Why Late Bloomers Win: David Epstein | Rich Roll Podcast

[Music] and looking forward to this for a while so thank you for coming on the show I appreciate it now the pleasures pleasures all mine and congrats on this book I mean this is quite an accomplishment and it's no surprise that it's resonating with so many people right now I appreciate that very different project for me so I was nervous about the reception yeah it is it seems like it isn't it isn't I mean it in many ways it's an extrapolation of your previous book absolutely absolutely I mean it right if you look at like the afterword of the last book which I sort of came out of a debate with Malcolm Gladwell I was writing for that sort of an expanded version of that basically becomes the intro yeah it sets the stage for every unit you explore in this book and perhaps that's a good launching off point here to kind of contextualise what we're gonna talk about like and it's such a great story I mean you got to tell the Malcolm Gladwell debate story okay so many times men but it isn't I mean and these are so after the publication my first book this morning we were invited to the MIT Sloan Sports analytics conference which is co-founded by the general manager of the Rockets and we were invited there to debate like 10,000 hours versus the sports team even though we had you know middle ground but that that's I was set up and I'd never met him before right and and he was too busy to like participate in any of the pre event calls so I had like no idea what any super clever and so like I didn't want to get steamrolled you know you're gonna double down on getting ready for this right right and so in prepping I sort of tried to anticipate the things that that he might argue and knew that he would have to argue for early specialization in in deliberate practice and so I said okay well I'm the science writer and Sports Illustrated let me go look at what the literature says if it's compatible with that my hypothesis can you sell across most sports athletes going to become elite have this sampling period where they try a variety of things they gain he's sort of broader skills importantly they learn about their own interests and abilities and delay specializing until later than their peers and so you know on stage is sort of talked about that and we sort of contrasted as the Roger vs. tiger model because Roger Federer played a bunch of different sports and Tiger was early specialization and after we came off the stage he sort of said you know what you got me on was that like Roger verse Tiger thing and we ended up becoming running buddy you see invites me the next day to go do some intervals with him and he was like a Canadian provincial champ in the 1500 meters he's quietly this extraordinary runner yeah and he's like the biggest sand bagger in the world I talked to him recently and he's like I'm like you're running again to be having a knee problem and he says I'm at the point where I can run for a minute without pain so I'm just doing a minute and then I see like a week later pictures on Twitter of him doing intervals like at a trap and I'm like you say he's such a yes got to be ready for the workout what's it like to go running with him it's great I mean it's he's he if anything I would say he needs to learn how to back off sometimes like when he gets the intervals he hits them really hard and and sometimes like all the way up to his races a little bit so huh so my like sort of contribution to his training was like you're 12 days out in your big race like don't sweat session yeah yeah but but it's great it's a lot of fun and then so then we would talk about this stuff on our own time and to my delight you know I sort of found it he didn't view our ideas as being like this zero-sum competition but more like let's talk about it and learn stuff from each other and that was like a great kind of model for me it's really cool and what I appreciate about that is his malleability like his openness to new ideas and his willingness to say yeah I was a little bit maybe not entirely wrong but there are certain things that David brought up that I was wrong about and I will happily admit that and do so in a blur for your humor you look you know yeah I love that that blur but and so in we were invited back to the Sloan Sports animal news conference in March and you know I'm the this one's also on YouTube and at the end of the video he says like I now feel that I conflated two ideas the the fact that it takes a lot of practice to become good in something with the idea that that implies that to be good at X you should do only X from as early as possible I thought that was like a great way to update the mental model that's cool I was thinking about this earlier today and it occurred to me that on some level it seems that it depends on how you define that 10,000 hours it's like how how broad is the scope of the work right like if you if you're very specific about that yes your argument prevails but if you take a broader view of what it means to put in that 10,000 hours and what those disciplines entail then your ideas kind of dovetail into each other totally and in many ways I mean you're getting at the heart of some of what I was wrestling with here right because as I've looked sort of when I started interacting with the so-called 10,000 hours literature the deliberate practice framework for my last book he would see things that said you know that denied that right that even doing waits for a golfer didn't count as deliberate practice because it wasn't golf or trying these other things didn't matter and that there was no kind of natural proclivities for things you should just pick something for someone and just put them on that path and over time I think that definition of deliberate practice has gotten it's sort of broadened sometimes to such a degree that it looks like it's only what in retrospect did cause someone to improve at which point you don't have so much of a scientific hypothesis but but if if my contribution would be broadening that definition the way people think about it I think that'd be a great contribution right if you look at the work that goes into you putting a book like this together as I've heard you say like you read you know thousands of these studies and many of which seem irrelevant or don't you know directly inform what ends up on the page but yeah that's part of the 10,000 hours right and and maybe that study that you dismissed or wasn't appropriate for this book has a second life and something else that you write you know ten years later totally and and also in I mean that's part of this like I used to kind of chastise myself for being inefficient because I would end up reading so much stuff that didn't you know I'd go down some rabbit hole and come up a week later and say how did I ever think I was gonna write about that but now I realize that that sort of searching requires some inefficiency and that's sort of how I find the things and connect all these things and sort of know the arguments that they will be out there too because I'm aware of the literature even that I didn't put in the book based right on some level you're a product of your thesis in the book like you're you're somebody who is an example of a generalist who found their way by dabbling in many different things and sampling to use your language how much of that is in the back of your mind when you're writing this book like I'm gonna self justified my own trajectory ya know it's I mean I think to some degree both of like my first book was my own questions about like the interplay of nature and nurture from being an athlete and from being a spectator right and in this in this case I didn't initially like realize that much that I was sort of kind of investigating my own path a little bit because the spark came from this debate with Gladwell and his interactions I had with the Pat Tillman Foundation and so those career changers there and sort of as it went along as particularly when I got to this thing called the Dark Horse project where I was interviewing the researchers and they're like by the way would you like to become a subject because like obviously you know you're just like the people were studying these sort of career zig zag errs so sort of like partway through when I kind of realized like this feels so relevant and I don't know how much of that was sort of implicitly in my mind but that's when it became sort of explicit when I came to that the dark or those researchers who study how people find match quality you know the degree of fit between what they do and who they are mm-hmm yeah I mean you're somebody who you studied environmental science and astronomy yeah yeah Columbia yeah which is a you know a bizarre choice for somebody who ends up writing for Sports Illustrated yes yes well I've gotten like almost I would say like linearly less tied to long term goals I've gotten older like when I was a teenager I was sure I was gonna go to the Air Force Academy and be a test pilot and be an astronaut and of course I didn't do any of those things and I end up studying you know geology and environmental science and astronomy and I was living in a tent in the Arctic when I decided for sure I was gonna try to become a writer and at a time I only felt sort of behind I didn't realize that when I entered Sports Illustrated as a temp fact checker like a number of years behind people at the same level or even at higher levels but it turned out that this my very ordinary science skills taken from this area became suddenly extraordinary at Sports Illustrated we're kind of merging those I didn't have to be in zero-sum competition with everyone waiting in line to be like the next NFL beat reporter I can just do my own thing and compete against myself and if I could do that well enough like I could have a role that's so interesting and and your athletic career trajectory also informs the same idea yeah I very much had a sampling period football basketball baseball you know the people that did watch this on video though they won't be surprised that I didn't make the NBA you know because I'm a small guy but I started to realize you know I actually did I got injured once and decided to run to like stay in shape for other sports mm-hmm and kind of like started getting addicted to it you know you start to feel that improvement I wasn't even I wasn't good I was bad but I was improving and so I decided I just keep one one to keep doing that I started in college as a walk-on was like literally the worst person on the team I got paired with a guy who was when we were both juniors in high school he was 20 seconds faster and I wasn't 800 meter right like that's like embarrassing if you saw those yeah yeah you're you're not exaggerating I mean in the book you're like no I was literally the slowest like the coaches felt sorry for you yeah yeah that's why yeah coach gave a pep talk one story I was kind of like man he used to be painful to watch it and like I guess that's cool but I'm I was sort of like that that was a weird way to give a pep talk but but it so it it led to this stuff like you know I won the award of Columbia for the athlete who achieved significant athletic success in the face of unusual challenge and difficult my challenge and difficulty just being that I was terrible yeah Hurst right but the good thing about being a walk-on was you know I was paired with this guy who was already like a Canadian national level runner for training and he already had all these expectations and he had to score for the team and all this sort of stuff whereas I I nobody cared what I was doing or if I was scoring so for the first two years I could just blow you know my results just trying to find a type of training that worked for me uh-huh and then when I hit that I like took off like rocket fuel right and right flew by him and like he never beat me again I ended as a university record holder and all these things but I think it was a blessing in disguise that I got to have those first two years to experiment with myself because nobody cared uh-huh if I how I contribute it right right all right yeah I mean it's impossible for me to read your book and not reflect on you know the choices that I've made throughout my life and and my own you know kind of strange career trajectory and I'm somebody who you live in DC right like I grew up in DC was terrible at all sports found my way to swimming and it was the one thing that I felt like I had some some low level of innate talent and I just gravitated towards that and very quickly specialized in in this and just kind of doubled down and that was my lane this is an era in which on some level we I think the philosophy at the time at least with respect to this sport was kind of inherited from you know Soviet you know camp systems in terms of like how to develop an athlete and there was a lot of pressure at a young age to start doing double workouts and you know I was a little bit later to that and some of my peers but at 15 you know I was doing three or four hours of training every single day six days a week and I'm a successful product of that system but also I now in retrospect looking back realize like how limiting it was in terms of my overall development not just as an athlete but as a human being because it crowded out any space or time to really explore other things yeah and I mean at least what I've incorrect me if I'm wrong what I've read about you yet a little bit of exploration before that where you tried these other sports and realize they weren't a good right and you haven't found something right so you had some sampling period early a little bit right that it's nothing to know immediately that I was bad right but that's important right you can't Intuit that stuff like you have to try it and reflect on it and and then it seems to me like you sort of continued that that sense of a sampling period like later in life I think the things that you've ended up doing is same for me my most important projects are never things that I saw coming in fact when I was listening to maybe like a year ago a podcast you and Julie put up from one of your retreats it seemed like almost all the questions people were asking you were how do I figure out what I should be doing like some form of how do I figure out what I should be doing or how do I know and so you know I think that that sampling period that you can be limited in a way that like precludes you from finding your match quality right like one of the quotes I loved in the in the book that stuck with me because I don't know what I'm going to do next right but I'm not as like agitated about that as I used to be was from this woman Herminia Ibarra who studies how people make successful career changes and she said we learned who we are in practice not in theory right and what she means by that is she's you know marshaled all this psychology research to show that we're not as good as we think at just like introspecting and understanding what will make us feel fulfilled what we're good at what we're interested in we actually have to try things then reflect on it in like a very you know deep way if you can't like actually take some real time for reflection then keep zigzagging right there's so much code sort of social and cultural pressure that pushes up against that though for sure we have all these you know judgments about what it means to walk away from something or to quit something yeah and it impedes our ability to sample on that level yeah no definitely and I think that's why one of the things that really again resonated with me about Herminia Barros work was she says you know we think of we think you know you you're pressured not to change and you develop a new interest a lot of you're kind of confidants say like you know don't get off-track don't get behind and it's a really hard thing to do because it requires changing your identity especially if you're really you know what you've done is a big part of yourself you don't change your identity overnight you have to sort of start with these little keyhole experiments until something that you think was just an interest becomes like a real passion or a vocation right yeah you talk about the sunk cost mentality yeah right where it's like I can't walk away from this like I experience that with being a lawyer it's like I went to law school I incurred law school loans my parents helped me out like I can't walk away from this I've invested way too much in this what would that mean to my identity and all the other people that supported me and everything that went into this yeah no and the Sun cost is so strong right there was one in Inventor in range named Jerry Seth who became extremely successful and what I thought was really interesting was she said when she started her her master's program she didn't like she realized like after a year she didn't like what she was studying like some area of Materials Science and so she wanted to switch and she was told like don't switch you'll get behind right she's like one year into a 50 year working life and they're saying don't switch she'll get behind then she does her PhD decides she's not really into that either decides to switch when she goes into professional world and again they're like this is you know disaster for you but you're a dilettante right she goes to 3m and realizes that that sort of sense of insecurity forces her to like interview tons of her colleagues she learns what they all do and suddenly she knows all this like adjacent stuff to what she does and can assemble these teams of people who become incredibly productive and she becomes one of their most decorated scientists ever but if she had listened you know about being one year behind and how long is your so I think that the trade-off for finding a better match with like a little bit of experiment in time there's like almost you know no question yeah well we live in a in interesting times