817 How to Find Your Highest Potential with David Epstein

This is episode number 817 with New York Times bestselling author, David Epstein. Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin. George Elliott said, It is never too late to be what you might have been. I am so excited about this interview because I get the question all the time from people and said, Louis, I'm too old to start my dream, right? I don't have the resources. Can I still go after what I want or I'm too young to get started? because people aren't gonna take me seriously. I'm too young. No one's gonna listen to me. No one's gonna follow me. I'm too young. And I love what David just did recently. He wrote a book called Range: why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. Now, for years you've probably been heard, you need to specialize. You need to double down on your strengths. You need to never focus on your weaknesses. Only focus on your strengths. Go all in on your strengths. Know yourself what you're good at and just do that thing and outsource everything else. But there is science proven that that is actually not true. And my entire life, I feel like I've been a generalist. I feel like I've been a master at mastering many things, but I never specialized in one thing to be like the best in the world at something or have like the best skills at one thing. I've done so many things and I always wondered, you know, is this the right way to go? Should I just spend five, 10 years on one thing, 10,000 hours on one thing and just go all in? In my personality, my makeup, I just always like trying new stuff. I like taking on something I'm not good at and becoming better at it. I did this with public speaking. I did this with playing the guitar. I did this with salsa dancing. I did this with writing books, with launching a podcast. All these things I wasn't good at. In fact, I was pretty horrible at when I got started. But I became really good over the years of practicing all these things. And because I've mastered the art of range and really kind of tapping into lots of different things, I believe it makes me bulletproof. Gives me so much confidence I never would have had just mastering one thing, just relying on one skill set, one strength. And I'm really excited about this, and I hope you guys get a lot out of this. If you don't know who David is, he's the author of two top 10 New York Times bestselling books, one called Range and one called the Sports Gene. He was previously a science and investigative reporter, and prior to that, a senior writer at Sports Illustrated. His writing has been honored by an array of organizations from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine to the Society of Professional Journalists and the National Center of Disability and Journalism. His story on sudden cardiac death in athletes called Following the Trail of Broken Hearts was chosen as one of the top 100 stories of the last 100 years by Columbia Journalism Alumni. He's given talks about performance science and the uses and misuses of data. And his TED Talk has been viewed 7 million times and was shared by Bill Gates. And in this interview, we talk about why doing is the key for sustaining motivation. How comparison can slow you down and stop you from achieving your dreams. How to create range in your resume to create your ideal career, not specializing in one thing, but creating range. The importance of consistently learning about yourself and who you are to grow in all areas of your life, how powerful this is. And the profound benefit of getting out of your comfort zone on a consistent basis. I am pumped about this one. I nerd out on this type of stuff. And David has got all the science and the research and the data to back his findings. So I'm super excited about this and you're gonna learn a lot. Make sure to share this with your friends, lewishowes.com/817 and tag me @lewishowes while you're listening to this on Instagram. I reshare a lot of stories so I want to hear who you are, what you're up to and what parts you enjoy the most. So let me know over on Instagram @lewishowes. All right, my friends, I'm excited about this one. Super pumped. Let me know what you think about it while you're listening. Let's spread the message of greatness. Share it with a friend today and be a hero in someone's life. by helping them improve their life with this message. And without further ado, let's bring on the one and only David Epstein.

Welcome everyone to the School of Greatness podcast. We've got David Epstein in the house. Good to see you, man. How you doing?

Good. Thank you for having me.

Super glad you're here. You've got a new book out called Range, which when I saw this come across my desk, I said, yes. It's why generalists Triumph in a specialized world. Very excited about this because my whole life I've been a generalist. I've never been the best at anything. I was very, I would say I was a gifted athlete because I worked very, very hard to become that. But I was never the best, most talented athlete on any team I've ever played on. There's always someone who had more athletic skill or ability or bigger, faster, stronger. But I feel like I had heart and a vision and I was willing to work just as hard, if not harder than anyone else. and this has been my whole life is like becoming the master of general ideas, skills, and having a collection of a lot of skills. And I have no clue if having a collection, being 80% good at a lot of things or 100% good at one thing, that's the debate. We were talking about this before about how parents, especially in sports or music, they put them in one thing, violin, piano, and they drill it in them for eight hours a day. and that's all you do all year round. It's like soccer in the USA, it's like you just play select soccer all year round, you have no life, and you get burnt out when you're 18. You're exhausted. So why did you want to dive into this topic about generalists?

You mentioned a couple of interesting things there, by the way. We were just talking a little bit, you were a decathlete, right? Which is like, and then you talk about this concept of being good at a bunch of different things, maybe you're not number one, but some people call this concept skill stacking, where it's like, you may not have to be the very best at an individual thing. Like that's only for a small number of people. But if you can kind of cobble together skill in a number of different domains, you sort of make this mosaic where you're not in zero-sum competition with anyone anymore, because you're kind of competing on your own ground. Right. To me, that's kind of like what you've done, right? Is you cobble together these different things, and you're like, now you're not in zero-sum competition with anybody. You're totally doing your own thing, because of this like skill stack. Yeah. That's very much what's happened. happened for me too. But to your point about soccer and how I decided to write this book, so the genesis of this, there were sort of two things. One was after I wrote my first book and sort of, as Malcolm Gladwell would say, devoted several pages to criticizing his work. That's how he always says it, publicly. We were invited to-- why were you criticizing his work? Well, because some of the work underlying the 10,000 hours rule, so-called 10,000 hours rule, was very soft, right? And there was a ton of work showing that In fact, the strict 10,000 hour school said it doesn't even matter anything about you. Just pick something and- Do it for.

10,000 hours and you're gonna be amazing.

That's right. But in fact, there's a ton of evidence that shows actually learning about your talents and trying to match to those talents is actually incredibly important. So this message that it doesn't matter what you pick, just pick a thing and go 10,000 hours, I think was doing a really disservice. And there was much more rigorous work.

In sports showing how important matching to your abilities and your interests. Yeah, if I'm like, you know, the tallest person in school, but I want to be a point guard, you know, it may not match my interest or my body type or my genes is what you're saying, right? Yeah.

Like don't go be a point guard when you're built to be a center. Yeah, maybe you can be a big point guard, but like, it turns out the way we learn about our interests and abilities is by like trying things and then changing. So there's this huge, one of my favorite quotes in range is from this woman named Herminia Ibarra who studies how people find what's called match quality. So this is the economist term for the degree of fit between your interests, your abilities, and the work that you do. It turns out to be incredibly important for persistence, motivation, performance, all these things. And her quote that I love is, We learn who we are in practice, not in theory. And what she means is there's like all this sort of, you know, personality quizzes that want to convince you, take this and it'll just tell you, you know, the commencement speech thing, like, envision who you'll be in 20 years and march confidently toward it. But in fact, there's this wealth of psychology research that shows we aren't that good at understanding our abilities and interests until we actually try something. and then reflect on it and then zigzag. So you have to learn who you are in practice as opposed to just introspecting.

You have to try to understand. It's so important because my nephew is 15 who you just met out there. He's like, yeah, I don't know. Like, I want to do this, but I want to do that. I think there's so many people who are 15, 25, 45 who have like, I don't know what my purpose is. I think it is your purpose is to figure out what you want to do right now and reflect on it. Like you said, in six months or three months or after practice, See if you're good at it, see if you love it, if you can sustain the motivation. Like you said, it's important. If you're just doing something that's hard all day, that you don't enjoy at.

All, it's going to be hard to be motivated, right? Yeah, yeah, and I mean nobody loves every part of their job, of course. But again, you're glancing off all kinds of stuff, like the idea I want to talk about. So that idea of just knowing when you're a teenager, like you're mentioning of what you want to do, the investor Paul Graham of Y Combinator, he calls this, he says like, ignore the traditional commencement speech advice. In computer science, we call that premature optimization, where you're setting the goal before you know anything about yourself. basically. And that really jives with this research.

Called-- Don't set a goal.

I mean, you can set a-- so, okay, let me get to that. So this really jives with this research in range called the Dark Horse Project, okay? That we were talking a little bit about your-- and me. And you. And a lot of people who end up fulfilled in their work, right? So this is two Harvard researchers who are trying to figure out how people optimize that match quality, right? Which has hugely important to their sense of fulfillment. And it turned out that they were talking to all these people, not all these people were financially successful. A lot of them were, but they were all fulfilled. But it was like from, you know, chefs, athletes, whatever, midwives, didn't matter what it was. And these people would come in and they would tell the researchers like, well, don't tell people to do what I did, because I started in one thing, it turned out like I didn't want to be a lawyer or whatever. And so I got off that track and I was behind and I did zigzag, and then I got lucky and.

I found this thing that like only They said, don't tell them to do that.

But that's how they got there. And then like 90% of the subjects they found all came in and were like, well, I'm an outlier. I'm an outlier. Right. So that's why they called it the Dark Horse. It wasn't titled that before. They called it the Dark Horse Project because all these people, not all, but like 90% of them, viewed themselves as.

Having come out of nowhere to find success in this area because they like cobble together these different experiences. They weren't like 16 and saying, okay.

