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I always told that if you do 10,000 hours in anything you become a master in it well that's wrong this idea undermines this broader toolbox that you need for long-term development if you're doing that then you're missing opportunities David Epstein is a New York Times best-selling author whose Infamous work challenges the conventional wisdom about specialization productivity and what it takes to become successful what advice would you give to a person that's thinking about how to navigate their way to being really good at something first of all being a scientist of your own development and creating what's called a self-reg practice what is that so the cycle is flect what do you need to work on plan come up with an experiment for how you can work on that is that getting a job is it taking a class Monitor and then evaluate and people who do that repeatedly they just keep improving two so for anything you're doing if you're not 15 20% of the time failing then you're not in your zone of optimal push where you're getting as much better as you possibly can what about Focus I get distracted easily and I want to be more productive in the time that I spend working don't start your day with email it's been shocking to look at the research how big of an impairment that is what about notifications so if you're getting distracted all the time if you say well now I really have to hunker down I'm going to get rid of the notifications you will start self interrupting to maintain the interruptions to which you have become accustomed really yeah that will go away but not immediately but there's a lot of things that you can do for a productive day for example if you that has enormous influence in your productivity interesting the other thing I found which was pretty shocking was they start talking about some of the dangers of specialism yes Harvard Leed studies found if you're in hospital with certain cardiac conditions when the most esteemed Specialists are aware way you're less likely to die gosh that's terrifying the conclusion was that's because this is a sentence I never thought I'd say in my life um we've just hit 7 million subscribers on YouTube and I want to say a huge thank you to all of you that show up here every Monday and
Thursday to watch our conversations um from the bottom of my heart but also on behalf of my team who you don't always get to meet there's almost 50 people now behind the D of a CEO that work to put this together so from all of us thank you so much um we did a raffle last month and we gave away prizes for people that subscribed to the show up until 7 million subscribers and you guys love that raffle so much that we're going to continue it so every single month we're giving away money can't buy prizes including meetings with me invites to our events and ,000 gift vouchers to anyone that subscribes to the DI Co there's now more than 7 million of you so if you make the decision to subscribe today you can be one of those lucky people thank you from the bottom my heart let's get to the [Music] conversation David yes how do you summarize the work that you do and why you do it and who are you really doing it for I am obsessed with correcting what I view as mistranslations of scientific research about human development and so that is the core of my work and I think I'm doing it for everyone who is curious but either doesn't have a scientific background or doesn't have that particular scientific background curious but interested in self-improvement but doesn't either have the time or or the means to to go sifting through this evidence themselves and what is the sort of Realms of self-improvement that you have focused on thus far in your career well earlier on I was focused in physical skill acquisition like in in athletics but increasingly uh I've moved into career and personal development generally and looking at that with a very very kind of long lens right so one of the most important things to me one of the most important messages that I've been working on the last few years is the fact that sometimes optimizing for short-term development will undermine your long-term development so let's say if we're thinking about sports or music or something like that the obvious thing to do is to get a head start and whatever you're doing pick something stick with it don't don't switch things because then you've lost time Focus ver very narrowly and do as much of it as you possibly can to the exclusion of
other things that's such an obvious way right and you will jump out to to a lead right we see that in sports and music we see that in school with certain Head Start programs that give people an advantage in some academic skills the problem is that kind of narrow Focus creates short-term results but undermines this broader toolbox that you need for long-term development and so you'll see what scientists call Fade Out in these advantages which isn't isn't necessarily actually anything going away it's the fact that people with this broader base will catch up and surpass so it appears to be a fade out okay so if you take more time to get a broader understanding of something whether it's in sports If you're sort of a child prodigy um over the long term that's going to benefit you better and help sustain your development but in the short term you might lose out because there's some kid who is doing you know really deliberate practice obsessively and he's going to have a it's kind of like the tortoise in the hair yeah analogy where you know the tortoise uh eventually wins the race yeah I mean there's a there's a a big body of research in Psychology that can be summarized with the phrase breadth of training predicts breadth of transfer okay transfer is the ability of someone to take skills and knowledge and use it to solve a problem they haven't seen before right you transfer to a new situation and what predicts your ability to do that is the breadth of problems you've been exposed to in practice if you're exposed to like a broader set of problems you're forced to build these generalizable flexible models that you'll be able to apply to new things going forward across all of your work at the very heart of what people are trying to achieve in their lives what is that at the very very heart of what they're trying to achieve that you're speaking to getting better getting better at things right obviously people want success but I think there's pretty significant research showing that people are often actually reacting to their trajectory as much as their act actual absolute performance level that the feeling of improvement the feeling of moving on it gives them some sense of fulfillment right and eventually
obviously will get them to to a higher level and so I think really this is for people who are interested in how do I get off sort of my plateaus going forward and viewing it as as a lifelong journey as opposed to trying to Peak when they're 12 right it turns out that the way to make the best 20-year-old 30-year old 40-year-old is not the same as the way to make the best 10-year-old is is there sort of a tie here with the subject of just happiness and how to live a happy life fulfillment for sure yeah those aren't exactly the same but they're important so so to think about this in a career development perspective right I think probably the most interesting research on fulfillment in careers was this project at Harvard called the Darkhorse project and this was looking at how do people find a lot of these people were very financially successful and all that stuff but the dependent variable was fulfillment okay sense fulfillment and when people would come in for sort of an orientation in this study they would say things to the researchers like uh you know I started off doing this one thing I was Medical School whatever didn't really fit me so I went over to this other thing and I I learned I was good at something I didn't expect so then I went this other direction and you know I came don't tell people to do what I did because like I came out of nowhere and the large majority of people that was their story that's why became named the Darkhorse project Darkhorse is this expression that means coming out of nowhere and that the norm in this day and age was that people who found fulfillment would travel this kind of zigzagging path where they would learn maybe I'm good at something or bad at something that I didn't expect maybe I'm interested in something I didn't expect and they would keep pivoting and they would say instead of saying you know here's this person younger than me who has more than me they'd say here's who I am right now here are my skills and interests here are the opportunities in front of me uh I'm going to try this one and maybe I'll change a year from now because I will have learned something about myself and they keep doing those pivots throughout their career throughout their career until they achieve what Economist call better match
quality that's the degree of fit between someone's interests and abilities and the work that they do turns out to be extremely important for both your performance and and sense of fulfillment uh and your apparent grit if you want to talk about that so so just on that before we move on to grip the does what advice does that then mean you would give to a young person at the start of their career that's thinking about how to navigate their way to being both really competent really good at something and successful in any sort of uh monetary way but also maintaining fulfillment um throughout their life I think there are two two main things to take away from that one is to not over focus on long-term planning like I think we we lionize having long-term goals and that's okay there's nothing wrong with having long-term goals but those aren't necessarily always so useful for you in the moment right when I think about myself when I was a competitive 800 meter Runner I could have a time goal for the end of the race but that didn't help me actually do anything that just you see the clock when you're done and you're either happy or sad having goals that are let me try let me try moving with 300 meters to go that gives you an actionable experiment so short-term planning I think is is one of the takeaways uh and and creating what's called a self-regulatory practice so self-regulatory learning is means basically thinking about your own thinking taking accountability for your for your own learning and some of some of the coolest studies in self-regulatory learning actually came out of soccer football done in the Netherlands where this woman named Ry elfring gemer was following kids from the age of 12 right up through some of them went on to teams that um you know were Runners up in the world cup and what she'd see in the kids who got off performance plateaus there were certain physi measur someone had to have like if a kid couldn't hit at least 7 me a second sprinting which isn't that fast but if they couldn't hit it they weren't making it to the top that's so there were physiological parameters but also the kids who would get off performance plateaus were the ones where if you look at them in video when they're they're younger they're saying going to the
trainer like why are we doing this drill I think I can do this already like I think I need to work on this other thing and and you know sometimes a trainer might be like oh man just get back in line you know but these are the kids that are thinking about what they need to work on what they're good at they're making this cycle the the self-regulatory cycle is reflect what are you good or bad at what do you need to work on how do you need to do that plan come up with an experiment for how you can work on that monitor a way to try to measure whether objectively or subjectively and then evaluate did that experiment that I ran work and making me better at this thing or not and people who do that repeatedly they just keep improving and I think that's what the dark horses are doing in their careers they're saying I'm reflecting on what I've got I'm planning a way to test something that'll fit me I monitor it maybe subjectively maybe objectively and then I evaluate what that tells me to do for the next step and you just get better and better and better over time so if I'm say I'm in my early 20s in my career how do I take that and then Implement Implement that in a within my life to make sure that I'm going to get to the World Cup metaphorically speaking Yeah so and there's something interesting about the 20s that I think is worth saying which is there's this finding in Psychology called the end of History illusion and this is the finding that we always underestimate how much we will change what we think we're good at what we think we're bad at how we want to spend our time what we prioritize in friends Etc and EV at every step in life people underestimate how much they'll change in the future change continues for your whole life it does slow down so we're constantly Works in progress claiming to be finished constantly through life the fastest time of Personality change is about 18 to about 28 when you're telling but it never stops but that's about the fastest time when we're telling people hey now you have to have it figured out right and that's when they're changing like crazy and so I think it's even more important to have this self-regulatory practice in a journal I would say I mean I do it these questions can be basic