where there's this you know where it seems like across the board and all disciplines everything is becoming more and more specialized yeah you don't go to medical school to just become a doctor you have to find some very you know detailed niche right and you're you know education and experience is very structured and limited to that one thing just because you went to medical school if you're whether you're an anesthesiologist or you know you're working in a lab or whatever like you're the expansiveness of what you understand and study and experience on a day to day basis is very limited and it's almost like if you look at cell biology like we started as single-cell organisms and become increasingly more and more complex and if you look at planet Earth we start with you know hunter-gatherer societies and then villages and these cities that when you're flying on an airplane you look down on them look like biological organisms where every tiny human being plays one very discrete specialized part in that and your book is really a call to it's almost like this this call to go back to the way that we were in in not just a renaissance way but even all the way back to the beginning where man had to learn lots of things in order to just simply survive and now we've kind of lost our connection with that and survival means being very good at one very limited thing and yet now we're in a time where with AI and the you know tech innovations that we're seeing that we really need to be more generalized in our approach to our lives yeah I mean you hit on a number of I think like deeply profound things there so to go to sort of the first one in medicine right we're now it's super specialized and that specialization has been inevitable and beneficial in some ways but like a cardiologist used to be specialized now to be specialized a cardiologist has to work at let's say on only cardiac valves you know the little floppy doors that let blood in and out of the heart and that specialization has forced those practitioners to use what's called surrogate markers where instead of looking at the body the organism right they treat one tiny thing that they assume is a proxy for the outcome that they want and so that cardiologist might do something to alter the cardiac valve but what you really care about is if people die from a heart attack or stroke at different rates right and it turns out in many cases we treat these little surrogate markers and then when you zoom out and look at what people actually care about it's made no difference right they a die of heart attack and stroke at the same rate with a different cardiac valve or with lower blood pressure numbers or whatever and so this sort of reductionism that we've applied to the body which is clearly a system right you mentioned single cells we know a lot about how cells work and yet like we're not even close to being able to brick the type of poetry that a person who's just made up of cells will right and so I think sort of a lack of recognition of how important the system the emergent properties of the system are has led to these sort of perverse effects right in medicine where so it's like and once one of the studies I cite in has now just been replicated where if you were checked in for certain cardiac problems into a hospital you're less likely to die if it's during the dates of a national cardiology conference that it's so amazing and counterintuitive right and Mollica when all the all the cardiologists are at the conference that's when you want to go in for your procedure right and you're well and you're less you're less likely to you actually get some of the procedures that have low evidence levels right that the most specialized so the specialized surgeons do have fewer complications when they do a procedure but they also do the procedures in many many cases when they're not helpful basically and you know to accredit one of the cardiologists a cardiologist wrote an editorial about that study saying my colleagues now used to joke that this conference would be like the safest way to have safest place to have a heart problem in the world and this has really turned that on its head and we need to like do some inflection yeah the analogous example is that of the airline crews that when they're when they're new and haven't worked together that's when you're right for the bad things to happen yeah yeah so it was like some 77% of commercial air problems occur on a cruise first day of working together and and mostly on their first flight right because if things go as planned there's very well known and appropriately specialized roles for a flight crew the problem is when their training is to sort of repetitive basically which I would say in some ways fits like one of the original definitions of normal practice they lose the ability to improvise and they will stick to those those practices that they've learned that it become automatic even when to like an outside observer who doesn't even know anything it becomes like ridiculous to drive it yeah you become very rigid in your processes and and thinking patterns yeah yeah and there's this one of the sort of a summary one of the the researchers in range I interviewed sort of summarized a body of work for me about problem-solving in a way that I thought was very eloquent she said basically amounts to breath of training predicts breath of transfer transfer being your ability to take your skills and knowledge and apply them to a new problem that you haven't quite seen so or something unexpected happens and breath of training is the diversity of the problem types that you face in training will predict your ability to do that and if if you're facing sort of a narrow range of problem types then you'll learn what's called using procedures knowledge where you learn how to execute something really well if you're facing this incredible diversity you learn this more making connections knowledge where you're learning how to match a strategy to a type of problem and that's the kind of knowledge you need when it comes to improvising right one of the really interesting things that you explore is this difference between kind and wicked environments which kind of informs the the federer you know woods example that opens the book so explain that yeah so so these are terms coined by the psychologist Robin Hogarth in a kind learning environments one of the reasons I use golf is it's an example of like the epitome of a kind learning environment which is all the informations available next steps are clear goals are clear patterns repeat rules never change and when you do something you get automatic feedback that is both immediate and fully accurate so in kind learning environments basically by doing something and being cognitively engaged you get better just with experience on the other end of the spectrum are wicked learning environments where all the information may not be clear human behaviors often involved people may not be waiting for each other take turns the next steps may not be clear rules may change patterns may not repeat you may or may not get feedback it may not be automatic may be delayed it may be inaccurate in some cases it may even teach you the wrong lesson so one of Hogarth's examples of a very wicked learning environment was this New York City physician who would palpate patients tongues like feel around their tongue with his hands uh-huh and by doing that he could predict weeks before they showed a single symptom that they would develop typhoid like over and over and he became incredibly prominent for doing this and as one of his colleagues later observed using only his hands he was a more productive carrier of typhoid than even typhoid mary so he was transferring it to these patients tongue right his hands and so his accurate predictions were reinforcing the exact wrong lesson and so that's that's a really wicked learning environment when the feedback enforces the wrong lesson we're not you know most of us aren't in that wicked of an environment either but the work that we do is kind of increasingly the kind world stuff can be is what AI is taking over and right the wicked world where we can't count on repetitive patterns is where most of us are are operating or will be forced out yeah where the variables are innumerable and the dynamic is always shifting and you can't you just can't control the environment in the way that you can for example with a golf swing yeah right yeah and I mean Hogarth's oh-ho God said it pretty early in the book so tennis is more dynamic than golf right the patterns change a little bit the game speeds up as you get to higher levels these things like that but even that I sort of had to move on from because Oakheart specifically talks about tennis which was totally surprised me but he says you know most of us are actually in the work that's most important for us playing Martian tennis where you see people doing stuff but nobody's told you the rules it's up to you to deduce them and they could change any time without notice yeah that's interesting coaching is it is a big part of this as well like you if you have in sports it's very it's very binary right like there's an athlete and there's a coach and the coach is always there to provide feedback so adjustments are always being made but then we go out into the world and do whatever we do and we're not in a situation or an environment where we're getting that kind of constant feedback so that we can make those kinds of adjustments so talk a little bit about how that plays out in your thesis yeah and even if we do have those coaches most of us aren't in that sort of zero-sum sports world right so one of the things I realized after my first book after I started to my surprise getting invited to like these sort of more general performance conferences not just sports was that sometimes I felt we were making poor extrapolations from sports in certain ways because sports are zero-sum and they're very easily quantifiable and the feedback is eard it easier to give in a lot of ways or to perceive in many cases just automatic to what you're doing in the wider world that's not necessarily the case right so even having a coach which i think is valuable you you know you're not gonna be able to expect perfect feedback but I do think it can help a lot so one of the I'm like I'm a new parent for example and I've been getting a lot of questions I wasn't like trying to write for parents so much this is a parenting book in many ways that's something I definitely want to talk to you about so I'm starting to realize but yeah and so people are like asking me for parenting advice I'm like well with my four months of experience let me tell you how it goes and and so what I've sort of started to think of my role as like combining the the things from this book where say okay you learned who you are in practice not in theory you have to search for your match quality zigzag and and then you end up still in kind of a wicked world there's something I mentioned sort of briefly called talent based branching that the army started using when they were having problems with her tension and they had this strict sort of upper out structure for people's careers for their high potential future officers and that wasn't really working with retention and it started not working primarily like since like the 90s basically and so they first they throw money at people and the people are gonna stay took it people are gonna leave left anyway right half a billion dollars of taxpayer money down the drain so they start other programs like one called talent based branching where they say okay instead of saying here's your career track go up or out they say we're gonna pair you with a coach here are some possible career tracks try one the coach will help you reflect on how that fits your interests and talents what else is available then try another and another and another and you'll keep sort of triangulating what's a good fit for you and that turned out to be a great retention strategy for them I think because match quality is so important to us that even more than money getting someone in doing something that that emphasizes their talents and their interest is so important so I view my role as a parent it's kind of you know other than keeping them alive and all that stuff if the details is as like that coach in the talent brace processor I say can i facilitate a lot of opportunities for you to try and then sort of help you reflect because you have to do that proactively that reflection that doesn't just happen so it's like a prime trait of so-called self regulatory learners who end up learning a lot about themselves you have to actually like proactively do it and then help him reflect on those experiences so he takes the maximum amount of signal and learning from each one of the experiences so that's sort of how I conceived my role yeah I mean you as a parent of four kids like it's always been it's not because I've read a parenting book it just seemed it just seemed obvious to me that the the job is to expose them to as many things as possible and then pay close attention to what they gravitate towards what they naturally seem to be inclined to do and then fill the gap like show up and support that and then be neutral like if they decide I don't want to do that anymore like that's okay you know I grew up in an environment where where you know grit and perseverance took center stage and it was like no you stay in it and as successful as you know that made me in certain respects like I said earlier it limited me and so I my whole thing is like I'm not emotionally attached right like let's just pay attention do this do this do this and and just notice and be okay with whatever the kid decides they want to do or don't want to do yeah I mean but that feels like it's not nearly as clean advice as like pick the thing for them right right and I do think it's important to note that we are like the Tiger Woods stories probably the most impactful development story you know in modern writing and the Mozart is also write a big one but I think as I was sort of looking into those I think we're telling them a little bit wrong like Tiger has said my father never asked me to play golf never it was the child's interest in matters not the father's yeah his dad didn't have to say that right because there's actions spoke louder than whatever came out of his mouth exactly and I looked back at some of like Mozart's letter and there's I found these accounts where musicians came over and visited his house when he was a kid and Mozart wants to play with them he wants to play violin second violin and his father says like you've not taken any lessons go away you can't play and he starts crying and so one of the other musicians goes in another room with him and says I'll play with him so he stops crying and here second violin part coming from the other room and they come in and watch and little Wolfgang's playing and that the letter says his translated letter says little wolfgang was so emboldened by our applause to insist that he could also play the first violin and so then he goes and play and then that's when his father starts responding to this and creating you know all these opportunities so I don't think we have to be worried about missing Tiger and Mozart as rare as those people are I think you still have a better chance if you expose them to a bunch of stuff and maybe one of those things catches fire but they're not like father manufactured they were facilitated once they showed this intense an unusual interest mm-hmm yeah I mean the other thing with that approach I mean every parent wants to think that their kid is a genius there's you know Mozart or Tiger or whatnot I mean these things are so rare and what happens more often than not is even in the instance of great talent you end up with a Todd Marinovich or you know an Andre Agassi even in the most successful test case there are all these psychological problems that manifest later in life and we've seen this with Tiger you know even in the best example being Tiger he has this crisis you know at this stage in his life because you know I mean just as an armchair psychologist looking at that it's like he has all he's not he has a childhood trauma he's got all these unresolved issues and he's been in this very narrow lane for so long he hasn't fully developed as a human being and at some point you know the explosion becomes inevitable yeah yeah and so I think maybe he had to do some of that that growing that you would normally hope to do a little bit earlier you know under a public stage yeah so he's done it and now he's come back but you know you see with Michael Phelps as well you know the same thing and the great sort of comeback but as a whole human being because that pause had to occur in order for the maturation to take place yeah and I think that's important thing to keep in mind like we our whole humming whole human beings right and and we know even if we just restricted to athleticism we know like the way to develop the best ten-year-old athlete in most sports is not the same as the way to develop the best 20 year old athlete and I think that's sort of a decent analogy for the whole person which is the way to to optimize the things the goals that are being set for kids is not the same ways to optimize their long-term development I mean that's really one of the underlying themes of the whole book whether it's like learning math sports or sort of developing interests is that the things that you can do to cause the apparent most rapid short-term success can sometimes undermine your right yeah that's that's really the core message of the whole thing yeah like do you want the immediate satisfaction of rapid you know progress early in life or are you looking to set someone up for long term success yeah and I have to say I found that deeply very deeply counterintuitive right because I was very like