I'm gonna go to medical school and I'm gonna go be a doctor. I'm gonna do this for 30 years and this is how my life's gonna be. No, some of them set long-term goals eventually after a period of exploration, but they were still very open to sort of reorienting. Their common trait was, according to these researchers, was short-term planning, essentially, which is kind of like not what you usually.

So it's always like, what's your five-year goal?

Right, right. Instead of saying like, here's who's younger than me and has more than me, they would say, here's who I am right now, here are my skills and interests, Here are the things I want to learn. Here are the opportunities in front of me. I'm going to try this one, and maybe a year from now I'll change because I will have learned something about myself. And then they just keep doing that.

Until they find these places where they can grow. And it's okay if I change. Totally. Because I think a lot of people say, well, I failed in a year. This thing didn't work out for me. But from our examples of ourselves, the thing that didn't work out just set us up for the next thing.

Yeah. For the next thing. Yeah, yeah. To having more clarity, right? And the other thing is, and I think this applies to both of us too, those people didn't view. So a lot of it was learning about themselves. It's called self-regulatory learning. When you do something and you take time to reflect on it, and you'll see those people will then update their like self-assessments of their skills because you learn about it by trying it. And they end up analyzing their own like strengths and weaknesses more similar to how like their peers and bosses do because they get better self-knowledge. But they also tend to like not just view the experimentation as as lost time. They bring like knowledge from one area and sort of fuse it with other areas. So for me, I was training to be a scientist. I was living in a tent in the Arctic when I decided to become a writer. Right? And-- As a scientist, like studying something up there? Yeah, Arctic plant physiology, right?

Sounds good. Sounds good.

And the carbon cycle in the lower Arctic. So that was like from college you went to the other day? Yeah, yeah. Okay.

So I lived on like a research.

Vessel in the Pacific Ocean for a while, and then I moved up to the Arctic and all this stuff. Were you alone? It was like a small There were probably 30 to 40 people in the Arctic. Okay. You know, either people who like we're gonna go work on a pipeline or we had like a helicopter pilot because if there was an emergency, there's no other way to get out of there. So like if you needed a medical emergency and then like a couple scientists.

And some, you know, like mechanics. Then you were just doing research all.

Day and logging your information and that type of thing. For how long were you up there? Yep, I was up there for about half the year. But you couldn't, in the spot where I was, you couldn't be there. For having a dead of winter. Yeah, because you like, you're not a good way to get supplies or anything like that. But my work was getting, you know, so narrow, like really narrowly focused. And I started asking myself, you know, am I the type of person who wants to learn like one thing new to the world that's like very esoteric or shorter spans of time learning things new to me and translating them. And I was the latter. And so I sort of say like, fine, that's like lost time and I'm behind. So when I get to Sports Illustrated, I get there. How many years after that? So then I decide I want to be a writer and I had to take some like, you know, very not glorious jobs in journalism. Like my first stable gig in journalism was working at the New York Daily News, the tabloid in New York, starting at midnight. Because I applied for an internship, rejected, because no experience, no good experience. And then they come back and say, the guy who starts at midnight is like leaving, so if you'll start at midnight, you can do it, right? So nothing happy is going on. Daily news happens between midnight and 10 a.m., I assure you. Nothing. But it's great like boot camp, you know, you get like tossed into, and so I sort of like zigzag my way through a couple jobs, get to SI, I guess when I'm like 27 or something like that as a temp fact checker, right? Whereas 22 year olds fresh out of college, Should be getting hired as, oh, they're ahead of me, right? So I'm fact checking stuff for like.

23 year olds and stuff like that.

How did that make you feel? You know, at the time, I felt like I was on a growth trajectory, didn't even, didn't bother me. I was like, I got my foot in the door of this place that I wanted to be into, Whatever, you know, I'll work from there. But what I didn't realize was that this, my very ordinary science skills, right, I was like a totally ordinary scientist, suddenly take them there and I'm an extraordinary scientist, right?

Really?

And it's Sports Illustrated, 'cause there's a huge number of people waiting in line to be the next NFL beat reporter or the next baseball beat reporter. So I start writing these like science articles and suddenly I'm competing with nobody, right? 'Cause nobody's waiting in line to do that. So it's just the question of if I can perform well, I have a job. And so really quickly I like zoom past. What was this like science type of stuff? Yeah, and everything, you know, from doping to like performance to anything that science touched, concussions, like anything that medicine, science, anything. That was like all.

No one owned that yet.

No one, no, no, no one really wanted to do that stuff because it was a different skill and you know, I could read these papers, like scientific papers. You were excited about it. Data analytics, right? Like that's exploding, like so, you know, right in my wheelhouse, all those sorts of things. So pretty quickly I had like more stuff than I could really do. And so, you know, I had this crime reporting experience, so again that became this incredibly valuable thing. So suddenly I'm like having to, you know, I can't do any more stuff. Wow.

How quickly did you get to that point?

I think I went from temp fact checker to senior writer in about three years. And it happened so quickly that actually there's a paper where some of my grad research got published in the Journal of Arctic Antarctic and Alpine Tundra. And it was so quick that, you know, because there's like, it takes a while to publish scientific stuff. That my contact info on the paper is a senior writer at Sports Illustrated, which I bet is a first for that journal.

So it was happening pretty quick.

Wow.

Okay. So you learned about that stuff. You started to, you quickly realized that your skills from one thing you didn't.

Think would apply, did apply. Totally. I thought it was a sunk cost, and it turned out it was and still is the most valuable skill I have. Like, when I, with both of my books, being able to get into the nitty-gritty of, you know, some pretty, like, cryptic studies and into the methodology and do some of my own data analytics and stuff like that has been a huge competitive advantage.

Makes you stand out.

Huge.

No one's willing to put in that work, time, energy to create a work of art like that.

Well, and also, I mean, I wouldn't have, like, I couldn't have, prospectively seen this, right? Like when I was at SI and you get contacted by people who want to work there or they want to work at ESPN or whatever, they want to get into sports media and they say, well, should I major in journalism or English? My first instinct was to say journalism and my second instinct was to say English and my third instinct was to go, well, I studied geology and astronomy, so like maybe I'm not the best person to ask, you know? So it was really blessing in disguise that I went off on this other track and ended up with these skills It's almost like an intellectual arbitrage opportunity. You know, you end up with these skills that are normal in one place.

And totally abnormal in another place, and that makes you more valuable. More unique.

It's interesting when I've had Robert Green.

On a few times, you know Robert? Yeah, yeah. I talk personally, but I mean, I know he's well, he talks about that as well. He was like, you know, I was a screenwriter starting out for TV, then I started doing movie scripts, then I did newspapers. He did like a few different things, and he's like, I really didn't enjoy any of them. But I was getting these skills. And now I write these unique type of books that no one else really writes in that style that make me stand out and I love the lane.

That I'm in now.

But it took him 15, 20 years of kind of zigzagging around the things he wanted. Totally. To get to where he is now.

I mean, and that's why these dark horses, right? And again, there were some people in the Dark Horse Project who did follow a linear path. It was just the small minority, right?

So what does it mean? A dark horse is someone who is.

Fulfilled in their work. They're fulfilled in their work.

And they tend to often be very successful also.

They're talented and unfulfilled.

Yeah.

Gotcha. But like that's, you know, exactly what Robert Greene, I feel the same way. Like I want to be in my, I want to be in my own ground, so it's just a question of like how well can I do, not where I'm in like zero, you know, I don't want to be like running the 100 meters of work where I'm in zero some competition with a couple.

With other people, you know?

Right.

So tell me about this matching thing. How do we know what our best skills are or match, you know, how.

Do we figure out this? That's a good question. And that actually brings up something, can I like, Go back a little bit, you mentioned, because you were talking about teenagers. One of the neat studies that I put into range was by an economist who was wondering about the trade-offs between early and late specialization. So he looked at, he found a natural experiment in the higher ed systems in England and Scotland, where they're very similar, except in England you have to pick a specialty earlier because when you're like 15, 16, you have to start thinking about what tests you're going to take to get into a specific program for higher ed. In Scotland, you don't. It's sort of more like the American system. You can sample a little bit if you want to, and even late in your college career. Liberal arts. Liberal arts. Yeah, yeah. And even less constrained than liberal arts, because you can go take, because I would argue sometimes liberal arts, maybe some of them don't have enough of the dabbling in science. And so his question was who wins the trade-off, the early or late specializers, who are otherwise in these very similar systems? And it turns out the early specializers did jump out to an income lead. 'cause they have more domain-specific skills and whatever they're going into. But the late specializers end up get to sample a little bit, pick a better fit, and so their growth rates are much higher when they graduate. And a couple years after graduation, they erase that income gap completely, so they fly right by. And meanwhile, the early specializers start quitting.

Their career tracks in much higher numbers.

Well, 'cause they're bored or they're burnt out. Bad fit. They were made to pick so early that they made a bad choice, right? So it's like if careers were dating, we wouldn't pressure people to specialize when they were 15 years old, I don't think, right?

And we spend as much time, I.

Think, with our with our careers as we do with our significant others or whatever.

And we're completely different people from 16 to 27.