what am I trying to do why what do I need to learn to do it who do I need to help me learn that how am I going to make sure that person is there to help me what experiment can I set up to try it and then come back and evaluate the experiment and pick a next one be being a scientist of your own development I think is Inc it it's it's counterintuitive because you would think that we would just internalize this stuff just from doing things M but the science is pretty clear that we we don't get everything we can out of our experiences from a learning perspective unless we're doing it more explicitly so I would recommend for someone in their 20s to start this self-regulatory practice what got you into the work that you do and how did you define your profession okay so in my past life I was training to be a scientist environmental scientist I was like living up in the Arctic studying the carbon cycle like in a tent um and I had been a competitive Runner I had a training partner who was one of the top ranked guys in the 800 meters in his age group in the country uh first family of Jamaican immigrants was going to be the first one to graduate college Dro dead a few steps after a race uh and our sort of Hometown paper said well he had a heart attack I don't even know what that means for someone of that age and health right and I got curious and eventually I kind of worked up the courage or whatever that sounds silly to say it that way but um was nervous about it to ask his family to sign a waiver allowing me to gather up his medical records did that turned out he had like a textbook case of this disease caused by a single genetic mutation that's almost always the cause of young athletes dropping dead and I said we can save some people from this with more awareness and I wanted I decided to merge my interests in sports and science said I want to write about sudden cardiac death and athletes for Sports Illustrated which I grew up with so I got off the science track I left after my masters uh kind of weaved my way to sports illustra I got in there as a temp pitch this story about sudden cardiac death and athletes they're like temp sit down right and then the Olympic Marathon
trials for 2008 US team uh came to Central Park and the guy ranked fifth in the country dropped dead like 10 blocks from our office and then they said don't you know something about this and so you know in a week I was able to write a cover story making it look like we had done like two years of research in a week and I became the science writer at Sports Illustrated it was an interesting you know I came in there as a temp six seven years behind people who were younger than me MH doing sort of more remedial work for them but I realized pretty soon that my Oddball background right I I think I was shaping up to be like a typical average scientist but you take those average science skills and you bring them to sports magazines like you're like a Nobel laurate you know um and so I realized I I could just make my own ground instead of having to compete with anybody but the initial impetus for getting into this merger of sports and science was was a personal tragedy and how did you define yourself from a crib perspective of a writer are you a scientist how' you I view myself as this merger between a science writer and investigative reporter because what really fires me up is when I view that there's a really popular misconception about something really important to human development and that that's that's what led to range I mean I was at Sports Illustrated the 10,000 hours rule work was the most famous science in human development perhaps ever in terms of popular consumption and I said well I want to write about it and then I started reading the research and saying this is wrong it's the most popular finding in our field it's maybe the most popular skill acquisition human development research ever done and it is not right and so those you know these things kind of stick in my brain and I I have to do something about it 10,000 hours what is that for someone that's never heard about it before yeah and what people think about it probably depends where they have heard of it if they've heard of it but it's the idea and scientists call it the deliberate practice framework but it's this idea that the only route to True expertise is through 10,000 hours of so-called deliberate practice which is this effortful
cognitively engaged like not just swatting balls at the driving range you're focusing on correcting errors kind of practice and that there is no such thing as Talent differences it's really just the manifestation uh of 10,000 hours of you know of differences in your amount of hours of delivered practice so you should start as early as possible and there's something underlying it this is a little nerdy but called the monotonic benefits assumption I know scientists not going to win any marketing competitions but that basically means that the idea that two people at the same level of performance will progress the same amount for the same unit of deliberate practice also false and it's one of the underlying premises of a 10,000 hour rule yeah because I've always I've always heard that I mean it's become a bit of a colloquial phrase to say you've not put your 10,000 hours in which means you've not put enough practice to become a master I I I mean I mean I was told that if you do 10,000 hours in anything you become a master in it that's the kind of narrative right well to take some chess research for example there's uh people have been tracked and it takes about 11,053 hours on average to reach International Master status in chess so that's one level down from Grandmas so first of all 10,000 hours in that case would be a little low but some people made it in 3,000 hours because they learn a little bit more quickly other people were continuing to be tracked past 20,000 hours and they still hadn't made it so you can have 11,053 hours rule on the average doesn't actually tell you anything about the breadth of human skill development so why why is that so important for me to understand how does that liberate me from from wasting my time or aiming at the wrong thing well fit turns out to be really important so people learn at different rates and different things so finding where you learn better is really important if you want to maximize your advantages and I think that goes back to one of the reasons why people need to try a bunch of different things CU you're insight into yourself is really like limited by your roster of experiences right um and so you kind of need to figure out where you have comparative advantages but for a lot of
people that's so-called skill stacking where instead of doing the one thing for 10,000 hours you get proficient at a number of things and overlap them in a way that makes you very unique and so I think this idea of just head down doing the same thing I mean we can should we go back all the way and talk about the the research underlying the 10,000 hour Ru because that's where I first got onto this I wanted to so I was a walk-on meaning I wasn't good enough to get recruited as an 800 meter runner in college and I ended up being part of a university record holding relay so I went from being uh you know a nobody to being quite good and so I was inclined to believe this 10,000 hours like yeah just you know just my hard work and then when I started reading the research and I'm looking through the original paper written in 1993 and the original paper was done on 30 violinists 30 violinists at a world-class Music Academy okay so let's let's start dissecting the the problems here the first problem was what's called a restriction of range these people were already in a world-class Music Academy already highly pre-selected pre-selected for something again for the stat heads here that is correlated with your dependent variable which is skill that's a problem if you're trying to develop a general skill development framework that would be like to give an analogy if I did a study of what causes basketball skill and I used it as my subject's only centers in the NBA and I said well height has no effect on skill in the NBA because they're all 7 feet tall so I've squashed the variation in that variable so in in my first book actually did an analytics project where I took height among American male adults and height in the NBA as you might imagine there's a very high positive correlation between a height of an American male and their chance of scoring points in the NBA but if you restrict the range to only players already in the NBA the correlation turns negative because guards score more points than other positions mhm so if you didn't know that if you just did that study with only NBA players you would tell parents to have shorter children to have them score more points in the NBA so when you don't bring some sense of what's going on to your research and you
rest strict range that way you can end up with the wrong message aside from that Gods score more points or less points they score more points and they're shorter ah okay right so if you if you don't look at the whole population and you just look at people who are so highly pre-screened they're already at the top you can end up with these sort of backward advice the other issue that caught my eye when I first read the study was that there was they only reported the average 10,000 hours was the average number of hours of deliberate practice by the the 10 best violinists by the age of 20 and then there was a second group and a lower group and they said there was complete correspondence meaning nobody who had practiced fewer hours was better than anyone who had practiced more hours but they only included the average so I couldn't tell that so I said oh I would like to know if that's true can I see the data to see if that's true and I so I contacted the you know Andre Ericson a wonderful guy who was the so father of the 10,000 hour rule although he hated that uh moniker actually um and I said you know can I see the data or the measures of variance to know how much variation there was between individuals and he said well you know people were inconsistent on their repeated accounts of their practice so we don't think that's important I said well everyone has trouble with getting good data that doesn't mean they don't report the measure variance so after I started criticizing This research 20 years after the study came out they did a paper updating it with some of the actual data and you could see the original conclusion was wrong there was not complete correspondence some people who had practiced less were better than some people who had practice more some people had gone way over 10,000 hours some people were way under and had done better there were all sorts of other factors that mattered right like I like to call it the 625,000 hours of sleep study because the top tier group got a lot more sleep they were sleeping like 60 hours a week on average compared to lower groups and that was a a huge difference in the study how much they were sleeping so it could have just been sleep sleep or but there was just tremendous individual variation yeah so
this idea of an average completely obscured the real story which was that there were actually people who were practicing less and doing better than people who practiced more so there were all one problem after another I just said you know I'm getting Youth Sports pitches I'm getting investment pitches like citing the 10,000 hours rule it's not right and it's giving the wrong impression of how hum devel and this idea that you need to just Pi something and with it and that's sampling to try to figure out where you have your best shot is worthless and that's wrong and so I became kind of obsessed with getting after that I really want to become successful in the things that I'm applying myself to in the season of my life so whether that's podcasting or starting businesses my business portfolio is quite varied of sort of different industries from everything from sort of psychedelics to um SpaceX to whatever it might be and so when I was you know thinking about sitting down with you today I thought maybe I'll just tell him where I'm trying to get to in my life I'm a I'm a 30-year old man so you know I'm I'm not in the early phases of my career does that mean for example that I can't make ground now what phase of your career are you in I don't know because I had this 18 to 28 thing so I thought maybe I'm a little bit more rigid and you know there was research a few years ago from MIT and Northwestern and the US Census Bureau that found the average age of a founder of a fast growing Tech startup top one in 10,000 guess what the average age was on the day of founding guess 25 45 and a 50-year-old had a better chance than a 30-year-old but we never hear just like we never hear the story of these like Zig zaggers we only hear the Tiger Wood story we only hear like Mark Zuckerberg famously said young people are just smarter when he was 22 do you hear him saying that anymore no surprise surprise but we just we never we we like valorize precocity so I would not say that you're not in the early stages of your career you're certainly not by by that metric and that's not to say that there aren't tremendous companies or if you know measured by market cap that some of that there are these amazing young