achievement oriented when I was young too so it was definitely something I sort of wrestled with convincing my yeah well the best example my favorite example in the book is van Gogh I mean it just goes on and on and on with all the things that this guy was trying to do before he kind of found his thing yeah and talk about grit right he had this increase top that he goes on the people around him comment on his work ethic so he's first this great student at a boarding school he doesn't like living away from home so he drops out and he's an art dealer and he writes his uncle had this fabulously successful art dealership and gives him a job he writes his parent says I'll never have to look for work again you know pretty soon he has disagreements with his boss he gets laid off then he goes to be a teacher kind of likes that but doesn't totally work out decides to be a pastor following father's footsteps he makes a hat with lights on it so he can stay up later like with candles and then read later than his peers and get up earlier than them and he copies whole texts by hand and he keeps saying like you know my advantage will be my work ethic but like Latin and Greek aren't coming easily to him and he leaves that and he keeps bouncing around becomes a bookseller and there his his colleagues left records where of his endurance again where when the bookstore flooded he like saved a lot of the store by just carrying arm loads of books by hand hours and hours and he bounces between being a then a pastor then he kind of fails out of that and a catechist was just kind of itinerant unlicensed feature in the coal country you know this area where the workers are so downtrodden they refer to ground level is up there in hell above the mine and he flames out at pretty much everything he's living in the coal country has no possessions no achievements he's coming up you know and being 30 years old and decides to like try to document the life around him buys a book called the guide to the ABCs of Troy and start sort of trying to draw the life around him isn't that good at first but sort of likes it and realizes when he turns his gaze on nature he's got something there mm-hmm sort of tries to learn watercolors doesn't work the guy listed on his Wikipedia page for his education is like a cousin that he spent three weeks trying to study watercolors with before the cousin was like you don't have a delicate enough hand and he's been told early in life that he wasn't a good drawer I didn't do it well even I mean early on when he was 33 I think he got he tried to take a formal course because his brother basically said like you have to try some real training I'm not gonna send you money anymore uh-huh and he finishes last in the class competition and and is told to go down to a class with ten year olds right but he keeps bouncing between these experiments and one day he takes some oil paints out to a beach and a storm it's getting sandblasted he has to run in and out of cover and slap paint on this first oil painting slap paint on the canvas and that sort of riddim of this crippling perfectionism where he's going really slow and he and the next letter to his brother says painting has turned out to be easier than I expected uh-huh and then he continues to pinball from one experiment to another until he sort of merges all those experiments in the last two years of his life and just you know becomes disruption on a massive scale anyway changes what artists do from thence forth it's like the bridge between from realism to a to modern art and you know he uh so the interesting kind of case study of grit or not because he would he worked so hard at everything he did but then he would also end up like quitting these things until he found a fit for himself uh-huh almost the the perfect combination of grit and the ability to let go yeah yes I think you know in range I talk a little bit about this economist who sort of modeled the way to find your match quality in the world and it's very much like van Gogh so I sort of described him as this match quality searching algorithm where you dive into something and try to get as much signal as you can and so van Gogh would do that because he'd dive into everything so wholeheartedly which meant it was all and difficult for him but he would get a very quick signal about if it fit him and then you keep zigzagging until you until you find sort of the thing where you can uniquely feel fulfilled so some some aspect of what you write about is is an unraveling of Angela Duckworth work with grit I mean you recognized the importance of it but also you kind of unravel her thesis a little bit and you know her book has been so fundamental and instrumental in informing you know professional lives and it's so heralded so explain a little bit about where where you kind of fall on grit yeah and again I say evaluate some of my critique of grid in the book is largely to hurt her colleagues credit taken from their papers which just kind of did not get into the public right you're you're drawing different conclusions from the same work yeah that that book came from yeah and and based on some of the stuff in their papers but so the most famous study is of West Point cadets US Military Academy cadets going through it's called beast barracks this rigorous six-week orientation and grit was found to be a better predictor the grit survey 12 questions survey half the points are awarded for resilience and half for consistency of interests and grit turned out to be a better predictor than whole candidate score which is these more traditional measures test scores athleticism all this stuff and most cadets make it through beast anyway and so that's good thing to know that that crit is important for that but there are a couple issues to keep in mind one is you have what statisticians call severe restriction of range so basically these cadets were selected for their whole candidate score and when you do that when you select people for something in that way you basically exaggerate the effect of other variables so it'd be like if I study what causes basketball skill and do my study with only centers in the NBA and find well only practice got them to the NBA not practice plus being seven feet tall because I've selected a group that's already pre-screened for height so there's this restriction of range issue which duckworth in her paper says this this pre selection means that we can't really extrapolate this to groups outside of this study which is of course exactly what has happened and not only that but but like life is not a six-week orientation right and so you've pre-selected people for a very specific short-term goal they're already in the finals of the National Spelling Bee they're already in West Point and so if you open that time line a little bit and look at those cadets down the line since the 1990s about half of those very gritty cadets who get through West Point who get through Beiste and get through West Point have quitting the army almost on the day that they are allowed and that's a more modern phenomenon and so you know some officials in the Army felt that this was the army had develop when it developed a great problem overnight like one high-ranking official who'd suggested defunding West Point because he was a quote an institution that taught its cadets to get out of the army which obviously is not the case but what turned out was actually the case is that the army kept this upper out work structure which worked in a more industrialized world where where organizations were highly specialized and you faced repetitive challenges over and over and over and so there are huge barriers to lateral movement but as the knowledge economy allowed lateral movement and put a priority on people with knowledge creation skills and problem solve these broader skills and you can have lateral movements and by the way from age 18 to your late 20s is the fastest time of personality change in your life so the idea that people these cadets were developing new interest shouldn't be a surprise and so they started leaving because they didn't have control over trying to find a good fit for themselves in the army so they left and went outside and that's why the army started these other programs to give the highest potential officers more autonomy over their career trajectory because they realize they didn't develop a grid problem overnight they developed a match quality problem overnight and by the way the day before this book came out Angela Duckworth weekly newsletter was called summaries for sampling you know maybe this is a coincidence maybe it isn't oh wow but summers for sampling where she says like this is when kids should sample a bunch of stuff because of course you shouldn't be too gritty until you figure out what you should be doing and that's what I did in my career for a decade first and that's what everyone should do so whether or not it's a coincidence it's wonderful timing and I'm glad she she shared that yeah and in the example that you just gave it sort of dovetailed also with the rise of the Information Age and and you know more opportunities you know abounding for these people that made staying in the military less attractive yeah because there were greater opportunities outside of it exactly so this so so even though we perceive people as becoming more and more specialized in work actually the change to the knowledge economy opened up this lateral mobility where there are you know again when when we were in sort of a kinder learning environment we were facing the same challenges in the work world wasn't changing as quickly experience in a specific task was so important that it was a huge barrier to someone coming in from the side but now that's not the case and so obviously cadets on mass have sort of realized their opportunities and taken them yeah when I look at how that kind of sports world intersects with the business world and you know now these are these worlds are the things that you write about going back to this idea of coaching and feedback you know this is something that we get in sports it's very direct in the work environment not only do we have not have coaches that are providing that kind of feedback we're in environments where you're not necessarily encouraged to succeed in fact most you know people would prefer that you not succeed so you're after a meeting you're not told like hey do this next time it'll be better they're like well we're just gonna weed that guy out and I'm gonna step on top of him and and and move up the chain and so people are living out their careers really not connected to the results of their labor in a way that's most favorable for their upward mobility no I mean I think that's a that's a absolutely apt observation you know and again I think it's it's also one of the points where I sort of wanted to respond to some of sports as an analogy for the work world because we don't have to view the work world as zero-sum in that way in the way they're like you know a football game has to be zero-sum like if someone's gonna win someone else has to lose or if someone else gets a certain number of catches someone else is basically going to get fewer and I think that's sort of a problematic mindset in the work world but but you're totally right right let's talk about talent transfer a little bit this is the idea that when you are a generalist for a period of time that the way that we learn certain things can inform and apply to other skills so it's really about learning how to learn as much as it is about learning how to do a specific thing yeah yeah yeah definitely that ability to transfer and so to put that and this is one area where we're sports actually has been a more appropriate analogy in some ways so some countries like Australia and the UK when they were gonna host the Olympics they sort of looked at some of this science that said oh actually maybe we should let people shuffle themselves around and search for things and started these what they called talent transfer programs which essentially was in some ways kind of the anti 10,000 hours school of thought not in the sense that you don't need a lot of deliberate practice to be good but in the sense that here people who are older you know they're old enough that if they haven't made the national team we should probably say you know you should go do something else but just allowed them to try other sports and both countries got gold medalists out of those people who had done a bunch of other sports hadn't quite you know found their fit and but they had learned these sort of broader skills and actually the Australian Institute of Sport when they were doing that compiled this data that showed people who had played at least three invasion sports meaning like it's a real time you know not taking turns but you have to people are trying to get past you or balls trying to get by you those sorts of things will then more quickly pick up subsequent sport skills going forward so might be a little bit like you know growing up bilingual where I think a lot of the I was gonna write more about multilingualism but I couldn't convince myself that a lot of the popular science is actually correct but what did seem reasonable to me you talk was work that showed that people who grew up bilingual are better able to learn a third language even if it's like made up by the scientists in an experiment without being told the rules right and that's those are the skills that you really need so put in another context of maths are this one chapter it's more about like the classroom kind of learning there was just a study that came out that I didn't have it came out too recently for me to put it in range or I certainly would have because it gets to this issue called interleaving that's one of the learning techniques I talk about so in this study seventh grade math classrooms were randomly assigned two types of studying math some got they would have problem do block to practice problem type aaaa bbbbb ccccc the other would get never see the same problem twice always different uh-huh and that that mixed that interleaved that's called interleaving when you mix it up that group would be more frustrated you know they rate their learning as less they'll rate their teacher has worse and then come test time when both groups have to see problems they've never seen before that group obliterates the other group it was the effect size was on the order of taking a kid from the 50th to the 80th person right I'm being selective in what percentiles I choose because if it was higher when the move looking sounds dramatic but because what they're learning is not just how to execute procedures for a certain type of problem but how to match a type of thinking strategy to the structure of a prob right and that's the kind of transferable knowledge that that you learn if you're sort of a good generalist yeah creative problem-solving as opposed to just learning how to solve a specific problem in a specific context exactly and that's why one one frustrating experience I had in reporting range was when I was spending some time with woman named Deidre Kentner who is probably the world's expert in using analogies from like outside of our domain to help you problem-solve whatever you're facing and she came up with this this study to make a long story short where she was giving Northwestern students these types of problems and they had to essentially try to solve them by identifying like the deep structure of the problem and students could do pretty well in their specific major but most didn't do well outside of their major even if the structure of the problem was similar just our features but the students who did the best were these ones in this program called the integrated science program where they had no major they just had all the they were supposed to dabble in like all of the sciences and they did the best on this but then when I went around and asked other faculty about that program you know why not expand it they were like well cuz those kids get behind because they don't have a major I'm like here you have on your faculty yeah the will probably the world's expert in this type of problem-solving saying here are the students were equipping the best for doing it and her own peers are saying not good they're getting behind me I don't like that's the cultural and social pressure that's butting up against this right there's so much momentum behind the way that we've always done it totally and I get it I get it so like whether you're a youth sports coach so so for those faculty who are in a specific department right like departments are like a necessary evil of making the way we study the world comprehensible at some point you have to put the world back together again but if you're just in one department your incentive is to have those customers right you don't really care about the others or if you're a when I was living in Brooklyn up until not long ago there was a you seven travel soccer team that met nearby me like oh you seven yeah I don't think anybody thinks that six can't find good enough competition in a city of nine million people right that they have to travel it's like those kids are customers for someone all right and they need to keep them from the other sports right and if their incentive is only to win the six year olds whatever it is then they're just responding to their incentives because their incentive isn't to develop the best 20 or 30 or 40 year old right soccer is a really interesting test case example because it's such a massive participation sport in the United States and yet and on some level it's sort of a generalist think it prepares you to to play all different kinds of sports and be an athlete in a multivariate way and yet despite the massive numbers of young people that participate in this sport we don't seem to have the best system to generate the best teams that can compete at the highest