I'm glad you mentioned that. So there's this concept I talk about in Range called the end of history illusion. And this is the psychological concept that at every time point in life, we say, yeah, I've changed a lot in the past based on my experiences and the things I've learned. But now I'm pretty much set. And we say that at every time point in life and every time we're wrong, and it leads to these really this is just a funny one of those experiments. But if you ask people how much they would pay today to see their favorite band in 10 years, the average answer is $129. If you ask how much they would pay right now to see their favorite band from 10 years ago, the average answer is $80. Because we underestimate how much our taste will change over that time period. And that's just a silly example. But at every point, we underestimate how much we'll change our values, what we think our skills are, the way we like to spend our time. And the period from 18 to about your late 20s is the fastest time of personality change of your entire life. So choosing early in that period or before that period is like truly trying to make choices for someone who does not yet exist, right? There's still traces of you. Wow. For sure. But we change more than we think we do. So that's a tricky.

That's why you should, so if you're, you have a daughter, right? Is what you said?

Son.

Son, who's.

Four months.

Four months, yeah. so say your son is 16 and he's saying, Dad, all my friends are getting ready for college. They're saying they know what they want to do when they grow up. I have no clue. Should I start specializing in one thing? Should I go to law school? Should I be training for this? Or should I just have a gap year, have fun, travel, experience things? What would you say to me?

Yeah, so first I would say, don't worry about being behind. Because there's the, some of the worry about being behind comes from these Tiger Woods and Mozart stories, right?

Who started when they were three.

Yeah, swinging perfect clubs. Tiger even before that. But yeah, I mean he was already on national television at two. It's crazy. Three was like, he was being media trained at three. Not kidding. It's crazy. And, but there's something we, about those stories that we tell them a little wrong. Delved into those and Tiger, he showed this prowess and interest that his father then responded to. As he has said, my father never asked me to play golf. It was always my interest, you know, it's the child's interest that matters. Mozart, I went back through some of the letters of his childhood, and there were some cool ones where like a musician comes to visit their household. Mozart's father was a musician. And little Mozart comes downstairs and is like, I want to play. I want to play second violin. And his father's like, you haven't had any lessons. Go away. You can't play second violin without lessons. He starts crying. And so that musician who's writing the letter says, I agreed to go play with little Wolfgang in the other room so he'd stop crying. Next thing you know, they hear a second violin piece coming in, and they're like, what? And the letter's hilarious because it says Mozart's father comes in and is kind of like in tears, right? And the guy writing the letter says, Little Wolfgang was emboldened by our applause to insist that he could also play the first violin. And he goes on and plays it with his made-up fingering. Tiger and Mozart are incredibly rare, but you don't really have to worry about.

Missing them because it was their parents.

Were responding to their very unusual desire. They had the desire. And in fact, forced into something. Right, and in fact, their parents then facilitated a ton of opportunities after that. But in fact, if you, you know, those are incredible outliers. But if you want to maximize the opportunity for that, you should expose them to a bunch of stuff and see if they grab onto something like that. So the approach I think I want to take as a parent is akin to this system I write about that the army uses in range, where the army had this very strict upper out structure for career tracks for high potential officers, which of course it's the army. And that worked for a long time in like the industrial economy where organizations were facing the same kind of challenges over and over. So you could, they were very specialized. Companies were much more specialized in the industrial economy because it was what's called a kind learning environment. You can assume tomorrow is going to look like yesterday in your work world so people face the same challenges. With the knowledge economy that goes away. entirely and suddenly, like graduates of the US Military Academy, all of a sudden who used to, you know, go up and become like the top leadership of the army, suddenly half of them are quitting like the day they can leave the military because they learn these skills, they learn things about themselves in their early 20s. And now you can move laterally and work a lot more because there's more emphasis on like ability to create knowledge and problem solve rather than these very specific skills. Emotional intelligence, all this stuff. And so they start leaving. And so first the army throws money at them. That doesn't work. The people who are going to stay, take it. People who are going to leave, leave anyway. Half billion dollars down the drain. Then they start saying, all right, we haven't developed a grit problem or whatever overnight. We've developed a match quality problem, where these people are leaving because they're finding work-- They're filming somewhere else. They want autonomy over their career track. And so the higher potential they were, the more likely the Army was to give them scholarships, the more likely they were to leave as soon as they could, working exactly the opposite of the way you want. And so they started programs like this one called talent-based branching, where instead of saying these high potential officers, here's your career track, go up or out, they say, we're gonna pair you with a coach. Here's some career tracks. Start with one. The coach will help you reflect on how it fits your talents and interests. Then try another and another and another. And you'll keep bouncing around until you have some autonomy in where you fit. And that worked much better for retention than did throwing money at people because they want some autonomy over their career matching. So I see my role as a parent as the coach in talent-based branching. to say, here's a bunch of stuff, you know, I want to facilitate these opportunities for you, try some, and I'll help you reflect on it and how it fits you and what you learn so that you get the maximum amount of learning from that experience. So that's how I kind of sort of view my role after doing this research.

That's cool. How long would they do each, you know, activity or career for in the Army?

Is it three months, six months, a year? It varied. It kind of varied how it was going. And if they wanted to see a little more, they could do a little more. And this is developing very much right now. So sometimes, There were other programs like talent-based branching where if by the time they got commissioned, they had already changed their mind, they could say, All right, I'll take on some extra years if you allow me to change my career track to this thing over here of commitment. With talent-based branching, they start by just dabbling a couple months at first, but then as they sort of triangulate, those periods can get a little bit longer.

Interesting. So you would tell your son to, what if they were like, I just want to be a soccer player? and from four years old till 18, he's an amazing soccer player. He spends six hours a day. He studies and does everything that he's supposed to do. He's like, you know what, Dad? I'm burnt out. I don't wanna do this anymore. I can go get a full ride playing soccer. I can go be on a national team, but I just don't care anymore.

What would you say to that situation? I mean, the first thing I would say is, let's take a break and see if you recover. Oh, interesting. Yeah. And if not, if after a break you still don't wanna do this, you know, nobody should be, nobody should be forced to like go to the national team, right? So that would be, I would try to manage it leading up to that, right? So when I lived in Brooklyn recently, there was a U7 travel soccer team that met near me.

U7.

U7. Travel team.

Yeah.

What? You think anybody thinks in a city of nine million people, six-year-olds have to travel to find good enough competition?

I doubt it.

Like that's not in the interest of their development. They're all the same skill pretty much. It's because they're customers for this league, right? And then you look at places like France and Germany, which have won the last two World Cups, where they have, a French soccer player in the youth development pipeline probably plays half as many organized games as a US player of the same, oh, they started reforming their pipeline about a few decades ago.

Why do they play half as many?

Because all the science shows that this unstructured play early is the best for this kind of problem solving. So there's two different kinds of knowledge. Using procedures, and this is whether you're studying math or sports, using procedures knowledge is like your ability to execute plays and certain technical skills. Making connections knowledge is this sort of broader knowledge that teaches you how to match a strategy to a type of problem. And that's what you, whether you're doing math or solving, you know, using anticipatory skills to tell what's going on in the soccer field, 'cause things actually happen faster than you can react, so you have to be like anticipating. So, I mean, you know this from football, like quarterbacks have to throw in one and a half seconds. All that film study is teaching them anticipatory skills, so when they see the chess pieces in a certain arrangement, it instantly says like, this is what's gonna happen in the future. and the defense moves around to try to confuse them about that. And so it turns out that this unorganized play is a much better way of learning those broader skills. So if you go to Brazil, the kids are all playing futsal, which is, you know, futsal is like a small, heavy, wall, they're just playing in the backyard. Right, backyard organized games. Sand one day, cobblestones the next day, different number of players all the time, basketball court, you know, off the walls. And so that is, so France is sort of trying to mimic some of that development. They have this saying that there's no, one of the guys who helped design the system would say there's no remote control for the players, meaning like they don't try to micromanage them, they have to try to problem solve on their own. And so they restricted the coaches from talking to like these 15-minute periods during development. And because there's all this science that shows that sport diversity early, you know, that elite athletes have this sampling period where they delay specialization until later than peers, I think the multiple sport thing is partly just finding the sport where they best fit, but it's also just a proxy for this movement diversity and learning these general skills. And so I think they're trying to have kids in soccer, but also incorporate.