Founders but they get outsized attention compared to what's the norm that that's another thing that's really important to me is not to say there aren't acceptions because there as many different ways to the top as there are human beings but I think we're constantly focusing on the exception when people should at least be aware of the norm so the average so the fastest growing did you say Tech Founders Tech startups but Tech in Tech in this context also included things in agriculture right it's not just photos sharing apps like Tech broadly speaking which I think is important because it I think it's fair to say that it's less likely a 55-year-old would understand some of the more emerging platforms that are native to say you know like a Mark Zuckerberg at 22 who's messing around in his dorm room with with computers and the internet yeah I think that's fair but technology touches a lot of other areas of the you know it's like yesterday on the way here there was a I was learning about a software that I had never heard of because all of the computers were down in the airport right Technologies in all these places that we that are not as kind of uh don't have the sort of figure head that's publicly profiled the same way so if I if I do want to become okay so I understand that this season of my life I can do whatever I want in terms of I can aim at whatever I want doesn't mean I'm going to be good at it but if I just want to be more productive in the goals that I am aiming at so say you know this podcast means a lot to me so I want to be more productive when it comes to figuring out how to move this podcast forward how to innovate um how to solve some of the problems and challenges that we face what are the first things that spring to mind when I start speaking about productivity with a very focused task I mean I think your a challenge for you is going to be that this podcast has gotten so big and you've gotten so competent at it that you're going to be in what uh a rut of competence or what Economist Russ Roberts told me a hammock of competence you're in an area where you're so comfortable and so successful that getting better is going to be harder because there's disincentive from changing anything that you're doing right and you have to take some risks I mean you know that you're an
entrepreneur if you're going to want to get better you're going to have to take some risk I think that's going to be a difficult thing to do because you know there are people in this room that depend on you uh risk for you is risk for them too and so I think you have to start thinking about what would be some smart risks if you want to innovate with the podcast what might that look like and finding ways to run small experiments I'm a huge fan of low stakes practice right how can you set up some low stakes practice for what might be a worthwhile larger experiment and I think that's the same for individuals dring in their career like I love this phras my my favorite my absolute favorite phrase in range was is a paraphrase from this woman named herminia Ibara who's a professor at the London business school and she studies how people make work transitions so her phrase was we learn who we are in practice not in theory so the thesis of her work is that there's this idea that you can just introspect and go forth and know what you should be doing you know like like Clark Kent running into a phone booth and ripping off his and becoming comes out as Superman but work is part of identity and it doesn't change like that from introspect you actually have to go try something see how it went what was unexpected what did you learn that you might be interested in or or that you're better at that you didn't what's something that you're good at that you realize you're not using and then you make your next step based on that right and I think when you're so competent and successful and getting only you know tons of positive feedback for something uh it becomes hard to take risk and so I think that'll be a challenge for you because if you take a sufficient amount of risk right you want to be in your zone of of optimal push so for anything you're doing if you're doing practicing whatever physical skill anything if you're not at least like 15 20% of the time failing then you're not in your zone of optimal push where you're getting as much better as you possibly can and I think when you have something that's very successful that's hard and so I would start thinking about what risks you're willing to take and it doesn't
mean it's a failure if something goes backward right if the views go down or whatever metric you're you're measuring on it's interesting it's supp to see something it's one of my great obsessions in life and it's also one of the things that keeps me up at night bugs me in the shower is um how to keep a team conducting experiments and failing more when they are successful so when this podcast went to number one in Europe I hir ahead of failure and her sole responsibility is to increase the rate of failure and experimentation in our team which means just get all of our different departments we've got different departments in this particular business so there's 40 40 odd people in this company called the D CEO and there is a production team there is the social media team there's the commercial team for example and there's the guest booking and Logistics team and I I felt we're actually in La driving down the road and I was speaking to jamaa who's the head of the guest booking and research team and I was saying like one of the the most important thing now now that we're number one is that we keep like disrupting ourselves because there's going to be some kid like we were three three years ago that because of their naivity that they're not encumbered by all of this sort of like convention and all this success so hide a head of failure and experimentation who's in our team has been working and now in in the last couple of days we're running an experiment where every single one of those departments has essentially like a failure assistant in it who is who's because you know what happens with people they they get busy doing their job and experimentation and failure is always secondary to their job so if we put failure people into the each team and they drive the experiments they understand the team they drive the experiments they measure them and most importantly they report their failures and experiments back to the whole team because there's really transferable learnings for example there was one the other day where the social media team discovered this thing on Tik Tok which allows us to look at a guest like you and find your most popular videos ever on Tik Tok with a click and the social media team had figured that out which was really useful for them but then the
research team over here that are booking guests who are trying to find the best videos that a David has ever made they also benefited from just the discovery of that button because instead of having to scroll through the entire Tik Tok they can press one button and see your most popular videos so it's all there's this real 1 plus 1 equal 3 getting the teams to share their fails failures and experiments so they don't have to fail in the same ways so what did you just write down this this brings up so much stuff because the fundamental problem you're getting at here is the one called the explore exploit tradeoff right um and so explore is what it sounds like looking for new knowledge or new things that you can do that'll add value exploit is taking stuff you're already good at that you already know and drilling down on it and this is like the fundamental challenge for people in organizations that did good is once they've find something they're really good at and they drill down in it they tend to ditch explore modee yeah right and balancing that explore exploit and there's all these of course you know these like famous business cases like Kodak invents the digital camera and scuttles it because they're like why would we disrupt our own business but there was this fascinating work led by a guy named dashen Wong in Northwestern uh who does like people will do Career Development studies looking at 20 people and he'll look at 20,000 people you know so his work's just fascinating and he what he saw in this work with his colleagues was that people tend to have hot streaks in their careers their best work tends to come in clusters most people will only have one some people will have more than one if they're lucky and reliably what precedes a hot Ste he was looking at I think it was like 26,000 like film directors artists scientists reliably what precedes a hot streak is a period of exploration where they're trying these different styles they're going broad they're they're keeping a smaller team so they can be nimble they're moving between teams and then they find something and they they drill into it and if going to have another hot streak they do it again they Zoom back out and they go to this explore explore explore and then exploit
so they toggle between these modes instead of staying just in one but the clear message of his work is that exploration precedes a hot streak and if you don't do the exploration you just settle into exploit at sort of a middling level then you're you're kind of sacrificing your your hot streak so that that was one of the things that came up for me the other thing was this you got to something this idea of people not only doing things that might fit fail and I think that's great that they have the title failure right cuz you'll have the uh you know Adam Grant who I think we both know is he he he mentioned me some once something called the hippo effect where it's like the opinion of the highest paid person in the room I think the is the acronym where their their signaling is really important for everyone else so if you're not just giving lip service like yeah failure is good but actually giving people that title I think that's a great signal for you're underwriting risk you're underwriting risk for people psychologically and you're creating what what scientists who study sort of networks like groups of teams call an import export business of ideas and this is one of the Hallmarks of organizations and and ecosystems that learn and adapt to to a changing world and the import export business of ideas means you need to have information flowing through an organization you have people doing different things maybe people even moving teams here and there so I always think of the engineer uh Bill Gore who created the company or founded the company that created gortex and he fashioned the company based in his observation that organizations often do their most impactful work in times of Crisis because the disciplinary boundaries go out the window and people start what can I learn from my neighbor you know and working together or do he like to say real communication happens in the carpool which I think is a funny saying but I worry about that with more hybrid and remote work where you can't necessarily just rely on Serendipity for people to be sharing these ideas in this informal way and so I actually think we have to be a lot more thoughtful about setting up our own import export
business of ideas internally and it sounds to me like that's what you're doing okay so what about then on in an individual level how do I as an individual I've got you know lots of things I'm doing I'm writing some books at the moment I do the podcast lots of other things how do I become more productive within an organization because there's my to-do lists I've got 10 to-do lists from all of my different team members who can put things on there um I get distracted easily I think because I end up watching a video about AI on YouTube or about Rockets or something and I want to I want to get more done really I want to be more productive in the time that I spend working so this is when you know what you should be doing when I know and you know there's nothing wrong with sometimes like watching YouTube and Rocket like that's you get ideas from doing kind of stuff myself but T Todo lists is a lot of to-do lists yeah do you get most of the stuff done on those to-do lists it's more so each team from my chief of staff to my assistant to my manager has a to-do list on Monday that they send things to me on and then I go through there and it's either a task or it's an approve or it's just letting me know something and that's kind of how it works so I at one point had when I was getting overwhelmed with some stuff I had a virtual assistant for a little while and we would categorize like emails into list a priority b c d all this stuff and eventually I realized that was empowering me to do a lot of low value things I became efficient at doing things that I shouldn't be doing so I was seeing this public email address of mine that when I was oblivious to it I wasn't answering and that was fine and but once I knew it was there I'm like oh I have to answer this I have to answer this I have to answer this and so one important step for me was realizing that only the A-list is the stuff that's going to get done because I'm a limited person with a limited life so one I think it's maybe you do need to do all that stuff or you just need to be aware of it but some of it is just I think there can be a danger in someone who has a lot of support resources uh where they can lose some of the aspect of prioritization where you just need to say this is the list that's
important other things I might not get to but for someone like you I would I would suggest something like not starting your day with email or messaging because you know we were talking a little bit before about this thing called the zarnik effect which is this idea that an unfinished task leaves like a residue in your brain basically and makes you it makes it harder for you to fully transition to doing something else and because I expect your various inboxes will always be an unfinished task right yeah if you start the day with that no matter what you do the residue is going to be there for what you try to switch to next so I'm not saying don't address your email but I wouldn't start with I would the day before what is the thing that if I get done tomorrow it's going to be a good day and start with that before you do the things that might leave residue on your brain and start multitasking how do they know that's true have they done studies on this aonic effect yeah yeah absolutely I mean you can see you can give people one you can do it in a workplace environment where researchers like Gloria Mark for example will be tracking everything from someone's Vision to what they're doing on their computer to their heart rate variability and seeing how long it takes them to get back to a task um increased switching when there's like like a residue in their brain so their rate of switching will go up uh you know some of their indicators of stress response will go up or in a cognitive task they'll perform more poorly if there's something still stuck in their brain so there's also sort of laboratory experiments where you give somebody something don't let them finish it give them a cognitive task and you see does it impair their performance if they weren't allowed to finish the thing that started before I want to close off on that point of just team culture then how to get a team of people to do really exceptional Innovative work and to fail faster is there anything else that's sort of pertinent to you and I'm saying this purely selfishly because it's one of the things I think a lot about even with this podcast is how to get our teams failing more often if that's even the right thing to be aiming at the type of