level against you know European and South American teams I mean that's changing a little bit now but what how do you make sense of that yeah on the men's side on the women's side women are crushing it but and the women's side I mean I think is a testament to opportunities right if you go around the rest of the world like American women have much better opportunities in soccer in the rest of the world and it's and that shows so hopefully the American women won't crush it as well at some point in the future because other countries will have as many opportunities for women to play but I think and sometimes people say well in frit on the men's side our best athletes just are playing other sports and I don't accept that explanation because if you look at even the number of registered players we have it's like way more than the sayings that do way but yeah yeah it's crazy but what we don't really have but I think are starting to sort of develop in other ways is like the street soccer culture right if you go to Brazil the kids are playing futsal where they have the small ball stays on the ground it's kind of heavier one day they're playing on sand one day they're playing on cobblestones different shaped surface different number of people who are playing on a basketball court whatever so it's kind of a different game all the time and I think because I think the playing of multiple sports is much more proxy just for your general diversity of movement and problem-solving I don't think it matters that like you put on a basketball jersey instead of a soccer jersey and so they have that they grew up with that kind of like more general kind of problem solving and that of this more formal soccer playing at a lot of likely Americans have blown up a practice right and even even so after my first book when when I added the afterword and wrote about specialization I got a lot of feedback that was like you know saying that athletes who go on to become elite usually have this like less structured early beginning feedback from people saying like maybe your dumb American sports but not in not in football you know not in soccer and right on cue this was 2014 a study came out from Germany looking at the development of their amateur league players all the way up to their national team who'd just won the World Cup and showed that in fact the members went on to the national team played a lot less way less deliberate much more unstructured activity when they were kids dabbled in other sports not until they were 22 did they start can participate in more organized soccer than these high-level amateur players in France they started decades ago they just won the World Cup they started decades ago reforming their pipeline in a way where the French kid who's in their development pipeline probably plays half as many organized games as an American kid of the same age and they very the challenge they played these small sided games a different size pitch and one of the guys who helped design their system has a saying he said there's no remote control and what he meant is the coaches shouldn't try to micromanage the players you want this like organic problem solving in play and so they restricted the time when the coaches are even like allowed to talk during those those smaller number of games yeah well what I Intuit from that is it's it's a loser it's it's a cultural thing where it's just ingrained into the way people are living on a day to day basis it's not laden with the the structure and the pressures that often lead to burnout and making kids want to do something else right like they allow these young people to fall in love with it and that becomes like deeply rooted and I think that provides the foundation for longer-term success yeah no I totally agree and by the way our women some of our best women you know Alex Morgan and others did play variety of sports and didn't specialize until later but I completely agree so I think it's it's our approach in the u.s. has been with these like very specific development programs where what you're talking about and what I think is more important is this sort of broader call sure that the sport exists within and that's how you really develop a large number of these people who who can you know become creative players at the top level right a lot of what you talk about is kind of an antidote to the tiger mom philosophy and you even point out like what was her daughter's name was like Lulu Lulu was Mike like she quit by line at 13 right nobody remembers like part of the book though that's the whole thing though yeah right like if she quits at 13 then you've lost the game yeah nobody remembers that sorry Sam on page one of the book and so page one on the book was the start of her the excerpt of Battle Hymn of the tiger mother in The Wall Street Journal and it became the Wall Street Journal's most commented on article ever you know both very positive and very negative and on page one she says here are the secrets to raising serious typically successful kids and she assigns one of her kids violin you know and presides over like five hours of practice a day or whatever and then later in the book she says her daughter says to her you picked it not me and quit right and this is like in study of 1200 musicians the most common reason for quitting was the instrument the kid wanted to play as different than the one they are playing and and I gave her credit for being reflective about that she didn't have to put that in the book but nobody remembers that part that's interesting yeah I mean the the individual has to take ownership of this path and you know maybe the the parent can perform some kind of inception to make that happen but but but you know short of that when it's the there's you know the the tiger mom thing it's like this is about the parent not about the kid this is about the parent living vicariously through their child to succeed on a level that they couldn't or whatever gets projected onto that child and you know it's it's generally a recipe for disaster yeah and I think we've seen that now come out in these incredibly perverse ways right with like this college admissions right handles that happened where you're sort of like you know there's a level of okay I can understand how parent might do this because they don't want their kid to fall behind even if they're not thinking about you know what the kid might want to do like getting them ahead in something that the kid doesn't really like but that that College Admission scandal went to a a level where I'm saying the only thing the only way I can make sense of this is that like your kids are jewel that you're trying to show off because this makes I can't even figure out another context right ends a bet I think it's also indicative of of you know what I've heard described is like this this snowplow parent snowplow culture where you know parents feel like they just have to clear this path for their kid in order to succeed I don't think it's such a good idea you know it's it's it's it's running at cross-purposes with you know the kind of grit and the love of learning and the exploration and the spirit that we want to instill in our young people so like how do you look at like what's going on culturally with respect to parenting and how do I like find a better way yeah I mean I think again I think I think systems are kind of set up in I think a lot of our systems are sort of still have like the residuals of like the industrial era sort of because like our education system has a lot of the hallmarks of like Taylorism an industrial management science where it's like workers are gonna face repetitive tasks they need to have a certain level of certain types of skills and here's how we're gonna turn them out just like we do this stuff in industry it's amazing given all the science how little has changed in our educational systems true it's true and so there's a part there's a part in the book where I talk about how everyone thinks like education is getting worse right there like it was better in my day and actually it's not the case like if you look at like there's no question that students today have a better mastery of basic skills then then like their parents did but if you compare tests from a generation or two ago to test now the kids have to take it's like previously they could just memorize formulas now they're asked for these like much more difficult problem-solving tactics so it's not that school has gotten worse it's just that the challenge has changed so rapidly to prepare people for this more dynamic work world and and I think we should sort of embrace some experimentation within that and realize that like we should move a little bit of not that there aren't basic skills that everyone should learn but that maybe part of developing young people should also be facilitating some of that experimentation and helping them find the place where they fit instead of just like kind of putting everyone through that same conveyor belt so given everything that you've learned and studied if you were suddenly vested with overhauling our educational system you know maybe the high school level or the junior high school level like what would that look like like what would be the systems that you would put into place yeah I mean I think I would try to do some of like what Dedra Gantner said where I would sort of try to teach this types of mental models for attacking problems in different disciplines so it would take different in the science and the humanities in history and try to kind of have those connected in a more integrated system so that people diversify their mental models but I think I might be willing to experiment with stuff like because I think so much of what kids get in school is of so little used to so many of them and not not to say that again there aren't certain things they should learn but that I would almost be willing to like come up with you know have a year or something dedicated to experimenting and like randomize them to learn a little bit about different disciplines there were these I cut something from range but was looking at these studies of what's called career academies where kids who are probably not going to go to college get into these programs where they still have to learn the normal high school stuff but they also are sort of introduced to types of work in the world where you know some vocational training or internship or exposure and one of the interesting things about the career academies was those kids end up doing better even if they go totally away from the thing that they were getting that education in and I think it suggests one that they end up having these productive interactions with an adult in their life and also they get some signal about like what work is like and what's possible and if that's a thing they want to do or not so I think I would facilitate much more sort of of that kind of talent based branching where it's like let's expose you to some things and see like what feels like a fit and yeah of interestingness and and your you know and your abilities I'm encouraged by this kind of shift in perspectives about careers that we're seeing with Millennials and and and even the the generation beneath them in the sense that you know look the the idea that you're gonna join this corporation and be there for your lifetime has gone the way of the dodo that doesn't exist anymore and we're in this increasingly more and more freelance based economy where young people are interested less in security and more in experience and are more likely to kind of gravitate and move around and try all different kinds of things and work and travel and do this and and to me reading your book and understanding where you're coming from that seems to be an encouraging signal of people that are going to be more you know have all of these general experiences that are going to inform more well-rounded people who will be better at these kinds of problem-solving skills yeah I think also it allows you to make your career and the stuff you do more reflective of who you are right because even most very specialized people like they're doing that because it's an advantage it's not like necessarily they're like self-actualization but also I think like if you believe in any kind of market principles this is a market for human capital and the less friction we have the people trying these different things and cobbling together these different roles I think the more productive you make those people so it's like the phrase I'd like to keep in my head is when you get fit it looks like grit right grit I think there's you know some evidence that grit is a state not a trait meaning that it's not just an innate characteristic right like I was a college runner some of the people who were the grittiest people I've ever seen on the track were the biggest chickens I've ever seen in the classroom and vice versa and it has a lot to do with your context and then when you get someone in the right fit their behavior will look like grit right so if we can let people do a little bit of that triangulating I think we end up with more productive people yeah there's a weird thing where it seems like on paper that a high-performing athlete who understands the importance of you know diligence and focus and grit and perseverance and and knows how to work hard and you know achieve a goal that that would translate seamlessly into the workforce and that was not my experience trying to make that transition from athlete to professional and more often than not with high-performing athletes that I know they they experience this period of confusion and loss and they just can't translate this amazing skill set that they have into the workplace and you have some cool interesting thoughts about that but let's explore that for a moment ya know I think and you know I know a lot of retired pro athletes and that is absolutely the norm with very few exceptions like maybe some guys go into you know like support rod casting right away but those that don't I think right when you're just a civilian overnight right right that there's this like incredible period of of identity change that needs to happen and they do have skills that they can use right there are things that they can take that they can use but they there are also things like that they haven't developed and an identity that sort of they haven't fleshed out in those ways and so I think it can be like really traumatic you know there's a form of that that sort of partly prompted me to write the book not with athletes but with these people who had been given scholarships by the Pat Tillman foundation these were former military or some current military and military spouses who were given these scholarships to aid career changes essentially and one of my college training partners was a Tillman Scholar he was giving away scholarships I got invited to speak to a tiny group of them it was like 15 or 20 people and because my that my buddy thought that like this sort of talking about late specialization in sports would resonate with them because their career changing and I sort of said well I better like also put some non sports stuff in it you know because they're not athletes and that's sort of what led to the first research and looking in other domains and I sort of tacked that on to the end of the talk and they like every one of them like came up to me after and and you know we're saying like this is so good to hear a guy an ex-navy seal who was in grad school at Dartmouth and Harvard at the same time sent me this note saying later saying where we were so relieved to hear this like they all feel so behind and not only in their profession but also in this identity shift and they have these incredible experiences and these incredible you know leadership and problem solving and and determination skills but they've been made to feel so far behind right and so it was odd to me almost that it was like catharsis for them to hear that like you know these are good things that you've done like these will help you it's just but it's gonna take a period of transition because your identity doesn't change overnight interesting where does talent come into play here I mean this is something that you talked about in sports gene yeah like how do you how do you square talent with all these other ideas that you're juggling yeah and I mean I obviously having written my first book think that you know talent is an important thing and and I should say the proposal for my first book did not think that like I thought it was gonna be a 10,000 hours book and I was you know after I spent a year like looking in that literature can convinced otherwise but that that both talent and and environment are both very important but I think there are you know certain studies like outside of the sports world that I've followed over time where you can see that when people have like ability tilts where they're sort of better at certain things than others they can start to triangulate that over time and they become more satisfied and more productive when they get in a place that like them it tends to match their abilities that's not to say everyone has to like things that they're good at by any stretch of the imagination but obviously a lot of other things come with that positive feedback and these sorts of things and so I think we underestimate how important it is to try to find like where our talents might most fit all right part of those talents just being being voraciously interested in something and then you're gonna work really hard at it and if you don't believe in talent at all then you should do the 10,000 hours right because just pick something and like go crazy at it right you like we could randomly assign people right what they're doing but I don't think we can randomly assign people to what they're doing because of our different talents and interests and so I think it's incredibly important