The best of what the science says. Yeah. This is interesting because I remember people trying to say you should just do one sport in high school and college. I was in the, probably in the fringe where I was playing four sports in high school, three sports in college, and I was probably like in the last-- you- played three sports in college? Yeah. And I got injured playing basketball. sprained my ankle coming down from a dunk and rolled it and I was out for like two months. And I tried to come back and it was bad. So I just did football on track the last couple of years. But I remember there was a guy in high school who only played basketball. And this is interesting story because he only played basketball. I was better than him as a basketball player, freshman, sophomore, junior year for sure. Then he decided, okay, I'm going all in on basketball. He would just do jump programs, sprinting. He did this all in the off season. I'm playing football, and I was doing track and baseball. And I remember coming in senior year, and he was like fully dedicated from junior year, started to develop more as a human and an athlete. And I was thinking, huh, this guy's probably gonna be better than me. Maybe he's gonna be better than me. He'd been training all year, 12 months for this moment. and I just came out of football practice, right? Football last game, the next day I'm in basketball. And I'm thinking to myself, I haven't touched a basketball in four months. I'm probably gonna be a little rusty, but I'm still dominating, you know? And I was a little rusty. My shot wasn't perfect. I was messing up the dribble every now and then. But I was like, man, I'm still dominating and still just as good, if not better than this guy. And I felt like I had a mindset that was stronger, like where he was weaker in a lot of areas, he had a weak mindset because all he was doing was training. I was competing every single day in a sport that was mentally challenging. and I felt like I had the edge, even though I didn't train for those skills. I had the athletic edge. And so for me, I've always felt like, you know, being a generalist is the key to having that edge in sports. Look at the Heisman Trophy winner this year. What's his name?

Yeah, for Oklahoma. Yeah.

But he was like first round draft pick in baseball.

Yeah, yeah.

And the number one pick.

And, sorry, I'm drawing a blank on that, but like Woodland, who just won the US Open, Did you read about him? He was a really good basketball player. Really?

He was a college basketball player. College basketball player. He just won the open.

Yeah. Wow.

Yeah, so I feel like these, you know, because I can't even remember his.

Name, the guy who won the Heisman.

Oh my, I know, I can't believe we're drawing a blank on this. Because he won, you know, he won the Heisman Trophy. Is it Tyler something?

No.

Do you know the guy's name?

No.

Google the Heisman Trophy winner if you can. the guy who won the Heisman, but he's like playing baseball for six months a year and then football for six months a year.

He's the best player in both sports. Yeah, yeah. And so, I mean, right, so one argument is just, oh, he's just such a superior athlete. Like he's just better at everything. But first of all, that would auger against the 10,000 hour rule anyway, because those, you know, practicing some other sports is in zero-sum competition with your main sport.

But separately from that, I wondered about.

That, if it was just, are these athletes better? For you, like Bo Jackson, Yeah, yeah, and obviously there are traits that help across sports. If you're fast, you're fast, right, in whatever sport you're in. But that's why I made sure, like actually in the introduction of RANGEd, to include these studies where like, for example, in Germany they looked at, they were wondering the same question, is it just that? And so they matched kids, had coaches evaluate them, matched kids playing soccer for skill at a certain age, track them over the next several years, and see who's better at time point two, and it would be these kids that had.

Played like a wider variety of skills. Not the ones who just did the skill, for those years. That's right. Than other skills.

The ones who did dabbled in more sports, didn't matter if it was formal or not, more athlete-led unstructured play, less organized training and practice. They do focus in eventually, but that's sort of like, it gets less and less over time, right? It's not this abrupt shift. It's not to say that you don't.

You know, focus in. At some point you have to be.

In a team and you have to be organized. Yeah, yeah. I mean, at some point, like, at some point, There's some semantic issues here. Like at some point we all specialize to one degree or another in something or other. Of course.

What's the guy's name?

Kyler Murray.

Kyler Murray. Oh, yeah, yeah. There's a documentary. There's a movie that came out recently, I know.

There's a movie that came out also called Chasing Greatness. Have you heard of this? In Search of Greatness.

In Search of Greatness. Yeah, I'm one of the talking heads in it. Are you? I haven't seen it yet, but- Me and Sir Ken Robinson. Oh, there you go. Yeah, I haven't seen it yet, but I saw, I met with a person.

Over at WME who was in charge.

Of like selling that movie.

Yeah.

And she was telling me about it.

Yeah.

You know, so when you were talking like this, I was like, yeah, it sounds like the movie, in such a greatest because Greski. Coincidence, yes. Greski and Pele, right, are talking. Yeah, and Jerry Rice. And Jerry Rice. And they were just like, yeah, we had all unstructured play where we could be free to try things.

Yeah.

This was my whole childhood. I remember I didn't play football, organized football till I was 15. My mom wanted me to play. But I would play in the backyard all the time, diving into leaves in the fall, you know, in Ohio. And I remember we were playing roller hockey in the, in the, I was just playing whatever the kids were playing. I wasn't like, I'm only gonna be on the select team soccer, which I did that too. But I was playing roller hockey in the parking lots with kids. We'd put on the blue bins for recycling bins. We had those as our goals. We were just running around. We didn't have enough money, so I was wearing street shoes and everyone else had roller blades. But it was just like, we'd do that, then we'd go play football, then we'd go play basketball. We were always playing something. unorganized, just making up our own games. And it sounds like this is in.

That documentary or the movie, that's what it was about. Yeah, yeah, and I mean, I think some things are changing for the better and some are changing for the worse. Like the bad kind of specialization is accelerating in a lot of programs and while some other people are realizing we should look at what France and Germany have done and do that. So it's going in both directions at once. But what I think we're missing the most is the streets culture.

That's it. That's what- Backyard, streets, no one wants to be safe. Everyone wants to be too safe, right? It's like you gotta be on a perfect grasp.

Right. Exactly. Whereas you go in Brazil, they're playing on like, you know, in octagon.

It's like, and part of it's like a hole.

Yeah.

You got nails sticking up and barefoot.

Yeah.

I think that's what it needs to be.

You just need to let people be unstructured. Right. And just be an athlete. Learn to be a better athlete. Yeah. Yeah.

The problem is it feels like getting behind.

Right. When you say, I mean, that's one of, you're not on the select team. You're not like learning the rules. Right. And if someone sets up a structure, right? Like AAU has like, Second grade national basketball championships now. And so it's kids like throwing one hand. Second grade? Yeah, yeah. And like the kids can't even shoot right, right? It's not good for their development. They're playing on 10 foot rims. And I don't think anybody thinks it's the best for their development, right? But it's like they're customers and if you're not in the second grade team, you can't be in the third grade team. And so there's these systems that are often working against where some of these countries that have like a more holistic national pipeline. Like Norway, there was just a great HPO real sports about sports in Norway. Norway like exploded the Winter Olympics. Like it was the best performance ever. And they've gotten rid of a lot of the aspects of formal competition before age 12 in their sports entirely.

Just go have fun, go jump around on the skis.

And they'll still compete. You put kids in there playing, even if it's unstructured, they're gonna compete.

Let's race.

Yeah, so that's not a problem. And they spend less time traveling and doing the stuff that isn't even participating in the sport anyway.

Right. Wow, interesting.

It's a really good special, yeah.

So tell me more about- I was.

Talking to Steve Nash about this actually recently. He lives out here. yeah, he lives out here. you- know, he didn't even pick up.

A basketball till he was 13, played.

A whole bunch of other sports. He was a huge soccer guy. yeah, and I like to use him as an example because he's not like.

You know, he's like, I don't know.

Like 6'2 in ways. He's like a normal- He's like a.

Soccer player on the basketball court.

Yeah, and so it's not like, oh, okay, well he's 6'10 or whatever. so he's a freak. He looks like an average dude. yeah, so I was talking to him about this recently and he's exploring starting like a sports academy that would allow people to do that sort of sampling and unstructured play, you know, up through age, whatever, 13, 14, which is sort of what, I don't know if you're tennis, file tennis at all, but like Andy and Jamie Murray, so Andy Murray, you know, one of the, has been one of the best players in the world for a long time. Their mother, Judy Murray, started an academy for tennis players where like people are willing to give their kids to her because she's Judy Murray, so she's got this imprimatur of, you know, the mother of these great players. But then it's just like, oh, they're gonna play through the tree branches. It's like the stuff they would probably do on their own, but it's like, okay, because Judy Murray says it's okay. I think that's a little bit of like what Steve Nash is looking for. He's like, We know a lot about optimal development for athletes. Not everything, but we know a lot. And he says, like, if the Steve.

Nash stamp is on it, then people will-- parents will feel okay doing it, which I think is true. So tell me more about the matching process. How do we figure out this matching for ourselves? in our careers, per se. 20, 25, you feel like you're not sure what you want to do. You feel like you're already behind, you're not making any money, you're living at your parents' home in the basement or something. How do we figure out what's our matching process? Self-matching. That's really tricky, right?

Because it's so individual. And I think that's a reason why it sometimes takes a while, whether it's the dark horses or like, so I think we should start by not feeling behind, because especially early on... How do we not feel behind when everyone else.

Has got degrees and six-figure careers?

It's tricky, it's tricky. And you're limited in tent and now.

You'Re a fact checker for a 22 year old as a 27 year old.

Yeah, yeah, worked out okay. But you have to view that early time as like learning about yourself. You can't go wrong really, right? Like I wanted to learn that I wanted to be a scientist for the rest of my life. That's not what I learned. That turned out to be a very valuable thing to know. But if you look at, so for example, like when we were so obsessed with precocity, right, and getting ahead and all this stuff. So like when Mark Zuckerberg, you know, he once famously said, young people are just smarter. When he was 22, he had interest in saying that. And obviously he's a bright guy, whatever. But there's, and I was at a, do you know Motley Fool, the investing, I was at an event of theirs recently, and based on something I put in the introduction, they put up an audience poll that said, guess what the average age of a founder of a blockbuster startup is on the day of founding, not when it becomes a blockbuster. 25, 35, 45, 55. Overwhelming favorite was 25. and then it went down sequentially from there. The answer is 45 and a half. Really? Because according to the brand new research from the Census Bureau, MIT and Google.