experiments we should be running how we should be running them anything else at all yeah I mean I don't think I don't I don't lionize failure for its own sake right it's just I think it's inevitable if you're experimenting enough that you'll have some failure but I think one useful thing to do like a guy I love who's made a big impression on me named ed Hoffman was used to be the chief knowledge officer at Nasa that's like after NASA had some disasters most every they did was very successful but obviously they had some high-profile disasters he was brought in because they were deemed not a learning organization they weren't learning from lessons of the past and he was brought in to help create a knowledge system so that people would learn from the lessons of the past and one of the things he does in organizations when he goes in because now he consults is he goes around he asks people what are you good at that we're not using right and people always have an answer for that and that leads to well what's some what's an experiment that we can run to try to use that thing that you're good at that we're not using so I think that can be kind of a foundational question to help people set up some of those experiments but also a big impact would be and this is a tough one you going ahead and failing in an experiment because that's going to set the agenda right but you would actually have to fail like this can't be you go out for a jog and you trip on the curve or something like you have to fail something of consequence uh and and then your reaction to that can set a tone um so that's on the the team level so I just I want to really think about how on an individual level I can become a better learner because one of the things I do obviously for a living is I do this podcast and I meet all these incredible people and they say things to me that in the moment change my life but I feel like I forget them five minutes later often some of them stick some of them don't so I've always wondered how can I become a better learner people come up to me in the street and say you might you must know so many things about so many things and also my audience they they tune in every week they listen to
these incredible people how can we become better Learners what is it we can do to ret retain information better and then also bring it into practice in our lives oh to retain inform okay for retaining information one repetition and familiarity is important right so if there's something that's really important to you you should reread it because the first time you go through if you're hearing new things new terms you're using your working memory just to keep up basically so so to put this in kind of a simple way like there's research where you look at school kids and if they're given um like an essay about baseball say the kids that are deemed really good readers and there are kids who are deemed poor readers and the the kids who will do the worst on comprehension are the poor readers who don't know anything about baseball but the kids who know about baseball but are not as good readers will still have better comprehension than the kids who are good readers but don't know anything about baseball if they only get to go through once because having some knowledge helps you fit it into what's called your semantic Network the spiderweb of all the ideas in your brain so one going back over things that can be taking notes whatever it is but when you learn something new try to fit it into your semantic Network when you learn something connect it back to something you already know so like when you have these conversations you probably have a better tendency to remember things where you say you know that reminds me of some other guest that either agrees or disagrees with something that some other guest said and you've attached it if you think of your brain as like the spiderweb things are attached by threads and if you vibrate one thread it's more likely to shake these other ideas into your brain so when you're learning something new stop and try to fit it into your existing base of knowledge if you want to return better can can I use that to sort of fit it into an example so I'm thinking of you you said something about um what is something I don't use but I'm good at would the listener that's listening to this now in order to embed that think of something that they are not using that they're good at because then it kind of
brings it into their absolutely okay absolutely use it as quickly as you can again repetition but fit it into your network of ideas like stop if you have to because you know you can read a ton but if you're not kind of and and I think I think reading even things that you don't retain still change your sensibility at some level even if you can't consciously pull up all of the ideas and statistics and so on but for things that you really want to be able to access connect it to other things that you already know and someone's called space repetition like if you can have a way where you come back to it at intervals that'll be much better so I use this um like readwise as a programming I'm not like affiliated with them in any way it's just a thing that I use where if I have highlights in Kindle books or ebooks it will feed me back my highlights at intervals things that I thought were important regularly and that's taking advantage of what's called spaced spaced repetition where if you you want to actually leave a space almost to the point of forgetting something and then if it's brought up again you're embedding it better in long-term memory so this is for for learning anything spaced repetition language learning all this kinds of stuff so you would think that you just repeat a thing a million times as soon as you have it and that's the best way to Grapple on to it that's not the most efficient use of time it's actually to to space it out and quizzing yourself is a great way to retain so there's something called The Generation effect which is if like if you have to do highlighting versus uh flash cards flash card quizzing is much better the generation effect is being forced to come up with an answer primes even if it's wrong in fact sometimes especially if it's wrong primes your brain to then retain the right answer it's actually something called the hyper correction effect where if you're really wrong about an answer you're much more likely to remember the right answer once it's given to you so if you're looking up a piece of information I suggest you guess what it's going to be before you get the answer it doesn't matter if you're right
or wrong might feel bad to be wrong but it doesn't matter you'll better retain it when you see the right answer but if I'm wrong then I'm I guess I'm more shocked so there's even more retention of that new answer it's Salient I mean this is this is what this is so this is one of this kind of quizzing where it feels hard because you should do it before you know the answer is something I wrote about in range called desirable difficulties these are things that make learning feel less fluent they are unpleasant they may slow you down much better for long-term retention interesting so the more difficult the learning the more you learn often I mean but I guess there can be a case where something so over your head that you're not learning anything right but these desirable difficulties are like one of the most famous ones is called interleaving or mixed practice and this is if you're training at something you you want to vary the types of pro so let's give an example DJing I'm I'm DJing at the moment okay so I don't know all the skills that go into DJing but if there's a way to do it you should try to instead of doing the same skill over and over and over again well let me give you let me give you a research example and then you can Port it into DJing so in a recent study there were dozens of uh middle school math classrooms Middle School of sixth grade that were assigned to different types of math learning some of them randomly assigned some of them got what's called blocked practice that's you give like problem type a AAA bbbb Etc kids make progress fast they're happy rate their teachers highly Etc other other classrooms got what's called interleaved or mixed practice where instead of doing a followed by B it's like you took all the problem types threw them in a hat and Drew them out at random progress is slower they might be less happy because they don't feel like they're getting it but instead of having to just execute a procedure they're having to match a strategy to a type of problem and when the test came along where everyone has to transfer to new problems the inter Le group blew the block Practice Group away it was like the effect size was like taking a kid from the 50th percentile and moving them to the 80th just by arranging the
practice in a way that made it more difficult what's going on there I think I mean it seems to be and this this work for physical learning as well I think this is one of the reasons why this if you want why fotsa is like why like 90% of the best footballers grow up on fotsa instead of like playing on full-size pitch um is that it forces you to instead of doing using procedures knowledge which is you learn how to execute this procedure over and over you're doing making connections knowledge which is identifying the structure of a problem and foring out how to match a strategy to it and so you're building this like mental template instead of just an ability to execute this like flexible template that can be applied going forward so you're getting like a broader context of the challenge versus a very narrow solution perspective to how the challenge is solved you're kind of understanding it from a deeper level right from different sides and and you're building this generalizable model in your head of how to approach it I mean my my favorite and I'd be the only person to say this but my favorite study that went into range was this one the one that surprised me the most I guess was this one that was done at the United States Air Force Academy which is this amazing place for experiments because they get a thousand new students every year those students are randomized to math classes that all have the same test and same grading and everything then they are randomized the next year and randomized again so you can get these huge experiments randomizing people to math classes and they looked at 10,000 students and found that the teachers who are the best at getting students to do well on the test in their own class in their own intro class right teacher year one has students who score highly on their test those students go on to underperform in the subwing classes and teachers whose students sometimes rated them lowly poorly because they thought it was hard don't do as well on the test the first year overperform in subsequent classes and the difference is the way to get someone to do really well in the test is to teach this very narrow body of knowledge that they'll have to execute at the test the best way to prepare them for math learning is to give them this
much broader connection of ideas that will serve them later on so again this is like to me the theme on every page of range that would have made a crappy subtitle is is sometimes what seems the best in the short term will undermine long-term development the tricky thing with that as you say is I I think about all the areas and industries that I'm playing in now so I go do I have the time to go broad like if I'm learning to DJ at the moment and at at the moment I'm just trying to figure out what these [ __ ] buttons do you know what I mean like there's all these buttons I'm trying to press them in the right order but you're telling me that the thing that's better for my long-term development might be just to spend some time understanding music and how it's made and how and understanding like the the Beats of music and make maybe spend some time making music myself cuz right now I'm just trying to smash two songs together at the right time I think this gets at a fundamental issue that that that maybe I should have brought up earlier actually so and it has to do with how you characterize the different tasks that you're trying to learn so there was a period where I was really confused about the research I was reading in in building expertise because there were two camps of researchers both led by eminent scientists one that would study people doing sort of more 10,000 houry kind of approach same thing over and over and they would get better and this other camp that would find if people did that approach Not only would they not get better they would often get more confident but not better which was a bad combination and sometimes it would get even worse with really narrow focus and I could not figure out how to reconcile these things why are they finding such different results again I'm looking through for all these signs of you know bad data not not finding it and fortunately um I I gave a talk uh where I was doing some of the critiquing of the science underlying the 10,000 hours Rule and the Nobel La Daniel Conan who wrote Thinking Fast and Slow was there and someone asked he asked someone for my email address and like months later he followed up and invited me to lunch and we go and have lunch and I'm