to find that place where you where you fit where you will display the characteristics of grit but some people are just voraciously hard or hardwired to be voraciously interesting interested in things and some people are not like is this a teachable thing like I guess if you have an amazing teacher that can like light a spark in you yeah one thing but there are certain people that just are expansive in their curiosity and others aren't ya know I mean some people just become polymaths right like in in in one chapter of range actually right about these studies of inventors where like there you can classify inventors by some of them are if you look at their patent history they're 450 different patent classes and of Technology and you can see some have drilled into like one or two areas some have spread their work across a huge number of areas so there's specialists in general and they both make important contributions then there are people who have done like not that many different classes and haven't gone that deep in one and they don't make very big contributions so they're like not all that interested anything and then they're the polymaths who either start in an area with some depth and then become really broad or start broad and zero in on an area of depth and those are the people that make like the biggest contributions right these who are sort of Polymathic and I don't think that's you know I think they're following their interests and they just have these sort of daily voracious interests yeah their their talent is their curiosity right totally totally and and I think that and again looking at that patent research the the impact of these broader people has been exacerbated since about the mid 80s again in the sort of as communication technology is allowed information to be disseminated more quickly and more thoroughly they can combine they can gather up things from all these different domains and and make combinations of knowledge you know so sometimes their patents will like have a dozen classes listed in like one thing that they're doing and so I think this is a particularly good area era for really curious people because so much information is available and you can combine things in way that the people who are more narrow can't do but if you're not that curious someone actually asked me recently an event was saying how do I broaden my mental models you know and get this kind of thinking and problem solving if I'm not like really that innately curious of a person and that's a really hard question you know but you can assign tasks you can say read books ya know I mean eventually you'll come across something that hopefully would light a spark in that person totally and also and it's all matter of degree right like I'm gonna continue kind of triangulating my interest in my whole life I don't think I'm gonna like get to a place where I'm finished you know I keep doing this and there are things involved in work that I love that parts that I don't love that I'm doing because I'm like this is a habit I need to get this worth done mm-hmm and so maybe if not being as curious is something that doesn't come as easily for some people you have a lot of options now audiobooks you know podcasts like you can do things that have a lower barrier of effort than they would have in the past and I think you know take advantage of that if that's if that's one of your weaknesses or things like you know Shane Parrish I don't know if you ever realized he's doing this we sort of realized we connected because we realized we're basically that kind of writing about the same thing yeah yeah yeah anyways and so you know so I was giving some feedback on the next volume of great mental models project and I think sort of part of what that project is is him saying look if you're not gonna be sort of as interested in the stuff the way I was I'm gonna kind of package it for you so that you can do it without as much work and so I think those things are available yeah well I mean look I'm an old guy yeah I I came up in a different era where you go to college and you take you know certain courses and you major in something and then you go to the Career Center and you look at these brochures for consulting companies and investment banks and you think well this is this is it you know and now with the internet you could listen to you know countless hours of podcasts and audiobooks and just you know on on the kind of theme that you explore of like exposing yourself to a lot of different things there's never been a better time to be able to do that and to do it for essentially for free that's right this whole universe of knowledge is available to everybody that has a smartphone yeah and again not not to like keep harping on her minibar --is work but it resonated with me and my own career path you know very much where you know we don't need to have this idea that like you hit on something it's like lightning necessarily that that may happen but all this stuff when she was looking at these people who made successful career transitions and found much more fulfilling work usually the spark came from they met someone at a dinner party or they read about something they didn't know about it was it was or the fringe of their network they connected with somebody wasn't like their inner circle because they knew about that stuff it was like chance exposure to something well there's the Girl Scouts woman is a great example of that yeah yeah and she I just saw her the other day as Frances Hesselbein who's just like a hundred or 102 now she's a hundred and three and a half hundred and three well and I'm still teaching at West Point and running an organization in Manhattan so she was she became a little bit of like a role model for me actually where she she had to drop out of junior college she's born in 1915 in Johnstown Pennsylvania and now to drop out a junior college because her father was passing away and she had to take care of the family got a job as like an assistant to an advertising executive those the only job she ever applied for and after that she sort of did odd jobs like helping her husband with photography studio and all these sorts of things she called her dad helping whatever was needed she would do it and in her 30s a woman in her community came and asked her like will you volunteer to lead a Girl Scout troop because the other leader left and she says no I don't know no no experience not a leader I only have a little boy don't know anything about girls and the woman finally tells her like well we're gonna have to disband these group of girls from modest families who meet in a church basement if you don't do it because everyone else has declined she's just fine I'll do six weeks and then find out find a real leader and during that time she sort of starts reading about the Girl Scouts realize they're founded eight years before women could vote you know and and that the leader told girls you can be a lawyer a doctor an aviatrix or a hot-air ballooning aviatrix yeah and Francis realized he remembered being in second grade and saying she want to be a pilot and people laughing at her so she ends up sticking with that troop til they graduate high school and basically she keeps picking up jobs in Girl Scouts where people where she keeps saying like I'll do this for a month or two you know and she keeps realizing every time she does it that she likes it or she's making a big impact they asked her to chair United Way campaign when a woman had never done that before still only two women have done that and the most recent one was like a year ago or something and so she does that and it's like Johnstown has the highest per-capita giving in the country that year and finally they wanted to be an executive director of a local Girl Scouts Council which is actually a professional job everything else has been volunteering this is in her mid-50s she said no no I'm a volunteer like I've never had a professional job and again they say well you know then this there's gonna be like the finances are all messed up there's gonna be like problems if you don't do it so should find six months you know I'll do it six months then get the book straightened out get a real leader and she gets totally addicted to it again right and one thing leads to another finally they were interviewing her to be the CEO of the Girl Scouts they're having this huge crisis where in the 60s like society's changing and Girl Scouts is like girls need information about sex and drugs and careers in math and science and Girl Scouts is stuck in like kind of home a commode you know and she says no no no I went on living in Pennsylvania my whole life I'm not going and the previous CEOs had been like you know the woman who founded the u.s. women's Coast Guard Reserve and was a university dean Francis was one of 355 local Girl Scout council leaders so she goes to New York doesn't want to take the job but her husband says you have to turn down in person and so he drives her to New York and she she's not nervous because she's not gonna take it she describes total transformation of of the operation get rid of the old handbook get a bunch of new ones that appeal of different ages to two girls of different backgrounds and you know get rid of the current management structure all this stuff and they invite her back as the CEO so this professional journey she started in her mid-50s she becomes the CEO basically saves the organization increases gets a hundred and thirty thousand new volunteers right people she's paying in sense of mission not in money it explodes the minority participation right she commissions all this messaging specifically for minority girls like what she tells one of her the artist is if if an indigenous girl and an ice floe in Alaska reopens this book she better see herself in a Girl Scout uniform and she's being told while doing this like don't like focus on the finance problems first and then diversity like I mean she says no diversity is the problem and so she goes all in on that and just like saves the organization the cookie business becomes a third of a billion dollars a year and every stop in her life like when I went to interview her and I say like you know what trains you for leadership she waves me off and goes like don't ask me that question I never knew I was being trained I was doing what was needed at the time and that I used her stories this example entity you know even after she thought she retired she didn't and now she's doing something else and working five days a week at 103 and a half and I used it as an example of this research that suggests that the people who find the most fulfilling careers have that orientation towards short-term planning where instead of saying here's I'm gonna be in 10 or 20 years like the commencement speech kind of thing they say here's why I'm right now here my interest in the you know skills and things I want to learn for Francis it was like what's an opportunity to serve and I'm gonna try this maybe you're from now I'll change cuz I will have learned something about myself and she just did that all the way through her whole career and is still doing that yeah I mean what I took from that is is is just her servant service mindedness like that was what what it was about for her and then she just she's getting dragged into all these opportunity like she's kicking and screaming to not do it and they keep saying no you need to do this and so she's reacting to her environment yeah her upward mobility is you know her resisting it almost yeah alway yeah she becomes you know Peter Drucker this famed management expert calls her the best CEO in America unlike and at the end of this and so she's become she won the National Medal of Freedom which is the highest civilian award that you can win but it was always like that she would sort of get pushed into it she would see an opportunity to serve because that was important to her and then would sort of get sucked in and realized like it really fit her but another of the lessons from me from that was like you can't just figure this out a priori I wish you could you actually have to try stuff sometimes to figure out like what works for you right I mean when you look it look you know retro actively back on the history of your trajectory in your career is this the result of some scheme that you white boarded and said this is what I want to be doing I I'm just like I know for myself like I would have I don't you know like I don't know how I got here I don't know you know I'm just sort of gravitating towards my interest now in a way that I didn't know how to do as a younger person and I'm curious you know as somebody who's looked at a number of successful people across a number of disciplines how many of those people are in a similar situation where you know like that like the Girl Scouts woman just you know found themselves in a place they never would have thought because they didn't have you know there's this pressure like you got to have what's your five-year plan what's your 10-year plan it's all scripted and you're on this path versus you know looking at the people that are super successful and saying no it's more like this it's messy its unpredictable you know someone were to say how do I get where you know to where you're you're at their answer is I have no idea right that's that's so interesting you know and that I love that like the 10-year plan the investor Paul Graham says in computer science we call that premature optimization because like you're setting the goal before you sort of know who you are but to that point like I can fit together all my pieces in retrospect but I couldn't yeah look backwards it like oh of course it all lined alright hey making the stars but so when I was at Sports Illustrated and you'd get you know asked a lot by younger aspiring sports writers like if I want to work at Sports Illustrated ESPN or whatever should i major in journalism or English and my first instinct was to say journalism right and my second instinct was to say English and my third instinct was say I studied geology in astronomy I have no idea right but even my instinct was to say like well obviously you should get a lead if you can yeah right but and that's so that feels like the right thing to do but but your to your question of how many of the people sort of do the Frances Hesselbein I mean I use her as the lead-in to this research called the Dark Horse project which is about how people find fulfilling work and it didn't start with the name the Dark Horse project the way it got that was these two researchers at Harvard were studying people who find fulfillment a lot of them were also you know materially successful but that wasn't but not all that wasn't necessarily requirement and they would all come in and say like well don't tell people to do what I did cuz I started on this other path you know I thought was gonna be a doctor or lawyer or whatever right and then I sort of zig zag and I like stopped a couple things and then I ended up with this like weird opportunity and so you know you shouldn't tell people to be like me and most of them describe themselves that way that's why they credit the Dark Horse project they all viewed themselves as having come out of know everyone's a dark horse right right yeah yeah the vast majority there was some like who were then here but a very small number yeah it wasn't much smaller and so how do you square that with this conventional wisdom that you know you can't score if you don't have a goal like you know we're all set it like everyone's everyone's this Dark Horse and yet they're telling everyone else to adhere to this paradigm yeah that actually isn't how they got there yeah yeah no and I think it's and some of the Dark Horse's did set you know medium or longer-term goals but it was like after this period of experimentation basically so it's not to say you can never set goals but they were much more oriented toward moving forward from like the opportunities right in front of them and and that's that's for me Ben for sure the way my most important projects have come from these you know some conversation I didn't expect or some interaction that I didn't really expect so now when people ask you you know what should I do to be a journalist yeah now now I you got to be honest now yeah no I mean I sort of try to tell them what my background was and I think there are many different ways to to get to good outcomes right there's many different possible paths as there are people but my suggestion would actually be to study something other than journalism right right find these other interests like you'll be able to do the journalism and you're gonna need stuff to write about and you'll learn a lot of the sort of boots-on-the-ground stuff like just through the practice and so I would encourage them to like have a little bit of that sampling period in college and study something else like that one of the match quality studies I loved was this economist who wanted to see he used the English and Scottish school systems as a comparison where they're very similar except for the English students have to specialize earlier and what he found was that those students where the Scottish students can special I can sample a little longer and we found the English students jump out to an income lead after college because they have more domain-specific skills but then the scouter students pick better fits because they get to sample and so they have faster growth rates so they quickly erase that income gap and then the English students start quitting their career tracks and much higher numbers even though they have huge disincentive from doing so because they've sunk more time in it and so I would kind of share stuff like that I think like share some of the evidence with people and say the one or two years you're gonna put into experimenting can pay big dividends and you're gonna be in journalism for a long time