There's a few outliers like a Zuckerberg.

But most people have had 20 years of experience failing. And just like the Tiger and Mozart, we fall prey to Daniel Kahneman's availability heuristic. We know those really dramatic stories, so we assume they represent the field, when in fact, the reason they're such dramatic stories is because they're the outliers, basically. And so these entrepreneurs usually have to do a lot of zigzagging to get to get where they're going. And so I think the approach to take, again, is like the dark horses to say, so for myself, when I got, because I was a college athlete, runner too, and runners all keep like training journals, here's what I did, here's my time.

What was your 800 time? 151.

Where'd you go to school?

Columbia. Nice, that's pretty good.

D1 level though, that's kind of average, right? I mean, I was all East, but I wasn't, you know, like gonna win, and certainly was not gonna win the.

National championship by any stretch of the imagination, right? I had Nick Simmons on, you know him?

Oh yeah, I mean, he's a freak.

Oh yeah. We competed in the same national championship.

Oh really? Oh right. I played D3. See, there's a guy that I think had he come along too, 'cause I mean, I'm a huge fan of, right, being a fan of the 800 meters. And he's like, was the best American.

800 meters for like a decade. Yeah, crushing it.

And he didn't have like athletic skill. He's just like a short, skinny guy. I think there was sort of, 'cause I'm like total running geek, people sort of felt like he wasn't working as hard as the next guy. when he got out of college, right? And I think his plan was genius, which was he's gonna come along slow in development where a lot of the people who were sort of stars in college, who were much higher, you know, sort of prospects than he was in college, come out and they're like grinding right away and they're injured. And then they're back and then they're injured and then they're back and then they're injured. For a long span, he stayed healthy.

And just got a little better and a little better every year.

Just like a half a second a second. And I wonder if he had been, you know, a Division 1 star, if he wouldn't have been able to develop at that pace, which he did, and had this like incredible career. I wonder about, I don't, you know, I don't want to put words in his mouth, but I do wonder. Well, call him out. Because all these runners who were in his cohort, who were like the Division 1 stars, who were like, these are gonna be our next Olympians, like so many of them ended up just battling injuries forever, whereas he just got better.

And better and better and better every year till he got to the top.

And then, like, stayed there.

And he didn't have the prototypical body type or stride. He just, like, I don't know, he was willing to work hard and stay.

Consistent, like you said. Yeah. And consistent and, like, not, not feeling rushed, it seemed to me, where, where some of the best Runners, it seemed like when they went from college to the pros, suddenly they're going from being the very top of the pack to being not the top of the pack. It's almost like they're trying to pack it in so quickly. And so I think he had a lot patience. That's interesting. You know, and I'm speculating about that just following from afar, but it's unusual for this guy to come from, if you think of all the people who, all the Division 1 stars, and he surpassed everyone. All of them. But anyway, so I think the approach to take is, so when I got done with running and I kept this like a training log, you know, I sort of transitioned that in my professional life where I was like, here's my goal, and that's what I'm gonna do. And I actually found that that did not work as well for me as it did in running, where it was like very concrete and the goals were very easily measurable, Every day. And all these sorts of things. And so I switched that and started sort of based on some of the research that went into this using what I call instead like a book of experiments where it's more like when I was a science grad student, I say, Here's something I'd like to learn or try or an interest I'd like to explore or some person in some line of work who I'd like to find out a little bit more about. Here's my hypothesis, I'm gonna go try it and then I'll come back and see, did I learn what I was hoping for? was I as interested in that as I thought? And I just keep doing that. And that's been a much better way of me kind of like-- because when I was 16, I was positive I was going to the Air Force Academy. I was going to be a test pilot, and I was going to be an astronaut. And I've gotten linearly less long-term goal directed as I've gotten older. You're more and more like one, two years out now. All the most important projects that have been my most important projects are never anything that I predicted far in advance. It's always responding to some opportunity at the moment. and so I've almost like given up on. I think it's still fine to make the long-term goal as long as you're not like holding to it too tightly. Interesting. So that's been my approach and I have no idea what I'm doing next.

None.

Really? Zero. After this book, you're just like. No, I left my day job to finish it, right? As soon as I finished the Sports Gene, which was kind of this like surprise bestseller, I left Sports Illustrated and went to this investigative startup called ProPublica because I was like, all right, that's kind of my sports capstone project in a way, like now I need to develop some new skills. So I go down the hierarchy of a new organization, but learning totally new skills, reporting about drug cartels and bad science and medical care and all this stuff. And that added so much to my, you know, it's those additional skills that allowed me to do this kind of book, which is much broader than my first one.

You know, it's interesting because for so many years in the last 10 years, I've always had this desire to learn and grow personally. And so when I was injured, recovering from an injury playing football, I started salsa dancing. I was like, what can I do? I couldn't work, I couldn't really work out because I had this big cast on my arm from here to here. So I was just walking around like this, like kid from Rookie of the Year.

And then it came off, could you-.

Yeah, I didn't have a 100 mile.

Hour fastball, I wish.

Why break your arm? I know, right? And I started salsa dancing. I lived near a salsa club and I would go out every week and sit there in terror. I was so terrified of just being in the room with these incredible dancers because I couldn't do that skill. And it was completely foreign to me. They're singing Spanish music. I don't even understand it. I'm the only white person there pretty much. And every week I would go there because I was just fascinated to watch these guys dance with these women. And I started to build relationships with some of the regulars. They would come say hi to me. They'd be like, hey, come and dance. And I would say, no, I don't want to make you look bad. and I was so terrified I couldn't dance. I was like, I don't want to make you look bad. Eventually, after a few months, a couple girls finally dragged me, literally had to yank me on the floor. It was the most embarrassing moment in my life at the time because I was just like, everyone around me is laughing at me. Everyone is way better than me. And they're all probably saying that I should get out of here. I'm doing the basic steps with this girl for a few minutes, sweating, staring down at my feet the whole time, thinking everyone is laughing at me. And then I look up and no one cares how no one even knows I'm there. There was a moment I switched to me, I was like, okay, I'm gonna go all in on this thing and try to master some skill. This thing that I have a passion for, this desire to learn. And over the next three and a half, four months, I went all in. I mean, it was my life's mission to become a great salsa dancer. All day long, I listened to salsa music. I was a truck driver at the time, so I was going from Columbus to Cincinnati and back every day. It was about a six hour trip. driving car parts for NAPA Auto, and I would listen to salsa music the whole way and imagine myself dancing. I would come home at night, I would watch YouTube tutorials, practice in the mirror by myself, and then I would go out and practice at the clubs. And I did this for a few months until I became essentially fluent at salsa dancing. And I've used that skill has applied in so many other areas of my life. Now as a public speaker, it's given me more confidence on stage in front of people and less worry what people think about me. It gives me more poise, the ability to kind of float more as opposed to be rigid. It allows me to connect with people different languages all the time because now I can understand people with a different skill set. I can go anywhere in the world and find a salsa club and meet friends. Even if I don't speak the language, I have the confidence in the skill set. So it's like I'm always trying to think of new things every year that I can take on as like an experiment. or just a desire to learn something. You know, I'm learning Spanish right now. I'm taking singing lessons. I'm always trying different things. And it may never make me money. It may never be a career, but it helps me in my life.

Yeah.

I think that's an important thing we should all be thinking about is like, what's the skill that I can take on every year? Something new that's a challenge. Maybe I'll never have anything to do with this again. Or maybe it's another tool that I can add to my tool belt and just whip out whenever I need to.

And just give me that confidence. --and you don't know until you try it. And I think there's a couple profound things there, one of which is, this is sort of an aside, but this, you know, one of the big five personality traits in psychology is called openness to experience, like your willingness to try new things. And this is a personality trait that predictably declines like quite a bit starting.

In like middle age and going down.

--Become less open to experience. --Less open to trying new things, right. --30, 40, 50, yeah. --But it turns out, and then like it really accelerates when you're older. But it turns out that if you sort of like, force people to try new things. Like one of these studies was training older people on certain types of puzzles that they had never, you know, like this is like problem solving. And even if they didn't get better at the problem solving stuff, their openness to experience got a little better. So it would sort of like buck that trend. So for one, I think you will maintain, and we know open to experience is like highly correlated with creative achievement, right? So I think one, you'll help like buck that trend of your own decline and openness to experience. But even more profound I think is what you're getting at there is we tend to settle into these ruts of competence, right? I talked to the economist Russ Roberts who hosts EconTalk about this. He said it's not a rut, it's a hammock because it's so comfortable.

You really have to work to get out of it.

So you don't push yourself to learn these things, right? Because you already had things you felt.

Competent in, presumably, right? And here you're going into this other thing. I felt like a king in sports. I knew what I was doing.

But here I was like, Right.

Horrible, terrified.

Right. And so, but it's so important to be willing to do that. And when we're younger, we're willing to do that.

Right?