like I'm and he was he was interested in my critique of some of the research and I was saying I'm really confused you know what are you working on now I'm working through my confusion about this why do people sometimes get better with narrowly focused practice and why sometimes don't they he said oh I've done I've got the paper for you and basically he referred me to this body of research about kind versus wicked learning environments these are terms coined by a psychologist named Robin Hogarth kind is like next steps and goals are clear rules repeat uh it's based on patterns repetitive patterns rules never change give me an example chess golf uh in chess the grandmaster's advantage is largely based on knowledge of recurring patterns so you better have started studying those by age 12 or your chance of reaching Grandmaster drops from about one in4 to about 1 and 155 also why it's relatively so easy to automate uh feedback is quick and accurate uh not a lot of human behavior involved work next year will look like work last year on the other end of the spectrum are wicked learning environments where patterns don't just repeat they might fool you rules may change if there are any feedback could be delayed or inaccurate um work next year may not look like work last year and so whether or not people get better with this very Nar in a predictable way with this very narrow practice depends a lot on where on that kind to Wicked Spectrum the the task happens to be what's an example of a wicked lining environment so let's say one one of the examples uh that I loved that he turned me to was uh in medicine because there's a lot of areas in medicine where something is done and the person making the decision actually never learns of the consequence of the decision um or I'd say I would say like judges some cases in like the criminal justice system are set up to have maybe the worst judgment they could have in some ways because they almost never get feedback they have like very little they can do whatever they want and they almost never get any any feedback but so in in medicine there was this one example in one of the studies that I thought was just interesting and illustrative where um this this physician became famous for being able
to diagnose typhoid it's a New York physician by feeling around palpating people's tongues feeling around their tongues with his hand and he could tell you know we or two before they would even get it this person's going to get typhoid and as one of his colleagues later observed he was a more prolific spreader of typhoid than even Typhoid Mary he was spreading it with his hands by touching their tongue making the prediction they would get typhoid which would turn out to be correct so would reinforce the lesson that he was really good at prediction that's a really wicked learning environment where the feedback he's getting is reinforcing the exact wrong lesson right but I would say most of the things that most of us are doing have feedback that tends to be delayed sometimes it's accurate and sometimes it's not it's never as accurate as like I hit that golf shot and I see if it hooks or slices and then I changed the the club face and and try it again and so most of what most of us are involved in increasingly right like work doesn't next year doesn't look like work last year for most of us anymore and in fact Andre Ericson again the guy who did the research underlying the 10,000 hour rule when he eventually wrote a book he he he made this caveat the book that said the 10,000 hours framework uh it applies to things where we know exactly how to be good and a coach can watch you do it and correct everything that you do wrong so it doesn't apply to most these other things that most of us do like computer programming and managing and Entrepreneurship and all these other pretty big loophole right in those areas you want this much broader toolbox I am I was really compelled by something I saw you talking about which was the story of Nintendo and why they were so successful in the early days because they have a a very Broad they take wrote down the quote um a lateral thinking with withered technology yeah that started with a guy named gune yokoi who was scored poorly on electronics exams in University and so he had to settle for a low tier job as a machine maintenance worker uh at a at a company in Kyoto that made playing cards with flowers on them whereas like his more prestigious peers went to big companies
in Tokyo and the company was in huge trouble uh it had to diversify if it was going to survive survive and he knew that he wasn't equipped to work on The Cutting Edge but that there was all this information available that maybe he could just look for technology that's already well understood and combine it in ways that his more specialized peers couldn't see and so he went and he took some well-known technology from the calculator industry some well-known technology from the credit card industry and combined them and made handheld games and those were those were a hit right that's what made Nintendo which was a found in a wooden storefront in 19th century that's what turned it into a to a toy and game Operation so he moved from machine maintenance to developing toys and games and his magnopus was the Game Boy right where um it was a technological joke in every way it's like the processor was a decade old the screen looks like you know rotting alala or something it's like and it came out at the same time as color competitors and it blew them out of the water because he knew what customers cared about wasn't color as much as it was durability affordability portability battery life game selection by using well-known technology people could make games quickly and so he kind of set this philosophy this lateral thinking with withered technology that was his phrase which means taking things that are already well understood and moving them somewhere where they're seen as invention and that actually turns out to be more the norm than the exception in terms of technological innovation particularly sort of later in the 20th century forward before that it wasn't necessarily the case much of the 20th century actually the most impactful patents if you look at patent research were authored by teams and individuals that Dove deeper and deeper into one area of Technology as classified by the US patent office but starting in this sort of Information Age period um you know particularly 80s and accelerating forward suddenly it becomes a lot easier to access information more broadly and the most impactful patents started to be authored by teams that include individuals who've worked in a whole number of different classes and they're often merging things from different
areas uh for invention so how important is focus in this this equation focusing on one thing because you're talking for much of this conversation about being Broad and people will associate that with being unfocused yeah it's it's a right I think the differen is between doing a bunch of things sort of over your career over your life or a span and doing attempting to do a bunch of things at once we can't technically do a bunch of things at once like we we don't really multitask we don't have the capacity to do it we're actually just toggling between things really quickly um and it's it's been shocking to me to look at the research how how big of an impairment that is for people's performance particularly because it takes time to switch and so you're not again it it's it the the scientist Gloria Mark who who I think has been at the Forefront of study of attention describes your brain as like a whiteboard where you're doing something and to do something else you have to erase and that residue is left and it's still going to be there when you move to the new thing for a while and so you you can't totally get into the next thing if you're interrupted um and and it impairs your performance and it's stressful that's been the most surprising part to me is that when people are heart rate variability is measured and some immune parameters um that when people switch a lot like if you just saw how many times people switched their task you know email to this other thing to some notification over a day you'd have a pretty good bet at predicting their stress level and their performance level over the day really yeah they've done studies on this she has done that she's hooked people up you know at Big organizations too like inside Microsoft and and places like that um where people are wearing heart rate variability monitors everything they're doing is being tracked in the old days she was like sitting behind people with a stopwatch but technology obviously progressed from then um and I think that's a surprising aspect of it one of the reasons that email makes people so stressed is because it leads them to do this like con I think in one of her studies people were checking email office workers were checking email and
average of 77 times a day that's a lot of switching when you're switching in and out of email and that just turns out to a stressful thing because there there's switching actually takes place in two uh kind of phases where you the first phase is is shutting down what you are doing and the next phase is activating the rules for the next task so even if you kind of think you're doing the same thing like you're working on focused writing but you're also in a slack Channel or something with a friend or colleague those are both writing but they're not the same style of writing and so you're still having to activate different cognitive rules and that that comes with a switching cost so if I can do something about it what should I do to to make sure that I'm both happy um more productive and healthier I would again not start your day with something that is inherently a multitask so if you cannot start with email I would not start with it because I view that at least for me as something that will start the day with multitasking and will always feel unfinished like never feel like it's finished um blockout times where you designate on your calendar that this is the only thing that you're doing and leave some buffer for it because there's something called the planning fallacy we always overestimate how much we can get done in a given amount of time so I'd say fewer things on your to-do list fewer things and on the top maybe even just one thing that's if I get this done this this was a good productive day focus on that thing you know pay yourself first do the important thing first and really try to have some when you're trying to be focused it's important to mingle with people and exchange ideas when that's what you want to do but when you really have to be focused to try to be in a place that's as distraction free as possible and un that includes even you know turning down or off music even though it's Pleasant and can help your affect and can motivate but it also does have an impairment on cognitive function because you are paying attention to it to some degree so don't listen to music while I'm doing my work I mean that's hard to say because I do it sometimes too because it can have an energizing effect or it can have a calming effect and those are good but it does take up brain
space so you have to balance those how do they know it takes up brain space you can see how people perform on tasks when the music is on and when the music is off and it's it's a it's it's not as big a deal if the music is very familiar where you're kind of like it's not novel so you're not attending to it the same way but you know when I'm trying to be super focused now I'll I'll turn the music off but if I feel my sort of motivation waning then maybe I'll tune it back on but I want to use it deliberately instead of just having it in the background all the time because it takes up a little space if it's and if it's real noise like decb is a logarithmic scale so small differences are actually a big deal but if you go from I think it's like maybe 70 to 80 DB that's like the difference of going from a like a washing machine to a vacuum cleaner thereabouts in your background noise that has a enormous influence on your cognitive ability and your productivity like like a 15% decrement in your because of sound yeah volume s because because you attend to it you attend I mean our that's how our brain like focus is a challenge because this is not the situation that we evolved in right we evolved in a situation we're paying attention to novel stimuli is a really good thing and sometimes it's still a very good thing but it's at odds with a lot of these modern things that we're trying to do that are pretty new tasks for for people what about instrumental music because I tend to find that if I'm listening to music that has lyrics in it then I find it quite distracting when I'm trying to do some work specifically writing work or reading work so when I'm researching guests for the podcast like I was today in my hotel room I had a song playing it was a rap song and um it was I could I could feel my brain subtly jumping from the screen that I was reading to the rap lyrics to the screen to the rap lyrics almost like just oscillating between the two yeah and I thought you got to turn that off cuz you you're not reading I turned it off and I really made progress but I but I sometimes when I write like books and stuff like that I put instrumentals on and there's actually some apps in the App Store now that are called like focus