like having another model of how to think about things is really really useful right that that can really set you apart well also if you want to be a writer you have to live life yeah even if you're reporting on other things the best writers are the people who have rich life experiences from which to draw upon totally Tom Lake a writer who I really like said CNN now was that at Sports Illustrated I remember him once asking me how I got onto a certain story I wrote this story about Lance Mackey who won the Iditarod four times in a row and he had won he had done this like several times in a row had won like the two longest races both the Iditarod and another like a thousand mile race and I wrote this story about him and it was great I loved it you know as some of it ended up in the sports gene and it was just this wonderful experience and he was sort of like how in the world did you end up with this guy and I was like well after the Vancouver Olympics you know when you work really hard nobody keeps track of you @si for a couple weeks after the Olympics and so I was like so when dogsledding you know and like met someone in dog sledding and kind of start asking questions and they start telling me about this guy Lance Mackey and whatever and so I go up and he's like fine you can interview me as long as I you work in my dog yard while like we're interviewing so this was the hardest transcription I've ever had was barking and all this stuff in the but I remember Tom saying sort of like this a good reminder that the way to find interesting stories is to live an interesting life yeah there's no question about that when when you were describing the differences between the the Scottish in the English educational system I was curious if in the course of doing all this research you came across one country whose really figured out the model that that you think is going in the right direction like is there any country in terms of our educational system that is you know doing things that are in line with these ideas that you're exploring that's a good question I mean I think I think Finland is a good one but I also am always hesitant to draw too strong of comparisons between Finland and the US because there has been a lot of like we should do what Finland does but we have a lot of social complexities that they don't have and so I think it makes them easier to sort of implement some of these kinds of things like they're very oriented toward like nature education earlier in education toward like multilingualism and towards insects sort of much more holistic and you know they end up doing like phenomenally well on international tests and all those things but again they have some they it's a very small country you know that's very financially well-off and they don't have some of the challenges that we have on the sports front I think Norway there was just a great HBO real sports looking at Norway how they've basically like banned formal competition below the age of 12 and they heard about that exploded the Winter Olympics you like best performance ever I think in in limited cases there's like the way Japan teaches math where they do instead of this using procedures knowledge they if you go in they'll be like a blackboard that takes the whole wall of a room and they'll work on one problem the entire class and the kids have magnets with their name on it and they're asked like what's an approach to this problem and they come up to the board they put an approach on and the problems will incorporate like several different types of concepts that can be brought to bear and though their suggestion may be wrong but they get to put their name magnet on it and you follow it and you sort of take that on one course then another kids suggest something else and you follow all their different courses and the end of the class you have this one problem that's covered a whole blackboard and all your sort of false starts of attempting to solve it there's a word for this called bond show which is this a word for that type of blackboard writing in Japan that like tracks the intellectual journey of the class and they really impart that sort of that making connections knowledge where you have to connect concepts to try to solve a problem to such a degree that one of the researchers I talked to said we have trouble labeling like the types of lessons when we did a videotape to Havanese classrooms because there's so many concepts in each problem that we it's hard for us to say it's they're teaching this concept right now and so I think you know there there are aspects of different countries the way to operate like that for Japan that there yeah well they're they're learning how to problem-solve in a very dynamic way yeah that then is applicable across multi you know a multitude of disciplines and they're learning how to you know approach something complex and figure out their own process for solving it as opposed to like alright you carry the one and like you you learn the system for solving a math problem but you don't really understand what's actually behind it to a to an incredible degree so like when I was reading some of these studies about the math knowledge that college students have like sometimes you could be fooled into thinking they knew a lot because they could execute certain procedures but then if you changed a problem just a little it was clear they hadn't no idea what's going on right and sometimes you know to use like like a very distressing sort of lower math level example there was like one of these college students who was being studied was you know given like in whatever I don't know is like 500 plus 200 equals 700 or something I say well how can you check if this answer is right and I said okay well 700 minus 200 equals 500 right what's another way you could check if this answer is right and they couldn't come up with 700 minus 500 equals 200 because they'd been told you subtract the one to the right of the plus sign right from the one that's on the other side of the equal sign and you're like holy cow like you can so someone could get by doing that right till you really like you capacities understanding but you don't actually understand because our entire educational system is set up on breath not depth yeah yeah well it's set up on I would say on this using procedures knowledge unlearning this using procedures knowledge which is is too be sort of the opposite of the kind of breath you need where you need these like broader conceptual models right I see what you're saying yeah yeah yeah what about the idea that when we're very young were able to learn things you know in a very facile way like you know you teach a very young child how to you know a different language they didn't pick it up very quickly you know my own personal case swimming like if you learn how to swim well yeah when you're six years old you'll have that for life you try to teach like a 30 year old how to swim it doesn't know how to swim it's like they're never gonna they're just net they're never gonna get to that same place so what is it about that early period in childhood development that applies to kind of these ideas that you're working with yeah I think you have an enormous you know I think we used to think that you sort of built up these neuronal connections like as you did stuff when you're a kid and now the model is more like you have all these all these neurons and you sort of prune things away and strengthen the ones that you're actually going to use so sort of you like trade a measure of cognitive flexibility for more efficiency and the things they're actually going to do and you know I think those are important periods to take advantage of in to know like what are the things that you should expose people to and then time like languish we do it totally backward right like we like well they're too late yeah and and again I think there's evidence that if someone's bilingual in that fade like before the age of 12 basically they have an advantage for picking up later language or if they've played multiple invasion sports before about that same age then they'll have an advantage for picking up more so I think the most important question would be what things are like that where if we if we sort of give them a broad base it will facilitate this later learning later on and I think you know a lot of sports are like that languages like that and I think maybe a lot of other things are like that too so you know if someone does find something that they truly like love and it lights them on fire like that's totally great but I do think that that some of that broader base early on can scaffold this sort of more later specific learning mm-hmm there's a sense of relief with with this book in the sense that I think there are a lot of people yeah there are there's there's certain people who find that thing that they're great at and that they absolutely love when they're very young and they can then do that their entire life like you know they picked up the guitar when they're five and you know they have a whole career into their 90's you know doing that one thing but those are the rare exceptions and I feel like there's so many people who who just like feel bad about themselves because they haven't found that thing and what's great about the book is that it's like you can exhale like you don't have to be that person you can try all these different things and it's a it's a pressure valve release to encourage people to explore and not feel like they have to you know fall into this specific niche or they're falling behind yeah and I mean it's it's a little bit of a relief for me in that way too because I really don't know what I'm going to do next and I really have gotten like whatever I asked you that right yeah yeah and but I'm less embarrassed about saying that then I was in the past partly because I can at least say like well I'm you know living by my tenets that I was writing about here but I do I am much more so where I used to have like after I got done with running I used to keep pretty assiduously a training Journal and would have pretty specific goals and these sorts of things and I started doing that in my personal life after I got out of running and realized that actually like wasn't super helpful for me it was you know either I got to that goal or I didn't and it wasn't actually helping me move there in a way and so now instead I have what I call a book of experiments where I use it the way I did when I was a science grad students here's something I'd like to learn about myself am i interested in this you know do I think I could be good at it whatever do I have access to training in it and I'll try something and then you know be sort of a scientist of myself and and write the conclusions and and that's really I'm just doing that to prompt reflection in myself and I've found that to be much more useful to me than the kind of training journal that I did find useful when I was a runner right it's hard though like I don't want to you know show up at a jiu-jitsu class and you know be the worst part you know I I don't want to put myself in those situations and generally I don't you know like I want to do more of the things that I'm good at yeah I want to train the discipline that you know makes me feel encouraged but when I have the you know gumption to do that it's all it always ends up being good thing that's interesting I mean you have found things I would say like you've done a much better job than most people at finding things that really do interest you and sort of continuing to like mold your life around your interest in some ways yes in some ways no though you know I think I still stick to like okay I'm good at this I'm gonna stay here yeah but most I mean you're a lawyer right like most of them are still probably most your colleagues are probably still lawyer that's true right so it's we're not talking about a real high bar for people like sort of molding their their life around them unfortunately but I think we do we get in these like ruts of competence right I was talking The Economist Russ Roberts he sits a hammock of competence because it's so comfortable that you don't want to get it out and I think it's like an illustrative example this will sound really weird but I was at certain point like reading all the speed typing literature okay like how do you get faster typing and it turns out that most of us will get up to you know 50 to 80 words a minute and then we'll settle there naturally but actually you can get much faster but it requires you to basically take a metronome take it up a little bit and follow that speed no matter how many mistakes you make uh-huh and then you just keep doing that little by little and you can like double your speed but it suggests to me that we sort of will naturally will with experience will get better but then we'll like some for some reason naturally plateau at a level of like very good and it's like you know if you go to the weight room and lift the same number of weights at the same times every day you won't slide backward but you might not get better and so I think even within your thing it's important to do things that make you like a little bit yeah well it becomes like this asymptotic curve like it you know at some point the amount of work that you have to put in to get incrementally better just becomes unjustifiable yeah right yeah yeah and but then you can do these sorts of things like this skill stacking right which is where you don't have to be once you get to that you're starting to approach that asymptote you don't have to you know if you're running like the 100 meters like then you know you that's like total zero-sum competition you know 0.5% difference between competitors is a blowout but in most of the world we can take sort of a little of what we're good at a little bit here and if you stack them in a unique way you're kind of competing on turf that no one's competing with you with right and that's I think sort of something that's been useful for for both of us this might sound like a little woowoo but what I found as I get older it seems like time accelerates like you know it's like what it was just coupe wait it's Christmas again you know like it things just things things happen really increase with increasing rapidity and my experience of time but when I take an opportunity to do something that I have no experience in and I get outside my comfort zone and invest myself and some new activity time slows down like I don't know if you've had that experience in your own life and I don't know why that is neurologically but I find it to be true no I've totally had that experience and I can only guess at the reasoning which is like you know when when certain things are kind of more automated and they kind of move from these like your prefrontal cortex to these these more sort of automated parts of your brain you are doing that sort of unconsciously in a way right and I wonder if that that sort of dulls are in the moment nests in a way where like you're it's just it's just happening something a base presence right for your own right variance right and so it might be comforting and you feel competent but I do think there's something kind of lost there like when I think back on there some like short parts of my life like when I lived in the Arctic I lived on a ship for awhile like those parts weren't that long but they were so different that they feel like such long and important and impactful memories to me yeah because they were so uncomfortable and so unusual and so you know it's everyone's choice but for me that's kind of the life you don't want to live I mean with the journalist aspect of what you do it allows you to tap into all these different worlds and you know become part of subcultures that you wouldn't ordinarily experience and I would imagine that that you know that aspect of what you do would keep you you know fresh and engaged I mean and it also brought out things in me that I didn't know where like when I talk about these if-then personality signatures in range where I was like a shy person naturally but in my journalistic role I'm not shy and so it doing it kind of got me and you know brought out some some personalities are called free traits when you can sort of take on a personality trait that you don't sort of have in the rest of your life and so I enjoyed finding out that about myself because then I felt like oh I can probably do this and other things but very much to your point like when I was science you know aiming to be a scientist my work was getting so narrow that I really started asking myself pretty quick and I the type of person who wants to spend my whole life learning one thing new to the world and we need those people for sure or the type of person who wants to spend much shorter spans of time learning things that are new to me and connecting them and translating them and I was definitely the latter and that's kind of the lifeblood of the work I've gotten into you know interesting well there's sort of a fundamental premise in the book it's a call to action to embrace being a generalist but implicit in that is that at some point you're gonna specialize it's something like if you want to be really excellent like there is the rare polymath but dabble in all these things until you find that thing and then find your lane and and specialize in that so you're you know it's sort of like a wide generalist triumph in a specialized world ultimately you're still saying like at some point you're gonna have to specialize I mean I think it's very much you know a semantic issue at some level and like I have to admit that right it's like what even is a generalist or a specialist right I can tell you in the patent research it's based on how many different technological classifications someone worked and in comic book research it's it has to do with how many genres someone is well yeah but but each of those areas of