Like you learn a new language, you jump in and like you sound like a goofball and then you get immersed and learn it. But then we get less willing to do that. And I think that really limits, you know, I think it's part of that natural decline of openness to experience. It just happens unless you proactively battle against it. But also just once you get competent at something, it's like you adapt to that feeling of competence and then Why force yourself to like not, I think you really have to proactively force yourself to be uncomfortable, right? And I think we gravitate toward comfort. There's here's a funny analogy that when I was doing my first book that didn't go into the book, but I ended up reading a whole bunch of scientific literature on speed typing.

Okay, this sounds really dumb, but.

Really? How fast you type. Yeah. And you did research on it. I was reading the research on it. Yeah. And it turns out that what we all do is we get better just by practicing and then at, you know, 50 to 80 words a minute, we plateau. and that's good. And you just naturally plateau there. And you can get much faster. What you have to do is like turn a metronome up a little bit, follow that speed no matter how many mistakes you make. And just keep going. And then you do a little bit, you know, every couple days. And you can get like twice as fast. Wow. But what it suggested to me is that our natural proclivity for whatever reason is just to settle at very good and not to keep but way below where you can get to. Why? I don't know. I don't know, but I think that's like sort of how we're wired is to get to like really good, but then, and then like stay in that rut of comedy.

It was challenging to get there and we know it's that much more challenging to grow 10% more that we're just like, ah, I'm fine with where I am.

Yeah, yeah. But it's like you'll get to that 60 words a minute just by trying to type and then at a certain point the improvement stops from that and you have to do this more proactive stuff. so like one of my favorite writers, a woman named Jhumpa Lahiri, she, you know, is like one of the writers of her generation, a fiction writer in the English language, and decided to up and move to Italy and start learning Italian and only write in Italian. And you're like, here's someone who's one of the most successful writers of a generation, decides to go and leave the language that she's made her living and her name in. And she said it's because I wanted to get away from the feeling of myself as an expert and get back to that, you know, that concept of like the Zen concept with a beginner's mind. So I sort of took a cue from her when I got stuck in this book. I was stuck with some of the structuring of information. So I took an online fiction writing course. Suddenly, I'm a total beginner.

No one cares I wrote a bestselling book before.

Everyone's like-- you-'re sucking this fiction thing. Totally. You're doing basics, talking to 101, exercises where it's like you have to write something today with only dialogue, something tomorrow with no dialogue. And after I do the no dialogue thing, I go back through range stripping tons of quotes, realizing that I had unconsciously been leaning on quotes to do explanation where I should have been writing. And it's like, it made me aware that I was doing stuff unconsciously, that I was just leaning on stuff out of habit, right? But getting out of my comfort zone sort of woke me up about the things that I had been doing unconsciously. And now I'm sort of committed to continuing, you know, one of the reasons I had been career changing from these places where I was very comfortable as a senior writer at Sports Illustrated. you know, whatever. I mean, I was in, like, my early 30s as a senior writer at SI.

It's a very comfy job. Yeah.

But making good money. But I always felt like. And you have a lot of cachet doing that, you know, like, people take your call, whatever. And then, you know, so I go to leave this startup where I have to, like, describe what it is on the phone. But, like, that's how you get those skills, right? Like, doing the same thing, you've lifting the same weights the same number of times every day might stop you from getting worse, but you're not, like, getting better, you know?

You're not growing.

Yeah. Yeah.

That's interesting, man. Why do we have this obsession, at least in America, it feels like that we want to be the best, though. We want to be the best. We want to be number one in what we do. And that's why we want to specialize from, like, two years old until whatever. Why do we have this craving or desire? Is that a global thing or is that just an American thing? Or is that just my thing that I've felt through my life, you know?

I mean, I think there, and I'm just speculating here, but I think there are a lot of people around the world who obviously want to be the best. stuff. But I do think this is something like more culturally ubiquitous in the United States in a lot of places where like a huge number of people are really like striving and we have this, you know, incredible entrepreneurial culture. Like I was reading Fareed Zakaria, one of his books, you know, super interesting guy, is a CNN show. And he was looking at, I mean he was actually talking about liberal education, but in that context he was looking at like entrepreneurship in different countries. He was like in Japan, They have a very well-trained workforce, but they do not have a lot of the things that support entrepreneurship, like this culture of risk-taking. In the US, we don't have as good of a trained workforce. Our students aren't doing as well in these international tests, but we have this incredible culture of try to make a splash.

Innovation, yeah.

Right, and VC putting all this money into these different things.

Risk, go for it all. Hit the home run.

Exactly, and so I think, and if you look at Finland, which has one of the best school systems in the country, they score really, really well on international tests. But if you look at the test distribution, they bring the low end up really well. They do a really good job of not letting kids fall way behind. But then they don't get that many up into the upper echelon either. And I think it's because they sort of like, they focus a lot on not letting kids fall behind, but not so much on the ones who are high-flying, accelerating them like crazy if they can. And so here, for better and sometimes worse, I think we have a much more polarized approach. But for the people who are really willing to take some risks and to be the high fliers, there are a lot of cultural structures that support that sort of stuff. Interesting.

What do you think your superpower is?

My superpower is my inefficient search mechanism for when I'm looking for research. Inefficient. Yes, inefficient.

And I used to blame myself for this.

Because you're like, why is it taking me so long? Yes. So first year, both my I don't write, I just 10 journal articles, scientific journal articles a day every day for the first year. Gosh, and that would kill me. I didn't make it every day, but I mean this is where the science background helps a lot, 'cause I can get through them quite used to it. And I know which sections to start reading first, you know, I don't read it like in order. But at first, I would go down some rabbit hole where I get curious about something and I'd surface a week later, like how did I ever think I could do this? Look, I've been writing a page every day for years. Like there's nowhere even close, like this is something I'm interested in, nobody else. and I used to chastise myself for that and think of how can I get more efficient, how can I get more efficient. And now I sort of realize that it's doing that sort of inefficient search that is a little bit akin to like what VCs and inventors do, where it's like you have to throw a lot out there for some things to stick. And that's kind of how I find stuff that other people aren't looking at and connected because I cast such a broad net that I find a lot of good stuff that other people aren't looking at, but it also means I'm necessarily gonna drag a bunch of stuff that isn't useful. But I've gotten myself in a workplace where, you know, partly because of skill and also very much because of luck, that I can get supported to do that, to take that time and have that expansive search that becomes my advantage.

You don't have quick deadlines for yourself. You can extend stuff longer. You've got the resources to not be.

Like in a quick deadline. Right, right. You know, and I mean, I had this Riverhead, my publisher with this book, who You publish some of the authors that I love. Dan Pink, I don't know if you've ever had him on, if not, you should definitely have him on. I know him, I know him. Okay, great guy. Marlon James, one of my favorite fiction.

Writers, they believed in it and were.

Sort of like, take your time, you know, and go do this. We don't need this in six months, you can take your time.

Yeah, and like what, you know, what.

Better gift can you have than someone.

Who'S like, take your time, do your project.

But also isn't there something to having a deadline? Oh, yeah, so. And having pressure as opposed to just, do whatever you want for as long as it takes. But for me, I'll have that pressure on my myself. So that's not a, like, I don't want the project to drag on forever. And so another guy I like who I write about in the book of Duke Ellington, they're saying, I don't need time, I need a deadline. Because he could have a long deadline, but he was gonna start right before. He was a genius. But I think I need time and a deadline, right? So I would still get a deadline from the publisher and like, I'm gonna turn it in that day. It could be two or three years hence, it's coming in on that day, because I'll work up to that day. But I put a lot of deadline pressure on myself and I don't want it to drag on forever. So I don't need so much of like someone lighting a fire under me that I kind of can do on my own.

What's your mission moving forward? You say you don't have another projects.

You're not really sure what you want to do or? No, not yet, but I said, you know, I noticed all my most important projects came out of things where I was like reading or talking to people with no apparent purpose. And I started to see that trend among some other creative type people that I admire like Christopher Nolan, the director. Eric Larson, nonfiction writer, who wrote Devil in the White City and these other great books. But I would see quotes where they would say, you know what? But someone would ask them, what's next? And they would say, Between projects, I just need to read widely with no apparent purpose. And I was kind of like, I'm not crazy.

And so I think that's the phase I'm gonna go into. Take space and time and explore whatever.

You want to explore and see what comes to you, right? Yeah, yeah. Because it's always, these things are too much, there's like, 35 pages of scientific citations in this book. Like, this stuff is too much work for me to do something that I'm not, where I don't also want to know the answers. Right? So I need to find something that I want to spend a lot of time with because I'm also personally really curious about it, not just that I think. If I were gonna go for the surest, like, you know, good selling book after the last one, it would have been the Sports Gene, too. I don't know what that is, but that's what I was being encouraged to do. But it needs to be something where, like, I want the answers that I'm hoping readers also want, basically.

How do we know when we've found fulfillment in the path that we're taking? That's a difficult question, right?

