briefly in the conflict which was the notion of deliberate practice and that and that 10,000 hour thing so what were you really saying is that we need to redefine what deliberate practice is just to make sure that people realize that although you do need to have a big chunk of deliberate practice to be excellent what is meant by deliberate practice is probably broader than you think either is we can either so I kind of think in the scientific community the the researchers that got most wedded to deliberate practice have continually backed into a corner where the definition of deliberate practice now is that which in retrospect did cause improvement which scientifically is like a totally useless definition so so I would not like to broaden the definition of deliberate practice I would like to just have like other other terms that you add to and broaden the whole umbrella of what's useful yeah because the definitions already gotten so broad now that I have trouble at keeping track of it yeah yeah but I mean it was a there was a conflation of two of two ideas that have to be disconnected which is specialization is one thing yeah and large amounts of accumulated practice is another yeah and they're not necessarily the same thing that's right they're not necessarily the same things it matters when you're doing it and it's also about how you're doing it right this more sort of freeform exposure to problem solving then it's like hyper-technical which may more work for golf and welcome back to one other thing you said I just reminded me of it the the clothing you know making these look like kids there's some research I write about in range that shows how powerful the effect of analogies are from one athlete to another so if you give like coaches a description of a player and it's identical you give different descriptions the only difference is they make an analogy to one previous player versus another previous player with all other information being the same including video it tremendously changes the judgments of how people evaluate that player if you say they're like the next you know this person versus they're like the next like that person so all of these sort of cues I think that start to making someone fit like a normal mode play into these cognitive biases we have you know which end up with things like maybe why someone like Jeremy Lin gets overlooked because you don't analogize him to the players that you're used to and go so I think a lot of those marketers can actually be dangerous probably evaluate players when you were talking I was reminded I think I finally it may be think of a really fascinating piece of research that I learned years ago which I've never until now been able to make sense of and completely which was an observation by Dean Simonton who I'm sure you know who is a researcher at UC Davis who has studied genius and one of his really interesting observations is he was interested in this notion of when do geniuses peak and what you discover is that people do their best work people who are exceptional do their best work in any given field now we're not talking about sports here at some point into their career for a difference by profession but you know for businesses it might be eight years after becoming a professional physicist you do you know our mathematicians it might be 12 years poets it might be 25 years and so the question he asked was is that because of your age is it eight years for the professional physicist because you do your best physics at 30 or is it the distance from leaving school or the distance from point zero in your profession in other words is it have nothing to do with your chronological age but rather just to do with when you started there's a whole bunch of analysis and what he discovers is it's not chronological age it is simply the time lag between when you enter when you enter a new field and when you've sorted it out sufficiently to make sense of it so he was making an argument to say there ought to be far more mid-career switching that you can actually be a very very good mathematician if you switch to a different two mathematics at age 40 because you will get reap all the benefits from that first flush of discovering and making sense of a but now you're adding a new wrinkle to this which is that maybe in secondary reason why the mid-career switchers do so well is that they are bringing they are also importing a whole set of strategies and observations and importing their broadened base from their previous world and that gives them another a secondary advantage over those who are have stayed in one world the entire time not only that but they're much better at optimizing their match quality at that point because they know a lot more about themselves they've learned about a lot about themselves right so I sort of take a swipe you know in the book where like Mark Zuckerberg famously said young people are just smarter so he just wants to hire young people and then there was just some new research actually from MIT and the Census Bureau showing that like a start-up founder at the age of founding not when a company becomes successful of you know like home run startups the average age is like over 45 and a 50 year old is way more likely to succeed than like a 30 year old and these are people who have done a bunch of stuff learn something have a new idea and found their way to that place where they uniquely can succeed and if there's a reason why that's more likely to happen to 50 year olds then then 30 year olds but we're running out time but I won't ask you since you're like some of the impetus for my book started when we had this debate five years ago and you're one of the few people who's read it and you're incredibly open-minded and I'm kind of curious like because you're excellent at like updating your mental models in my opinion and totally open about and I'm sort of curious if your thoughts sort of about the 10,000 hour rule and specialization have changed over those since we had this discussion 5 you have to go you've totally convinced me I I would I always I am but you convinced me years ago I think I made that error that I described that I conflated two separate things large amount of practice being necessary which i think is true but I in back of my mind thought that meant specialization which I now realize is false so you made me smarter and everyone who reads David's extraordinary book range coming up may 28 will get smarter thank you guaranteed [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music]

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Published: Sat Mar 02 2019