science that I cite like defines it in a specialized way for that area and so in the wider world it's like a semantic issue and like how specialized or not am I like I to a scientist I've income you know from science into writing I look very non specialized to other journalists I might look quite specialized because I'm always doing the science stuff so I think it's sort of context dependent mm-hmm and so my real hope is to you know I think we need both specialists and generalists in every field I like how Freeman Dyson styled it the physicist he said we need frogs and birds the frogs are down in the mud looking at the details the birds are up above integrating a knowledge of frogs yeah he said the problem is we're telling everybody to be frogs and that's not good for a healthy ecosystem and so I think you know this this discussion of how broad or specialized to be that is important I think either implicitly or explicitly to everyone and my hope is to make that conversation more interesting and productive and I think that's like the best thing I can hope for yeah and I think it depends upon how you define or think about what specialization is and I think in this freelance economy where people are empowered to cultivate and craft careers that never existed before yeah you can be the specialist of of you yeah in certain respects like who else has the life experiences that you it's like there's no one else who could write this book other than you so you are as you are specialists in being writing rage right now the semantics are gonna come right well like in my case it's like alright I was a lawyer I was an athlete I've done these certain things and so when I host a podcast I'm able to bring a perspective that you know someone else you know couldn't because they've lived a different life and it reminds me of you know sam harris has his waking up and and kind of he makes these preparatory remarks about why he created this app and he's like you know I'm a neurologist I spent all this time doing meditation and you know I have experiences with like these six things none of which I'm the best at there's people there are better meditators there are better neuroscientists all this but who there's no one else who has some level of expertise in these five or six things which makes me really the only person who could you know create this app that speaks to these this variety of issues yeah totally that's that kind of said he's so he's specializing in being sam harris yeah yeah he like not in being a neurologist who also has a meditation app and a podcast and writes best-selling books yeah yeah I mean yeah and that's kind of skill stacking right he says he's not the best anymore thing but he sort of creates this ground that only he's competing on if he exactly knows things there is no competition really ya know and that's like I said that's the way like I didn't want to be at Sports Illustrated running 100 meters you know with all because there's it's because there's like 50 line to be you know for that sort of in that kind of zero something and so I think you know you want to get on your own ground and sometimes it's interesting to hear you make the point that like that's a sort of generalization that becomes its own specialization in a way right cuz like one of my favorite interviews was with this guy Oliver Smithies this Nobel laureate who was studying to be a doctor and then he saw a chemistry lecture and was like that seems awesome like I'm gonna go take that and then all of a sudden as he put it now I'm not afraid of biology and I'm not afraid of chemistry and he sort of pioneers biochemistry which now is viewed as its own specialization right and subspecialties but at the time was like wool like Bud hybrid very broad you know so sometimes those sorts of things this that generalization can just become its own right like it's back to that idea of cell division right increasing specialization as we kind of progressed as a culture and a society yeah so when you extrapolate from all of these ideas we talked about education but let's talk about you know the professional environments like the workforce like how would you reimagine how we structure traditional work environments that can create more fertile environments to encourage generalizations so that you can create a workforce that actually is happy doing what they're doing and they're finding you know they're finding that place where they can actually excel and be fulfilled yeah I think I think some of it again is to to try to incorporate some of and I say this only because it's like we've been working for the army where they had this incredibly and and there's always going to be some barriers to lateral moving in the army like you can't get rid of that because I like ranks and all these things but if an institution that hierarchical can adjust in a way that allows people to sample such that it improves retention even in what's like in many ways the most hierarchical organization we can have in society then I think other workplaces should take a cue from that and say well we have a lot more liberty to allow people to sample into you know maybe provide some of that coaching and reflection when they're trying things you know and and not just give lip service to them failing right because I've been a lot of these conferences and everyone's like failure is great and then but then when I talk to people about when they actually failed like nobody's like great like that way that was a problem worth taking in rare cases there are some like the 3m inventors they said they would get that was a problem worth investigating even though it failed but that's rare usually you know so I think we have to have more than just lip service to to failure and build that in and allow people to do some of that zigzagging inside and to give a specific example a podcast that I love that I was on recently was the Bill Simmons podcast he's very popular I listen to us and and when I was there like he was you know ESPN's most popular writer and then he went to HBO and that basically failed there and then he started the wringer and that was like when I was around there I was only there for a little bit just seemed to me like one of the happiest workplaces and what as bill took me around introduced me some people and I already knew some people there from sports media what occurred to me was it was be like he'd be like oh we hired this person as like just an online editor and like now he's the director of content cuz we let him try this other thing or Malory Rubin who I had worked with before they hired her as just an online editor and then like you want to come try to talk on a podcast and now she's like a brilliant podcast I was becoming famous in her own right and I think they you know once he had people internally give them a little chance to try different things in a way that like wouldn't damage anything it would make them feel empowered and so he and some of these people have now become like famous in their own right and and it seemed like a really happy place and I think that's part of the reason because they have a little bit of ability to try some new things without having to just leave well because bill embodies that sensibility like he's done that in his own career like as he said on the podcast like he had that you know he had the show on HBO it didn't work and yeah but I learned something I moved on and that informs how I make decisions about other things going forward to create that kind of open environment where people can find their niche over time yeah that's pretty cool I mean he seems like I've never met him but he seems like an awesome guy yeah totally and really I was just like it was just interesting how much people like living there and what they were hired to do and what they're doing now right because because Malory I had she had been one of my colleagues at Sports Hills right and was like stuck in a very narrow lane so even for me to now see what she's doing you're just like she started as like a copy editor it there so or an editor or something like that yeah yeah and and NSI like whatever I think she was working at Sports Illustrated for kids whatever was she was like stuck in a narrow lane and so to see her now you just like gosh there must be so much like talent lurking you know that we just like haven't given people the chance there's no question about it and and you know he's you know in the grand scheme of things he's running a small organization like you how do you scale that like if you look at a fortune 500 company it becomes calcified over time where you have some marketing executive who's reporting to someone else and that person's decisions are really informed mostly by you know trying to please their boss or you know not losing their jobs so they're gonna like sort of tow some party line yeah that fits within the rubric of like how they've always done it and to step outside of that and say actually let's stop putting all our money in billboards like we should be doing podcast advertising when they've never done that before is a risk that is not necessarily encouraged yeah no totally and and you know I remember it's reminds me of some of Adam grants work that show that people actually become less creative when they become middle managers yeah it's not like it's just selecting for they become like much more much more risk averse I think this is some of the reason why these larger organizations can get disrupted by these tiny animal organizations right because there's no they have all the resources antigens and yet they can still get totally disrupted and so I think you'd have to take on like try to start with sort of small groups inside of you know cuz you can't change the big organizations are like these oil tankers you know you have to start steering like forty miles offshore to get it to the right place but like I spend some time a couple years ago with the data analytics team at UPS which I never would have thought would be an interesting company huh but it is interesting because they because it's brown just because Brown yeah how its thinking it being around yeah yeah no I totally it kind of like yeah brown packages like but but they face this thing called the Traveling Salesman problem where it's a math problem what's the best way to connect a number of different stops and they you they used to be like 30 or 40 stops and with the rise of e-commerce where they're delivering to a lot more individuals it's like 120 or 140 stops and there's more different combinations of how to connect those stops than there are like atoms in the universe and that's not even taking into account traffic or anything like that and the fact that they don't like to take left turns because that's when the accidents happen always Thanks and when I went there it's you know these mathematicians it's run by a psychologist actually runs the data science team a psychologist who's just like interested in data science and you're there and you're realizing like they're so they had to make this like custom mapping and and like routing tool that the driver then sort of uses and informs and the driver tries to like beat it and if the driver beats it then it like sort of incorporates some of that but they were telling me like the algorithm is like the easy part in a lot of ways the change management is the hard part because this is a big organization with a ton of different levels and a lot of history of doing things in a certain way so they had everybody in the data science team had to work as a driver for a little bit including the mathematicians the CEO had worked as a driver also Wow and so I said that was such a crucial thing in helping that change management because suddenly we realized like just passing down your algorithm from like you're like bestow it upon people like make it work was not working so we actually had to settle for not quite as optimized of a system but one that actually worked for what people were actually doing yeah and so by by working with these different levels of the organization I think they realized sort of where the Cinch in the hose was and a lot of in a lot of those cases yeah yeah it's interesting I mean because theoretically academically like these ideas that you're talking about should inform how we reframe corporate culture right like let's let's allow people the freedom to move around let's help them find their place but the human element of that quickly you you quickly realize it's it's too disruptive in order to get anything done yeah right and and psychology you know gets very complex in terms of what people's motivations are here yeah yeah and I also think if people are working in sort of those kinder learning environments where they can face the same challenge over and over then I think their interest in their ability still matters but but the breadth of experience I don't think matters as much in that case so it might matter for getting their match quality but like for industrial era sort of the stuff when organizations were very specialized in people faced a very narrow range of tasks I think specialization is is fine I just think we've we've kind of stuck with that a little too much yeah but I do think it's changing but the way that we're seeing it change is like you said where people are are cobbling together these careers by themselves right and is there a way for you to shion's to to allow that to happen internally in a matter a flexible way yeah that's interesting or are we just gonna do it like I don't understand so I mean you know if some institution had sort of like so you know would wholeheartedly support me doing a project like this book I'm sure I would have done it internal to that institution uh-huh but I couldn't so I had to go do it on my own but I sort of think like there should be places that would allow that you know yeah but this is I can't imagine how all-consuming it was to write this book yeah as much as you'd be able to actually hold a job and be productive in that while you were creating something like this so the book would have to be like my job right yeah they would have to what am i reporting stuff along the way or you know whatever it is they'd have to view that instead basically what you do is you go to the publisher and get like a grant essentially you know to do to do the work and then hope that it yeah so I mean in some respects you work for the publisher yeah it is it is yeah if you put a different lens on yeah yeah you pitch your project to them uh-huh and if they approve it then you get the funding in your I do it yes that's like a very amorphous kind of kind of job one of the things that you said to Brad Stolberg and that in the outside piece was he asked you something like you know where do you see the future of you know the professional environment a camera or exactly what the question was but you said like I think the Vanguard right now is seeing the expansion of these coat these coaching modalities in the professional world like taking what we've learned from sports and applying that to you know the executive suite to help people not just be better at like being more productive but in learning how to like navigate the psychological landmine of dealing with people and empowering teams and the like and you're seeing that with like you know I used to look at like oh I'm a coach I'm an executive kind of like what is that like what kind of nonsense is that but the more I learn about it and think about it and read about it the more I realize like yeah of course why wouldn't we be doing that yeah and I think at the higher levels of performance you know and we both know this from sports like there's becomes a point where you can't like tell somebody what to do at a certain level they have to like the good coach you know walks hand-in-hand with them on their development journey and helps sort of figure out what's working for them whether that's a lot of training or because you can no longer just say like do it this way right and so I think that's the part where it's really analogous where you know sometimes people get to become executives or even if they're lower level and then it's like everyone's a yes-man around them and all these sorts of things right and yeah sometimes like their decisions are very like I got obsessed with war and peace for a little while and basically worn pieces like Tolstoy's novel form argument against the great man theory of history he says like he uses Napoleon and says Napoleon was a in effect not a cause of these like larger movements going on and he does this historical reporting that shows like some of the commands he was issuing could not have gotten to the battlefield like in time like the information lag was too long that like he really had no control over what was going on I think that can like executives can become very divorced from like how their decisions actually play out or like the kind of chain of communication to an organization and I think that's sort of like nobody's helping them with their development a lot of times cuz they're just surrounded by people like who are who trying to curry their favor ass basically and and so I think anyone can develop from that sort of someone who is the outside observer in their personal development and is like helping them reflect on things and identifying some of their own weaknesses and some of the other problems and so that was incredibly powerful thing for me in sports right and I would love to have it in my other endeavors yeah I would love to have it if there was someone you know who would just you know fair warning to my coaches I think I told Brad like one of my favorite editors at SII called me the athlete who only hears the boos but I think I've got a lot better at that by the ones that way explain that it was just like I would do some project that would land well and then like the editor would be like you know and I'd be like this person's criticism