Because for me, I think this is always gonna be a work in progress. Like, I don't think I'm ever gonna get to a point where I'm like, I'm there as a writer or in the sense of fulfillment, where like I always view myself as a work in progress, which is one of the reasons why I'm willing to take like a beginner's course. And I think maybe whether implicitly or explicitly for you, like clearly you also view yourself as always a work in progress, so you wouldn't be doing these other things.

Always, yeah.

And so I don't think there's ever a point where I'm gonna get to, like, I arrived. Now I can just chill, 'cause I don't really wanna chill anyway. But I have felt that over time, you know, sometimes I take a turn to work that I don't think fits me as well, but that over time I keep moving in a direction where I'm feeling more and more fulfilled by my projects. And so I don't think there's an end to that, but taking that approach of like really reflecting and zigzagging and being willing to try new things, I think you should be feeling like you're moving in a direction where your projects become more fulfilling and that's sort of been the case for me even with sometimes two steps forward one step back, but it's definitely been in that general direction.

What is your biggest insecurity?

Oh gosh, I mean I constantly have imposter syndrome.

Really?

Like every time I put something out. Yeah, but you know also very specifically I get super nervous before I speak too. Like I love doing it because it makes me feel the way I used to before I raced but I also still get super nervous before I give a TED Talk literally like sweaty palms literally.

I think everyone probably does before a TED Talk.

And there was even some other crazy stuff there where they had a technical malfunction and I'm standing up on this, you know, looking at whatever Cameron Diaz and Will Smith, just standing there and I thought I was gonna have to give the talk without the visuals. They edit that part out, right? Wow. Because that's before the start. But yeah, also, you know, coming from science, I realized that, I don't know if you read Shane Parish's stuff at Farnham Street at all, anyway, interesting writer, and he and I, we realized we're basically writing about the same thing from different approaches. he runs this business called Farnham Street, and he's doing this project called the Great Mental Models. And it's these volumes of books where he's talking about the different models that people in different domains take to think about their problems. And so it's sort of diversifying the way you think about things. And one of the sections of one of the books is called the Map is Not the Territory. And what that means is a map isn't useful if it's so detailed that it is actually the territory you need to see. If you make a globe too detailed, it becomes the world, and that's not useful. for you. So how do you make these useful approximations and summaries? And I'm constantly doing that with science, and I'm very, I lose a lot of sleep over it because you cannot share the work in the same way the scientists would if they were sharing it with one of their peers. So the question is how can you boil it down so it's useful and in an approximation, a map of the actual work, but without being actually inaccurate. the difficulty of doing that will make sure that I never come off a project being like, I nailed it. No matter how well it sells or anything like that. I'll always keep thinking of maybe I should have changed that a little bit.

Is there ever too much of a range where I'm working on 10 different things at once and nothing gets better or nothing gets good? Is there so many things we can work on at one time we're actually maximizing it? wasting our energy.

No, I think so, because I think there can be a difference between being a generalist and being a dilettante, which is where you're like spread so thin that you don't get that interested in anything ever, right? A lot of the generalists I write about are people who will dive into something with a lot of curiosity, and then they'll get out and dive into something else. You can go all in on something. And they emerge these things. Yeah, or at least with a serious effort, right? Not just like... And some of the research in here about inventors, for example, they actually quantified generalists and specialists by the US Patent and Trademark Office has 450 different technology classes. And they'll say a specialist is someone who spends their time working in one or two of those classes. A generalist is someone who might work across dozens of those classes. And the dilettantes are ones who don't go that deep in one and don't go that wide. And those people actually don't tend to make very much in the way of contributions. The specialists and the generalists both make contributions separately. the dilettantes don't make that much. The polymaths, the ones who will sort of dive deep into something, get out, dive into something else, or they'll have like one area they're anchored in and then they become very broad. They make the biggest contributions. And so I think it's good to keep an eye toward like where you can sort of anchor yourself and have like areas of competence. But ultimately, there are these phrases that keep coming up in range for people who study creative achievement. And one psychologist calls it network of enterprise. Another woman who studies serial innovators talks about like, one of them describes it as having like fishing bobbers all with like little projects attached to them. Lynn Manuel Miranda said, I have many apps open in my brain right now. Of course he put it more eloquently than the rest, yeah. And what they find is that these network of enterprise, people have different things going on and they're not necessarily doing them all at once, but they'll have these different interests, they'll move on to one, maybe they'll get stuck, they'll move to another one and they keep like circling back. and they all sort of end up informing one another in a way. So interesting. This guy Santiago Ramón y Cajal, Nobel laureate, father of modern neuroscience, Spanish Nobel laureate, sort of described this. And he would say, like, the most creative scientists have this broad network. And his quote is basically, to him who observes them from afar, it looks as though they are dissipating their energies when in fact they are strengthening and channeling them.

This is so funny. you say this because my COO, who you'll meet, his name is Matt, he calls me Picasso. He's like, I don't know how you do it. Like you've got so many things in your head that are always like, you come back to stuff, you do this. Your painting looks like a Picasso. He's like, I'm more like a Michelangelo lover. I love to see it how it is and structure it how it is, but you're just kind of all over.

The place, but it always works out in a beautiful way. Yeah, and by the way, Michelangelo. So let's talk about Michelangelo for a sec. Right? So there's this, Michelangelo, painting didn't like painting. Probably his rivals got him that gig to keep him out of sculpting. Wow. And so he was forced to do it. Wrote some poems about, gave up art for a little while just to write poems, most of which he didn't finish, one of which was about how much he didn't like painting. And there's this idea that he would see a figure inside of a block of marble and just draw it out, like taking a figure out of a bath of water. Turns out not to be true. Was written in a biography by a guy who was like a famous fabulist, basically. And Michelangelo actually left like two-thirds of everything he ever touched undone because he would start with the block of marble, he would decide to try something else, do something else, and run out of stone and discard and go to something else. So it's sort of an interesting metaphor for this idea that, oh, he just saw the final product. And when in fact, like, he left almost everything undone because he didn't see that. And so it's just sort of an interesting, I mention this in the very end of the book as this sort of interesting metaphor for how we should think about ourselves, because that's sort of part of this mythology of like, you just see the finished product.

I just chiseled away what wasn't supposed to be there.

Exactly, exactly, exactly. And so, whereas the reality is like most of everything he ever touched, he didn't finish.

Right, he had to throw away, spent.

Six months on something and messed it up. And would start over, because he'd try to do something different and then you.

Don'T have enough marble left or whatever.

Yeah.

Wow. What is it that all in your mind from your research all the best athletes, scientists, you know, billionaires, entrepreneurs have in common? Are there a few things that you think they all have in common? I mean, obviously the athletes, the top of the top, we know that they have more unstructured activity as a child, in their childhood development. What about, is there any common themes from the top athletes, billionaires, rock stars, in your mind?

I mean, I think they have to have some tolerance for, I think we give a lot of lip service to a tolerance for failure. But I think in practice, like, I'll go to a conference and see people like, Failure is great. Learn from failure, failure, failure, failure. And then you talk to someone who actually failed at something at work, and.

It'S not like anyone was like, that was great.

Good job, you know? Yeah. You need to do your job better. Yeah. So one of the places that I write about in Range is 3M, the company, which is like this, you know, it's always listed on the world's most innovative companies, but all the other names you've heard, like Google, you know, Apple, all this stuff. 3M and their inventions are created from Post-it notes to high-tech aeronautical engineering stuff. And one of their biggest inventions that I profile in here is called Multilayer Optical Film, which is in all phones, I've got everything we've got in here because it recycles light inside the device so that you can get brighter picture with less battery power for longer. And that was a place where when I was talking to some of their scientists, they were like, If they've decided that the question you're trying to answer, the project you've taken on, is a worthwhile one and it fails, you can still get promoted off that. If it was clearly a worthwhile question, if you put together those questions, like this is something we for sure need to know the answer to, whether it works or not, you can get promoted totally off of that.

Even if you don't figure out the solution.

That's right. And maybe there really isn't one. Maybe you bump up against some theoretical limit or something like that, but one of the women who's one of their corporate scientists, this woman named Jay Shree. Seth, corporate scientist means you're like the top 20 inventors out of their like whatever, six or 7,000 or something. She said that she had been promoted before off of failures because they were like, this is such an important question that you've sort of realized, you know, exists, that it's so important to take on, and it leads to these other questions, right? And so I think they've sort of institutionalized some of that tolerance.

You know, you can't be failing all the time.

Lose a billion dollars on a project. Yeah, yeah. Here's a promotion, right? Yeah, but if you look at these inventors, like from Thomas Edison, to Nobel Laureates. To create these supernova successes, they actually have to create a ton of crap. Crap.

Horrible for years messing up.

Right, and they just don't, nobody hears about that stuff. Or if they're a writer or a musician, they don't publish that stuff or whatever. And so I think if you're gonna perform at a really high level, you have to stretch yourself, and that means sometimes it doesn't work, and you have to be able to sort of bounce back from that. and have that resilience and willingness to just lose sometimes and fail sometimes. Wow.

What else should people know about this being a generalist?

What else should they know about being a generalist? Good question.

For someone listening right now, what's the next step they should take? Well, so I see you're getting your book.

Right, that's right. Your life will be solved. That's the short answer. Chapter 10 is about how people develop good judgment about the world. And it's about in this incredible 20-year-long.