music and they're lyric free music and maybe like lot not lots of tonal changes or not very complex maybe repeating I mean I think that's going to be better right the less novelty there is for you to attend to that's better but think it's also worth trying it with with nothing and it depends how much you're pushing yourself right like a tiny an improvement of motivation or your affect or feeling good might be worth it if you're not all the way at the edge pushing yourself right I don't know if you've ever been on a there was there was a time where I was trying to uh you know do some foreign language lessons uh that I was listening to while I would be running and if I started hitting it hard while I was running I couldn't even remember what was said because it's you switch into being really focused right and so I think it it depends if you're pushing yourself all the way you need everything like there there are times when I'm writing where I'm trying to balance a lot of ideas in my head and I almost feel like I'm overheating a little bit yeah and if I'm in that phase I I I want every Advantage I can have um so push the distractions out but but like there's also times to be to be pleasant I think I think part of what's sensible is working in intervals planning to work in intervals Focus hard for a little while do the myangelo then switch to your your little mind where you're we're doing something that's sort of more fun and refreshing and maybe let you incubate for a few minutes also take a shower take a walk you know what about notifications uh because you know I have a lot of notifications I try to turn them all off but they're still there in the background and um you was talking before we got going about this sort of internal barometer of distraction that we all have yeah yeah this is so this is another aspect of of Dr Mark's Work where she found that we have this kind of internal mechanism if you're getting distracted all the time by notifications or whatever it is and switching a lot if you say well now I really have to hunker down I'm going to get rid of the notifications or whatever this stuff is you will start self- interrupting to maintain the Cadence of interruptions to which you have become accustomed right as if we have some internal like
distract ometer that is saying this is your normal Cadence of interruption I'm going to continue it by popping into your brain oh here's this thing I need to check oh here's this person I didn't respond to you know you'll self- interrupt that will go away but not immediately so if you want to have a lower Cadence of interruption you need to like build by getting rid of those external interruptions know that you're going to be self- interrupting for a while and that'll go down more slowly so it has to be more habit formation instead of just today I shall be you know uninterruptible okay so just want to make sure I'm clear on this so say that I get a notification every M every I get 10 notifications a minute and that's what I'm used to right and then I decide to turn my notifications off because I'm used to 10 notifications per minute you're saying that I will basically think of 10 things per minute to interrupt myself with yeah for a while because that's what I'm used to so we get comfortable with a certain level of interruption at a certain Cadence and even if you we remove the thing that's interrupting us we'll just replace it with something else that interrupts us that amount at that Cadence yes so you can see in studies where people are taking cognitive tests if they have their phone invisible even if it's off the people who are more phone dependent or sort of more used to interruptions they'll have a a bigger impairment on the test if the phone is even like visible or around them because they'll yeah and so it's you know what thing did I forget to do and I think something that can help with this is keep a pad nearby and when that thing pops into your head of the of what you forgot to do or who you forgot to respond to write it down so at least it's maybe that helps it not stick in your mind where you're trying to hold it in working memory like cognitively Outsource it so at least it's not sitting in there and I think that can help the adjustment it makes me think a lot about people that struggle with sleep and just sleep hygiene generally because if we're you know if our phone is this thing of interruption throughout the day then we go to bed cuddling our phone which a lot of people do um it's probably going to
have quite a big impact on our ability to sleep yeah I mean I wonder if you know I think there's some I think our phones are really useful for certain things and I think they are disruptive for other things and I wonder if sleep is one of the most important because you don't really want to be like leaving residue on your brain when you're trying to go to sleep so I would put the phone as far away as possible when you're really trying to sleep and not at the last minute either personally which you do oh I leave it in a different uh floor and airplane mode have you always done that no when did you start doing that well I definitely do it when I'm in the process of writing a book because then all these things that I take for granted I'm like now I really got to lock in and and be better um and I have a I have a five-year-old son and I was more of a night person who would work at night like I would do a lot of my writing in the wi hours and he's getting up early no matter what and so I realized that I had to start being a lot more efficient about some of my schedule and started thinking a lot more about having it be dark having it be quiet having it be cool not having the phone around um the last thing I'm reading not being work rated otherwise I'll be thinking about that and it'll take me longer to go to sleep so I think I became a lot better about it when I when I had my son when my son came around it's funny you mentioned that you've got a son because much of your work made me think about what I'll do when I'm a parent someday because you talk about how these early years where if a child focuses on being a specialist in something particular or a generalist they have worldly different outcomes and I think as a big football fan and a big Manchester United fan I've always thought when my kid comes out of my wife someday the first thing I'm going to get him doing from the age of two months old is kicking a football around because then he'll be a Manchester United player I'll get to go to the games I'll be in the players box everything will be great but your work seems to suggest that that if I want him to become a Manchester star maybe I shouldn't do that you know I'm I'm not convinced that you are going
to be like a vicarious living kind of dad maybe you'll turn out to be but I'm not convinced um but let me tell you this you just reminded me of an interesting story where I was once giving a talk about some of this research in sports that shows that the people who go on to the highest levels again there are a ton of different uh paths but they tend to follow the Roger path not the tiger path so Tiger Woods we know are very early specialization famously Roger feder played whole bunch of different sports uh didn't specialize until later than some of his peers so tiger was playing golf since he was he was um at his father gave him a putter when he was 10 months old uh when he was two just as a toy he wasn't trying to teach him to be a golfer he gave him a toy as tiger himself said my father never once to ask me to Play It Was Always me asking him to to let me play but that's ignored but at at two he was on National Television you know you can go on YouTube see him on national TV showing off his swing and then by three he's saying I'm going to be the world's next great golfer uh he's world famous as a teenager by the age of 21 he's the greatest golfer in the world right on the other hand Roger played a variety of different Sports basketball uh rugby skateboarding soccer mother was a tennis coach but declined to coach him because he wouldn't return balls normally I guess didn't like deliberate practice kept doing let's let's see he did handball uh he did some rugby uh SK swimming wrestling when his coaches wanted to move him up to play with older boys he declined because he just wanted to talk about pro wrestling with his friends after practice and he was not focused on being the next great from an early age like tiger was in fact when he became good enough to Warrant an interview with his local newspaper the reporter asked him what he'd buy with his first hypothetical paycheck if he ever became a pro and he said a Mercedes his mom was a gas right didn't she thought this was like go sure and so she asks the reporter to hear the interview recording turns out he just said M CDs in Swiss German he just wanted more CDs not a Mercedes right she was fine with that so he went on to be every bit as famous as Tiger Woods but even tennis
enthusiasts don't usually know anything about his developmental story even though it's the norm according to the science we only tell we only tell the tiger stories even though that that one's the exception right and this is why do we only tell the tiger story this is part of the debate I've had with with Malcolm Gladwell when we're running together and he said well he told me it's a human cat video you know you go YouTube and see them at two years old and you can't you got to share it I think that's true but I think it's also because it feels like this tidy narrative that we can extrapolate to anything we want to be good at in our own lives the problem is as we talked about golf is almost a uniquely horrible model of almost everything else that humans want to learn it's like the epitome of a Kind learning environment where the situation isn't isn't changing you're not having to react so I think it's a bad model and we we underplay even for famous people the normal developmental trajectory like I once gave a talk to a small group of people about some of this research in sports showing that the typical path to becoming Elite is with a sampling period you learn a broad range of skills learn about your own interests and abilities delay specializing till later than peers and Serena Williams sat in the second row and I'm freaking out because you can present all the data you want but if the goat stands up and says you're an idiot it's going to be a bad day right and I'm like please don't let her ask a question of course she raises her hand for the first thing and she goes I think my father was ahead of his time he had me do uh ballet track and field gymnastics Taekwondo uh learn to throw a football for the overhand snapping motion of a serve when there was too much travel on like the you know a youth tour he took me off so I could focus on school I'd been a senior writer at Sports Illustrated and I had never heard that like I assumed that she was this kind of quintessential tiger story so I think even those stories when you look more more deeply uh they're not as clearcut as we tend to think well I I learned this myself when I I didn't know this as as the rule but I I found the story of lomachenko
because I I my friend of mine brought me ringside to a fight in New York City and I sat at the side of the Ring watching this guy called Vil lenko that I'd never seen in my life and I just couldn't believe his footwork I'd never seen anything like it in my life and then I after the fight he won the fight of course after the fight I looked into his win record and it was something like he'd won 300 of his amateur fights and only ever lost one and then he' gone back and beat the guy that he had lost against um and in my mind I'd never seen a boxer like it ever and then when I read into your work you've mentioned him as well as being one of these examples that had a really varied early upbringing didn't just focus on boxing and that's ultimately what made his skill stack so unusual and therefore probably what made him the best his story surprised even me where he took several years off to learn dance like d i mean I wouldn't usually expect someone to take years off it's just sort of do things in those same years so that was amazing but his father's called Anatoli and I think it was his father that took him off into Yeah dance classes or something and then let him go back to boxing so for your perspective child I wouldn't say like don't expose them to soccer I think because I think a lot of this is I think there's there's a few things going there are three buckets of things going on with why this delayed specialization Works in sports one is match quality again the degree of fit between who you are and what you do is that about passion like what you're passionate about ability and interests both and the earlier you force selection the more likely you put the wrong person in the wrong spot so especially when selection is way pre puberty okay you're probably putting people in the wrong my kid might want to be a boxer but I'm forcing him to be a soccer player and he might miss his potential with boxing premature optimization yeah okay and and that's also why we often see on junior teams the relative age effect you know where kids born earlier in their Birth Cohort are way over represented on Junior and youth national teams because when they're eight or whatever and selected if they're eight and 10 months versus just turned eight that's a huge