like I'd be like all fixated on it and yeah that's human be like you're winning you're winning don't you know block that out and you know but I I think it would be I think I'm better at that now but that's a warning to my perspective coaches if anyone hears this and wants to be my coach but I think it would like I took in when I got stuck with this book with structuring because structuring the information was a real challenge for me I took an online fiction writing course that was taught by the author of mud bound Hillary Jordan and it's one of the exercises was we had to write with all dialogue one was with no dialogue and when doing the no dialogue when I go back and realize I've been leaning on quotes to do explanation in a way I shouldn't been doing I stripped like probably a hundred quotes and replace them with writing and the scary thing to me was I didn't realize it got me sort of off this plateau and block and it also sort of made me realize I was leaning on a certain technique without even being really conscious of it and so it would be really useful for me to have somebody pointing that sort of thing out that like you're doing this all the time like you're leaning on this sort of tactic all the time and it took me taking that like a fiction writing class to get sort of bounced out of that and I'd love to have it like more consistently yeah it's interesting you you you I heard you say like yo you you even take like introductory writing classes like just to refresh yourself or ground yourself in the principles and the fundamentals and you know it's one thing to be like generally science writers you know there's a there's a specific sort of pros you know methodology that that you you know that you typically come across but you have this amazing storytelling ability that meshes with that that I think really makes it that book come alive so whatever you were doing it worked thanks I really appreciate that and I think this is another I told you sort of Frances Hesselbein who's a character in the book kind of a personal role model for me so I've can you know kept up with her because she's very much like the living embodiment of like leadership is not what to do but how to be like just her interactions with everyone or just like the world would be a better place you know and she had this saying you have to well yes she she learned it from someone else you have to carry a large basket to bring something home and this woman when she was at her first Girl Scout training event and one of the other you know prospective troop leaders was saying like I'm not really learning anything from this it's all so basic and another woman said to Frances well you have to carry a big basket to bring something home which means like if you keep an open mind you know you'll get something from it and so like this sounds kind of funny but recently there was a you know like a like a Japanese culture conference at a hotel a couple blocks away from me like largely based on sort of anime stuff like that and I saw oh there's like a beginning like anime narrative class it's two blocks away of course I'm going that you know so you go there and it's like you know there's only a couple people there I guess that wasn't the popular draw for most of people or whatever but it's like and we're talking about like what is character and what is plot and I'm taking notes because I'm like you always will learn something from this stuff you know I don't want to ever get to a point where I think I'm not a work in progress as a writer ever well that's a Duckworth growth mindset okay right there yeah yeah yeah right I also heard you talk about how learning how to edit film actually in flow how you structure your book as well which I thought was really cool oh that's funny I don't even know when I last said that you know where did your homework I don't know where I came across that but I it's very apt so yeah wash thought out this this was so the way this came about was a friend of mine my name Jeff he was a film editor and he got some kind of repetitive stress injury where he wasn't supposed to like use the mouse a lot more because his arms were hurting and so he just talked me through what to do so you know he was doing all the brain part and I was just like I owed her skills and what I realized in doing this process like getting his basically documentary was you get all this film and you cut it up into all these little chunks right and all and that so that's like what reporters call your string right you gather string it's all this stuff and then you decide which chunks are gonna keep the rest the stuff hits the editing room floor and then it's just a question of how do you order those chunks basically and so that one out point feeds into the next end point and so that's how I started thinking of structuring my own writing which is just how do you go from one out point which is a section break or a chapter breaking to the next end point so that feels like especially if you're taking on these sort of amorphous questions like I did so that it feels like an escalating exploration of this question and I started to become attuned to that in like some of the masters like someone like Wes Craven where some of the material in his films I think is like patently ridiculous and yet because of the way he structures it he can often keep you like maybe I'll come back from that commercial break even if it's ridiculous just because of the out point is interesting and so that's how I think of structuring my writing is is my outline is in points and out points for each section break and then each chapter and I try to like write between them right and I noticed by the way just in some separate reading I don't remotely I just disclaimer I don't remotely want to compare myself to James Joyce on any level here okay but I read that in some of his papers were these color coded sentences that he had and he was like and he would put them in different places and just write between like the color-coded sentences and so to me I was sort of like maybe similar to this you right and those are the beats like that would be the plot beats in a film or you know that that art of like bringing somebody right up to the commercial break with the cliffhanger and knowing exactly after the commercial how to like segue into the next section is a version of you trying to get people to turn the page yeah engage with the next chapter and also to try to represent something of my own intellectual journey as I go about it because the way I go about it is sort of here's this question I have what research can I look for them might sort of like falsify this or bear on it and so a little bit and because again there are no perfect answers to questions like this my approach is like can I take the reader along on the intellectual journey that changed my mind about some things mm-hmm and so I try to sort of organize it in that way - yeah I would think of it almost more like a documentary that functions as a narrative the react film because you're somebody who spends like an entire year just in the research phase I can't imagine the volume of information that you're trying to collate that's the change and organize you know so what does that look like are you putting cards you know up on a wall and moving them around and trying to figure out like well where does this piece and form this and how is this all gonna work like that just seems monumental in the sense and in the same way that a documentary filmmaker who's got hundreds and hundreds of hours of you know maybe they've been following somebody around for years how do you take all of that and create a story that moves and has those beats and that three-act structure it's it's difficult it's one of the reasons why you know after my first book my my then agent said like just don't let it be five years before you have another book out and it's been six this is one of those reasons and it really does live if you came out the paperback five if you count the paperback right um yeah but yeah okay that's good you give yourself a break yeah but it really becomes a struggle for me sometimes like because I'm consuming things so quickly that sometimes things start connecting I'm like where did that go you know I have to find it again and I have things like laid out very visually and all this stuff but I do still on hand or do you do this all digitally everything everything um but like one of the ways I'll consume a lot of papers is I used to go to when I was in New York I would go to the Columbia library where I had like alumni reading access and there were four computers that were simultaneously logged into every Journal that the University subscribes to more than that hyperlinked in the citations so if you wanted to bounce right to a citation you could just do it so I could read tons of papers like really quickly and I start a thing I called a master thought list when I asked my that's my wife before like how did I because people would start asking me after my last book how did you write it and her answer was you went upstairs and came down two years later right which is there's some truth to that but but not helpful yeah so this master thought list I basically start putting down stuff that I think is interesting and that bears on the question whether that's some quote or some paper or whatever and as and I try to tag it with words I think I would search if I want to come back to it so this is like a an electronic document and as those sort of I keep tagging things with the same words I start moving those things closer to one another and when there's a bunch of them I put like a larger tag above it it's like this is a topic and then I put a bunch of words that I think I would search for that topic and then as and I call each of those tags and as more the tags start accumulating then I start moving like ones closer to each other so it sort of ends up being like that storyboarding hmm process kind of yeah going from a generalization to something very specialized it also helps with the citations process yeah yeah I mean I guess in some ways like yeah that could that could be like a container that could fit anything though right yeah eventually if we say like everything everything has to become something and right authorities specialize in whatever it is so all right well let's uh let's let's end this with with like some final thoughts for somebody that is listening to this and there perhaps stuck in in in a rut there in their cubicle or there in their Lane at their job they're not feeling fulfilled they feel like they don't have the bandwidth for you know so much lateral movement how can somebody kind of engage with you know aside from my reading the book which everybody should do like how can they start to engage some of these ideas in a way that can help them kind of shake things up I would say and because I'm gonna give this advice to myself right now because I'm not sure what I'm going to do next is start your little book of experiments like get it you you identity doesn't change overnight so you're if you you know you need a change right so like there's a freakonomics study and thereby the Freakonomics economists that shows pretty strongly that if people think they want to change they basically should by the time you're thinking like you might want to change already you clearly should so start that book of experiments don't worry about like finding the thing that like lights your hair on fire you may do that but usually these kinds of working is part of your identity and it usually changes a little piece at a time so reach out to the fringe of your network take a class in something you don't know about start exposing yourself systematically to little things having the book of experiments will force you to reflect on it you know what did that ignite a new interest it is it's something that might cater to your talents and just keep running those experiments and when you hit on something where you want to get a little deeper go ahead and do that but don't like just that experimentation process going it doesn't have to be a flying leap to start learning about yourself but you do have to be a little uncomfortable because you're going to dabble in things that you don't feel as competent at yeah but get get out of get to the fringes of your network the so-called strength of weak ties people usually get like new jobs from people who are on the fringe of their network because they already know the stuff that's that's sort of closer to the core of their network but so that's what I'm doing I'm running i'm using my book of experiments now and i'm you know pretty soon where i'm gonna be talking about this book less i'll be more active in running some of those experiments uh-huh it seems like patience is important with this because I think that that people do feel like they feel bad because they haven't been struck by lightning yeah and they feel this pressure or that everyone else is having these kinds of epiphanies that that they're not and this sense that they've got to figure it out right away but I think if it's more of a lifestyle or a mindset to just be constantly engaging different parts of your brain and your life experience in new and different ways there's a trust that takes over where like you just you're you're going to be naturally guided in a direction that will ultimately lead to different kinds of opportunities and that chance encounter that might into this other thing they can set you on you know a different path that you just can't see right now yeah or gives you some knowledge that you can you can merge into another domain I mean I would say if you're not a struck by lightning like that's okay you know there's no way to like force that to happen other than exposing yourself probably some things and hoping but if over longer time spans when you're changing what you're doing if you aren't moving in the direction of better match quality with those changes then there's something wrong right then I don't think you're kind of in that Dark Horse approach we say who am i today what are my skills and interests what are the opportunities in front of me which will I try and then maybe you're from now I'll change so you know over time I think you should be moving toward that match quality and don't worry about the lightning like you can't you can't force that anyway but you can have this this approach to being a scientist of yourself that means like your strategy will move you toward better match quality in the long term good stuff man thanks for having thanks for talking to me it's my pleasure yeah it's great range is the book available everywhere it's almost impossible to miss it I was in the airport yesterday and there was like a whole rack like outward facing like it was the most visible book of like any book in the in the airport book store which is a good sign definitely got out of the gate yester than I expected crazy man you must be in super high demand to you know talk at all these conferences and do all kinds of stuff and be really out really phasing right now yeah yeah and I you know and I obviously want to get the book out there because I worked hard on it um you know at the same time I'm like a bit of an introvert so I need something like the time to my own and at some point like I'm kind of a voracious reader and I'm doing like with the book out I'm doing like the least reading I've done in years you know but but no it's great because well I didn't really think I didn't know until my last book that speaking was like a thing that people would invite me to do uh-huh and I get very nervous before I do it the same way I used to do before races no matter how many times it's just like a race exactly and I found that I really enjoy it a lot like I like doing the aesthetics for like the visual presentations and it's brought me into contact with all these people in line of working walks of life that I would not have met otherwise and I've actually totally loved that and totally unexpected so that's like one area that just opened up for me that I didn't expect yeah yeah now you're like this guy who's speaking all these businessmen yeah which is super weird because I'm like you know for a long time just like what are these like why are they you know and but but I sort of get it now that like people are interested in performance interesting performance they don't care if it's a chef or a midwife or a pilot or an athlete or whatever cool you have any public events that like if people go to your website if they want to come and hear you speak or check you out is that where they should go yeah on my web page yeah and I'm also I'm just a bit I've seen on Twitter and like what have events coming up I stick them up there but also David Epstein calm so they're both easy all right man cool great to talk to you thank you for having me I feel good feel great if some of my favorite people have been in here so I'm kind of I feel like I'm in a good call man super super honor to have you here the book is amazing and once you finish that read the sports gene as well and I'll put links up in the show notes to everything you can go on a super deep dive into David's world and come back and talk to me again sometime I would love to cool base [Music]

Channel: Rich Roll

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Keywords: rich roll, rich roll podcast, self-improvement podcasts, education podcasts, health podcasts, wellness podcasts, fitness podcasts, spirituality podcasts, mindfulness podcasts, mindset podcast, vegan podcasts, David Epstein, RANGE WHY GENERALISTS TRIUMPH IN A SPECIALIZED WORLD, the sports gene, 10000 hour rule, malcolm gladwell debates david epstein, roger federer david epstein, frances hesselbein david epstein, freeman dyson, parenting podcast, self-mastery podcast

Id: QYLrNeJX9XU

Length: 125min 54sec (7554 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 08 2019