Study that's- Chapter 10, fooled by expertise.

Yeah, fooled by expertise. And it's about how when people have certain habits of mind, they actually develop worse judgment in terms of predicting business and political and economic trends in the world. If they have these certain habits of mind where they tend to see the world through kind of like one mental model, and that's often these are people who have had a very narrow specialty for their career, sometimes people who have investigated like one specific thing for their whole career, you know, like an academic. Not to say all academics are like that, just as an example. They will get worse judgment about the world as they accumulate more and more credentials because they can like fit any story to this like one model of the world that they've developed, whereas the people who develop better judgment are sort of self-conscious about not having an area where they're expert and they have these, they aggregate perspectives or what the researcher did this, he says, they have dragonfly eyes. So dragonflies, their eyes are made of thousands of lenses that each take a different picture and then it's integrated in the dragonfly's brain. And that's what they do. They go like hunting for different people's perspectives from different domains on a project and then they sort of integrate it. And so they are like the definition of intellectual generalists and they turn out to be, have such good judgment that this researcher basically entered them in a, in his tournament against intelligence analysts. US intelligence analysts who have access to classified data, these people are just volunteers who have general interest and they destroyed them to such a degree that now the intelligence community wants to work with them and those sorts of things. So I think that's- Like being really good at Jeopardy. Yeah.

It's like knowing a lot about everything, right?

Except the difference from Jeopardy is that these people, the things they're trying to predict are things we don't know the answer to, right? Will the Nikkei close above 9,500? Will there be a military clash in the East China Sea that will cost at least 10 casualties by a certain date, like the most difficult questions? And they had to be really hard and they had to have very defined dates so you could score people. And so that chapter is about the development of good judgment about the world and some research that really influenced my approach to the game as well.

Interesting. This is a question I asked towards the end.

It's called the three truths.

Okay. So imagine since you only plan out six to 12 months ahead now in your life and you don't plan out the rest of your life.

I don't even have two months to say.

You're just promoting this right now. Imagine it's the last day for you 100, 200 years from now. As long as you want to live, but it's gotta pick the last day. Yeah. And imagine you've created everything you want to create in your life. Every book you've wanted to write, every idea you've had, you've tackled it, you've taken it on. You've got a range of expertise now. And you've got the family of your dreams. Everything's happened.

I kind of got that right now, so I'm good with that.

There you go. Let's imagine you have to take all your work with you when you pass. So no one has access to your books or your work or whatever you create in the future. But you get to leave behind three things you know to be true about all your experiences in your life. Three lessons that you'd want to leave behind for the world. They wouldn't have any of your work, but they'd have a piece of paper with your three truths.

What would you say are yours? So my sort of advice.

Yeah, your three wisdom nuggets.

And by the way, I can never imagine getting to a point, no matter how many years I'd lived, that I would have written everything I wanted to write or read everything I wanted to read. Yeah, first of all, this is going to sound really dumb and pedantic, but I think people should spend more time outside. Oh yeah. Like with nature, first of all. I think just as much as we put emphasis on deliberate Practice, we need to put some emphasis on deliberate like not practicing and the kinds of recuperation and rejuvenation you need and like getting outside and I think that's killing. I think that's a really important thing. Secondly, I think we should don't feel behind in what you're doing. I think that's just a if you're more oriented toward finding things that work for you than feeling behind and that's already enough to to propel you then feeling behind doesn't doesn't really help. So like Julius Caesar famously saw a statue of Alexander when he was a young man and supposedly cried saying he, by my age had conquered so many nations, I and all this time have done nothing. Pretty soon that was a memory and Caesar was the head of the Roman Republic which he turned into a dictatorship and was murdered by his pals. So he peaked early. So don't worry about that behind stuff. You don't know when you're gonna, when your time's coming. So just sort of I just say release that pressure. It's not helping you to feel behind. And thirdly, I think when I was reporting on sports and sometimes on doping, and I was wondering why am I doing this sometimes? And I started to ask myself, what is it that we want from sports? Like what's the core of sports and games and activities? I started reading this philosopher named Bernard Suits, Canadian philosopher. And there had been this challenge in philosophy where philosophers had said there is no single thing that unites, like no conceptual thing that unites all sports and games. And Bernard Suits wrote this brilliant book called the Grasshopper, where it's like a parable. And he says that's wrong. The uniting factor is the voluntary acceptance of unnecessary obstacles. That's how he framed it. All of these things, these contrived rules of sports, they all involve the voluntary acceptance of unnecessary obstacles. And to me, that's sort of like, you know, I'm kind of an existentialist, so I'm like, take life and add meaning. It's up to you. And to me, a lot of that meaning comes from the voluntary acceptance of unnecessary obstacles. And so I would keep that frame in mind and try to find like what, you know, voluntarily accept obstacles that.

Are meaningful to your person. Yeah, that's interesting, 'cause life is like a game.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, people view it differently, but for me, it's, yeah, it's take the game and add meaning. Yeah, exactly. That's right, like some of us find meaning in running in circles around a track. and that's not trite. That's important. That's how we make our meaning.

Yeah, that's interesting. I want to acknowledge you for a moment, David, because I think it's really cool that you could be the example of taking a life path and thinking you're gonna do one thing, but then zigzagging constantly in creating works of art, which I think is what they are, to really serve people at a higher level who are overcoming, who are really facing challenges in their life, you give them the tools. with the science and the data to back it up to help them improve their life. So I really acknowledge you for your gift, your talent, your consistency on zigging and zagging.

Create a consistent inconsistency.

Exactly, because that range is allowing us to improve our lives. So I acknowledge you for everything, man. You've got a great heart, but you're very wise, obviously, as well. They can get the book right now. It's called Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. Make sure you guys go pick this up. Where can they connect with you online?

DavidEpstein.com and I'm @DavidEpstein on Twitter. You're not on the Instagram, huh? I have an Instagram, but I haven't been posting anything. I'll get you on there, man.

I know, I know. It's where all the young kids are at. I know, I know. Instagram is out. Only ever one of the young kids. I'll get a photo with you, I'll.

Make sure to post it on there where you tag you, get you some followers. This is the final question. It's called, what's yous Definition of Greatness? I should have this so on hand having been in the In Search of Greatness movie. and Don Yaeger just asked me this recently too. I think there are two things here. One, you've been a track and field athlete. I've been a track and field athlete. And so we know full well there are people who are running in the same pack, one of whom is being lazy at the front of the pack and one of whom is being an absolute hero at the back of the pack because those people are very different in their natural gifts. And so would I only say that that person who's leading but being lazy is great? That's a tough definition for me. So to me, I think it's a lot more about making the most of what you've got, like optimizing your abilities. And when I think of greatness, I usually think of doing something a little bit different too, not just doing something that people have done before, but also doing it well. So to me, it's very much about continual improvement and making the best of what you've got.

Awesome, David. Thanks, man.

Thank you. Thank you for having me. My pleasure.

My friend, thank you so much for coming on.

I appreciate you.

I hope you enjoyed this special interview. So powerful. Make sure to check out his books, the Sports Gene, which put him on a big map in the book world and his recent book, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. So much information there.

I really loved it.

And I think you're going to get.

A lot out of it.

Make sure to share this with a friend. You can be a hero in someone's life just by sharing the message of greatness just by sending them this link, lewishouse.com/817. I think you send this to a lot of parents today, actually. And if you have some parent friends who are specializing their kid in something only, Sports or music only, send them this to see what other options are available for them. I think it'll be very powerful. be a hero, be a champion in someone's life by just giving them some great information. You can send them this link, lewishouse.com/817. Leave us a review over on Apple Podcasts if you're over there, if you're on Spotify and Stitcher and SoundCloud, leave us a review. Click subscribe if this is your first time. We've got the most incredible and inspirational people in the world who come on every single a week. And I want to make sure you are up to date on the latest and greatest strategies for improving your life, for living happier, healthier, relieving stress, finding more of your purpose, and having a more fulfilling intimate relationships in your life. Again, share with a friend, lewishouse.com/817 and George Elliott said at the beginning of this episode, it is never too late to be what you might have been. No matter what part of the world you're in, what you're struggling with, the resources you have or don't have, you have a potential and a gift that is burning inside your heart and inside your soul. You are a one-oF-A-Kind human being that will never be replicated, my friends. There's a reason you're here. There's a reason you're listening to this right now. It's because you are on a journey. to discover more of what you're capable of. And you are capable of so much. You are so inspiring. You are so loving and so giving. You are a curious human being. You want to explore the different parts of yourself and the different parts of what's available in this life. That's why you are here. And this is why you were born to do something incredible. This is a moment you can start taking action on your fears and start doing something that you are scared of. Because when you step into the thing you're afraid of, that's when you become more of what you're capable of. That's when you allow yourself to overcome your fears and be more confident. You develop skills, you master a sense of peace that you've never had before, but you must be willing to take the risk. You must be willing to take the first step and then be consistent. and the steps moving forward. I love you so very much. You are born for incredible things. Don't you ever forget. And you know what time it is? It's time to go out there and do something great.

Thank you.