difference of development in that age and coaches mistake that biological maturation for talent and so youth teams are overloaded with kids born early in their youth cohort and also in school especially boys if they're younger in their age C are much more likely to get diagnosed with ahd but they're just acting like the younger boys that they are um okay and so and then that disappears at the top level so it's not it's not a good thing so there's the relative age effect that's one or premature you know choosing there's injury which is we now see a lot of adult style overuse injuries in kids and the main predictor of that is nine months a year of one sport and one sport only so this isn't about less Sports there seems to be a protective effect of diversifying that is separate from just doing less but actually you know balancing yourself out in some way but then there's a skill learning Advantage where it's similar to language where you know kids who grow up in a like with multiple languages they will often show a little delay in some of their language skills but that delay is totally wiped out in the long run and they have an advantage for subsequently learning other languages looks very similar in a lot of these skills where if you're diversifying there may be some delay but you have an advantage for picking up other skills later on and I don't think this is about whether you're putting on a basketball jersey or a football jersey I think it's about variability in your problem solving which is why I think so many of the great footballers grew up on fotsa where what's foots it's foot's with a small ball soccer like game with a small ball um I think I think the the Brazilian name is like football day Salo which it means like football in a room small ball stays on the ground played in a small space and kids will be playing on you know cobblestones one day and concrete the next day and and it's like in a phone booth you know at hypers speed and so there's no no one's drifting down the field and everyone's having to judge even if you don't have the ball pick up on body movements to try to anticipate what's coming next and the touches are about six times as frequent uh as in as in full scale football and so I think it engenders a lot more of
this sort of variability um than does just sort of the full scale game it makes your reactions a lot faster as well you have to make decisions faster with the ball but under yeah it's funny when you're talking about the tiger example and why people um broadcast that story more than they broadcast what you consider to be the the average which is just people having this varied upbringing and then eventually finding one thing and taking it forward it made me think that from my experience people broadcast that they basically broadcast anything that's the exception because it's the exception so the story of you know tiger WS as one example but the on the other side with someone like Anthony Joshua who started boxing at I'm going to Butch of this but let's say 24 I hear that all the time because it's so unusual that he would become world champion but start at 24 and the other story that you hear all the time is like the child prodigy story of like I don't know Michael Jackson or Tiger Woods that started when they were two you don't hear about the person that starts at like 15 right because it's not interesting right because it's the norm right or who ramps up in sort of a normal way if they started because early exposure is great yeah early exposure is good but yeah and and it's a little it's a little more equivocal right it's a it's less of a prescription also like so when when someone starts late we think they defied the odds this is amazing and when someone starts early that's a very easy example to emulate and so I think a lot of it is about that ease we referenced the word match quality but also we talked about passion a little bit which kind of is one factor of match quality a lot of people are trying to figure out what they should be aiming at in their life and they one of the most popular questions I get from young people is um how do I find my passion how do I know what it is or at least like what's the process def finding it and it's they refer to it as if it's this sort of Easter egg that one of them and have to find it there's not one and it's singular passion is a singular word yeah no I don't I first of all I think losing the idea that it is sing I mean that's like the idea that there's like a single soulmate out there for you you
know and I mean obviously I found my single soulmate but for most of the rest of you uh there's a lot of things you might be interested in in fact the more things you try you'll probably figure out the more things that that you're interested in I was just I was just like last week spending a little time I was at the Pentagon spending uh some time with a lieutenant general who helped with a program they call talent-based branching there where they were losing a lot of their the people they identified as The Highest Potential were leaving the the Army and they started this pilot program called talent-based branching where instead of saying here's your path you know here's your your career path get uper out they'd pair them with sort of a coach like figure and they'd have them dabble in like five different career paths a little bit reflect on it with their coach take some tests how this fits you they have to keep track of the Reflections in online portal again self-regulatory learning got to do it explicitly and in that process 90% of the army Cadets who went through that process changed their career preference 90 and this is just from a little bit of dabbling because you don't know what's out there you don't know what the opportunities are and that and you know it helped retention so people were more likely to stay if they find better fit this is I think actually one of the really important things about um and I'll I'll Circle back back to Passion a little bit there but when we think about grit right which everyone thinks of is I think about this and the reason that the Army made me think about it my semantic network is that the most famous grit research was done at West Point at the United States military academy by Angela Duckworth and her colleagues and it found that the grit survey the grit survey is a 12 question survey half the points are awarded for consistency of interests not changing what you're interested in and half the points for Persistence of effort or perseverance turns out to be a good predictor of who would get through this very rigorous orientation at West Point called Beast also has some predictive value for who would graduate so just to give you
some context for the listeners that from the way that I understood this is that Angela Duckworth did this study to basically figure out what it was that made people more likely to get through this very rigorous selection process at an army barracks or something and she determined that this this grit as she she called it was the thing that allowed people to be successful so from that study I've heard this all over the place that actually what makes people successful even in my team is great yeah yeah and that survey turned out to be a better predictor than were some traditional metrics of who would get through Beast like test scores and stuff like that it also had some value for who would get through the military academy as did some of those traditional metrics but tons of those like since about the mid1 1990s those very gritty cadets at West Point have been almost half of them have been quitting almost on the day that they allow they have a 5-year active duty service commitment after they graduate and almost half of them have been quitting and so the army at a certain point said oh we've got a millennial grit problem you know like too much avocado toast not enough mortgages or like whatever and then some scientists who also officers decided to study the problem and they said we don't we haven't gotten a grit problem overnight we've got a match quality problem right when the Army looked like the rest of the economy where it was more upper out and you fac the same kind of problems year-over-year and you could have a period of training followed by a period of working doing similar things lateral Mobility was limited that was fine it just mimicked the rest of the economy then you move into this whatever you want to call it knowledge creativity information economy and people who can engage in Creative problem solving and knowledge creation have tremendous lad Mobility they have lots of opportunities these young people are learning things about themselves in the early 20s and they have no agency over career switching to match it so they were just quitting right when the Army first didn't realize this so they threw retention bonuses at people and the ones were going to stay took it ones are goingon to leave left
anyway half billion dollars taxpayer money didn't didn't uh fix the problem but what I think it shows is that how limited your insight into what you might want to do is based on the things that you've tried again Herman bar as we learn who we are in practice not in theory and so I think the biggest problem for young people is if they're sitting around introspecting to try to figure out what their passion is go and try something it's not it's almost certainly not going to be the first thing it may be you may get lucky but it's probably not going to be the first thing so you should get going on that experiment process and start building a model of the world so that you can understand what your options are cuz I also think the issue with passion and happiness is again like I was talking about I think it was can't remember everything that was before the recording started and after um but like when I used to run the 800 meters or now when I write books if you ask me to any given moment am I enjoying this am I happy about it you know am I passionate about some's like no I want to throw my computer out the window are you crazy but it's so engaging it's so compelling and it pushes me in a way to learn that I can't do just on my free time and so I don't think we have to think about just passion find something that is so incredibly engaging to you uh and then go from there and engaging really is how do you know that it's engage it's when you sort of FL drop into that flow state where nothing else seems to matter or flow I mean flow is a tricky one because it's a lot easier it it shows up a lot more in people that are like surfing or painting than it does in some kinds of knowledge work but I think it when you when you get really engaged in something you a curiosity about how you can get better at it what else you can learn next so I think it it stimulates this kind of curiosity That You Don't See in people when they're just in something where they're kind of going through the motions so you you start to understand like when I I remember when my my then girlfriend now wife um it was important to me you know for health that like both of us be lifelong exercisers for example and the first time we we moved in together and I'm saying like all right
we got to identify uh something that works for you and I take her to a gym and drop her off and not realizing I have you know Decades of learning how to do stuff in a gym that I take for granted and then I realiz okay I need to sort of walk this walk with her and so we would try different things like running she wasn't as into that so then you know try some other thing etc etc and finally she found one kind of class and she comes home this day we did this and then we did this it was so hard let me show you this other thing we did I'm like you found your thing and the one problem was then when we were looking at moving States we had to be within 15 minutes of that kind of class walking distance for any house that we were going to buy but it's like you can see this curiosity develop uh when someone hits something it's so engaging that they want to understand how to be better they want to talk to other people doing it they get so curious about it but you have to experiment you have to experiment I wish there were a way out of that I wish you could say this is the thing that's going to work for you may maybe someday with AI I maybe but highly unlikely highly unlikely um and and AI just like changes the field that you're playing in right and so I think experimentation I think it's going to be even more important as people can't expect to be doing the same thing their whole careers anymore I mean they're threads that they can expect to to carry through but not the same exact thing when I saw your video called why Divergent thinkers beat Geniuses in the real world I thought you were going to talk about neurod Divergence in the video so someone that was you know diagnosed with ADHD maybe when I was about 30 years old I thought oh he's going to explain why neurod Divergence things like ADHD and autism result in um better outcomes in the real world has your work ever had any crossovers with NE Divergence not a lot but I mean I have read some of that work and I do think something that's really important is the more different types of thinking that we can like get into a stew the better off I think I think we all are I mean there are reasons why um ADHD like there's there's some
it's not it's not a big body of work but I think it's relevant where you can look at nomadic populations that then settled and you can see certain genes that are associated with and these are these are small effects um but you can see certain genes that are associated with uh like novelty seeking with with ADHD um will apparently start to be like selected out once they settle and it's more common when they're nomadic and what that suggest to me is that these are things this attentiveness to lots of different stimuli that are really important have been important for us ancestrally and are still important and so they're still here they may be maladaptive if you're telling someone they have to sit still in a classroom for 10 hours a day which I think is a difficult environment for anyone to adjust to but I think to some extent and I think this has happened sometimes in in some companies um that look for opportunities for people with Autism where you say okay where is this adaptive where is this type of thinking adaptive instead of maladaptive so useful instead of unproductive and I think if we're not doing that then you're missing opportunities to really use people who think differently from you yeah I mean it's interesting because your work does whether it is endeavoring to or not it really does make a great case for diversity in the workplace yeah yeah yeah uh you want to do a quiz sure pretend you're a doctor okay and I'm your put my white coat in my head with a little stethoscope around my neck yeah okay because that's that's what all doctors look like um and and I'm your patient okay and I've got a malignant stomach tumor and there's a new type of Ray or Focus radiation that can destroy the tumor if it's at sufficient intensity the problem is at that intensity it will also destroy healthy tissue in my stomach so how can you save me okay while you're thinking of that tell you a story there was once this General had to capture a fortress to to liberate a country from a brutal dictator and he had plenty enough troops to do it and there were roads radiating out like wheel spokes from The Fortress but they were strewn with landmines so if he marched all his troops down any one road he'd suffer a lot of casualty so he had the idea let's split up into
single file lines go to the different spok likee paths and we'll synchronize our watches and they converge there at the same time and they Liberate the Fortress okay or they capture the Fortress Liberate the country One More Story Once a fire in a small town in danger of spreading to neighboring structures fortunately was near Lake so neighbors are coming and they're filling pales and bailing water on it not working fire chief shows up she says stop what you're doing everyone get in a circle fill up your buckets get in a circle around the fire on the count of three one two three dampens the fire and good they put it out fire chief gets a raise okay have you can you save me now doesn't matter you should this is I'm giving you a very quick version but the answer is you can arrange multiple low intensity Rays around me so they converge at the focal point so they go through my torso without damaging me because they're low intensity but they converge at the right spot making high intensity and this is a very truncated version don't like if you were getting the real test you would have had a lot more time and still most people don't solve it so don't worry it's called the dunker radiation problem this is a very truncated version of a large body of research that shows that when you're facing a novel problem the number of solutions and the chance of coming up with a good solution are predicted by the number and breadth of analogies that your group can come up with and what predicts that is the breadth of experience of the people in the group so if you're facing a novel problem and you have only people with the same expertise it's not much better than having one brain okay what you want to do is come up with what's called a reference class where you sit down you come up with as many structurally similar analogies from all sorts of different areas like this sounds kind of like this and this other thing and they don't have to be as far flowing as what I just did but in in the studies where people have more time with each successive story you tell them more people will start solving the original one even though they don't know that they're related and so you want to get people together who are really different come up with a whole bunch of
uh of these like this kind of feels like this look for which ones are structurally similar and you'll start thinking of possible solutions yeah I mean that's just such a brilliant brilliant case for diversity in thinking and experience when you're building a team when you're co-founding a team when you're coming coming at a problem and I was thinking actually yesterday about um microphones so this is the first podcast we've ever recorded if people watching they might notice this all of a sudden it' be interesting to know if you notice this before I mentioned it but there's no microphone here and this is the first podcast we've ever recorded where there isn't a microphone here and I was thinking as you were speaking then about how when we had the debate about how to solve this problem with and the problem that we were trying to solve for is that there's guest bang on the table and it comes through the microphone people send me messages on LinkedIn saying hey it's so annoying that people bang and then whatever um so the microphones are now above us and coming down and as we sat around the three of us yesterday it's kind of a little analogy for what you what you're describing you've got will who's got his experience in audio you've got Jack who's got his experience and then you've got me who's got basically no experience but I do do a TV show called Dragon's Den where we wear a different type of microphone and we were all chucking in our solutions to this problem based on our own perspectives of audio recording so um we Jack's solution one but my solution before that was while on drag and then we have one glue to our chest so why can't we just glue it to the guest's chest and it was interesting watching us all it iterate through these different solutions that come from different places um doing this kind of cost benefit analysis on each of the solutions obviously one of the problems with my solution is guests will touch their chest right and then that'll [ __ ] that up so yeah yeah yeah they touch so and then also we have to grope them when they arrive which we also we didn't like but it's the same thing and you need you need a really diverse set of experiences to hone in on the winning solution um but in most Pursuits what we do is we collect people who have done it before collect people who've done it
before and and that it's not that you don't want those people you just don't want only those people yeah and and the tendency also is often to use the first analogy that comes up you don't want to do that either you want to like have a menu of possible solutions to to look at because like there's this thing called the creative Cliff illusion people think their most their best ideas and most creative ideas will come either quickly or not at all and in fact they tend to come later as you're trying to come up with ideas interesting yeah so but our inclination is that it's like this flash of lightning and either it comes or it doesn't [ __ ] that's made me question a lot of things I do because sometimes I get an idea I write it down and I share it straight away oh there's nothing wrong with sharing the idea right but if you're if you're like trying to solve a real problem I wouldn't stop at your first idea throw it out there for discussion and then allow it to and then keep yeah stay open to it and and don't assume that you know if something didn't come to you with like a flash of insight that you should just stop thinking you're writing a book about constraints yeah and you you know I'm not going to give away all all of the things in the book because you know you to sell it especially since like half of it isn't written so it's I can't even give away half but I found this story about Apple really important because it's helped me think about some of the things I'm doing in business but also in my life are you able to share that story of of Apple what you've discovered in terms of focus and constraints sure not not not Apple so much as as um another company uh called General magic that was uh a lot of the team that designed the original Mac came to this company and it was like the the the hottest thing in Silicon Valley and they were going to build um uh the iPhone they had the idea they had the vision like the drawings they have look like the iPhone they had the team from the Mac they had this incredible Talent uh they went public in a so-called concept IPO they didn't have a product yet but the idea was so hot that they were taken public uh and long story short it turned into a disaster because they had no boundaries they had as much money as they wanted they didn't have any customer in mind um they uh anything
they thought was cool they built it and so the project just grew and grew and grew and grew and never found the focus to to kind of turn into anything usable but a lot of the alumni that came out of there realized that that was a problem and so going forward they would have lessons like you're better off envisioning a customer even if it's the wrong person than none at all and just building something that's cool because even if it's wrong you can learn that you were wrong by trying something whereas if you don't have one you don't even have sort of a feedback mechanism for Learning and so it was spending some time with with some of those alumni um got me really interested in in constraints and uh I'm still putting together some of that some of that writing so I don't know that I can do it justice at the depth um that I could if I'd already written it but it's interesting with the words you use because there appears to be a bit of kind of like a paradox or contradiction in this idea of like breadth and then constraints and focus and it's this interest you know I mean that's part of the reason I got interested in it because a question after range that people had for me was you know how do you know when to focus right like so it really very much came out of this question because eventually you get this broad toolbox you have to focus it into achievement at some point right you don't want to just pinball forever which is what you said as your like hot streaks hot streaks right you want to folus into a hot streak eventually and it also came out of this aspect of me search you know research is research um where my own biggest challenge the bigger my projects are and the you know books being big projects for me the harder it is for me to draw the boundaries of what is in Bound because the the topics I take on in my my books are by definition can't be perfectly answered balance of Nature and nurture and developing a skill how broad or specialized to be and when and so I've had so much trouble saying this is the boundary for what fits in here and so I myself wanted to get better at at learning how to use constraints uh in in my own work so for the first time with this book for the first time I said because I I for both of my previous
books I've written like 15% the length of a book and then had to cut back because I just shove in everything I think is interesting this time I said I'm going to have an architect ahead of time forc myself to adhere to that and one of the first things I noticed was it's I I usually don't write the chapters in order and I I started with this book with my normal process of I'm going to jump in with chapter five because I just did the research and I realized because I was starting to see like this is going to break some of the structure up and downstream I'm leaving all these blanks because I don't know what I will have already said so I actually have to go back and start an order so now you know after being in writing for whatever like almost 20 years suddenly I have a totally new work process and I'm writing an order for the first time which is interesting and and a bit scary but I'm writing at length too I'm actually going to turn in a book at the length of a book for the first time are you not um at all concerned about AI as a writer because you know these models are getting smarter and smarter every single week and just generally how do you look at the the sort of future of work in a world of AI it feels like it's going to be such a disruptive force in you know oh I think it is career planning and like what do I do with my future I mean it might touch everything but one I love playing with it so I'm I have these competing forces of like maybe it'll um you know I'm a very curious person and so if I'm I I I play with probably about four different AI programs a day but the the one that's the most useful to me is called site. again is it I don't have like any affiliation with any of these things I'm just a subscriber s. where I can put in a scientific paper and it'll make like a app showing all the other papers that cite it and it'll try to automatically sort them into those that agree and disagree and it really helpfully will show the snippet of how that the target paper was cited in these other ones that I used to have to spend like go sit in a research library and be doing that by like scanning down a paper to find that so it's like a day now is an hour so and I love that like if that means my books don't sell as well but I get to learn 10
times as science that's a trade-off I'm definitely willing to make personally I'm not saying everyone should be willing to make that but I'm willing to make that tradeoff but in terms of work generally being disrupted yeah I mean I think the the model that I think of for sort of there's no singular model but for how technological innovation has disrupted work in the past a model that I like that I can tell sort of quickly is the introduction of the ATM in in the United States happened around 1970 uh so cash machine mhm um and I went back and looked at news coverage and it says like every uh you know 300,000 bank tellers are going to go out of business overnight and instead what happened over the next 40 years as there were more ATMs there were more bank tellers not fewer because ATMs made branches Bank branches cheaper to operate so there are fewer uh branches overall a fewer tellers per Branch but more branches overall sorry um but it fundamentally changed the job from someone who's doing these repetitive transactions repetitive cash transaction to someone who's like a marketing professional and a customer service representative and uh you know maybe a financial adviser it shifted them to these strategic goals where it's much broader mix of strategic skills so if we can Outsource some of that Kinder learning environment repetitive stuff to shift humans to being more strategic I think that's like a good thing right we think about I I know Radiologists have been some of the people deal with medical imaging have been some of the people who have often in these reports by banks that say who's going to be replaced they're often high on the list because they say the technology can you know read these pictures very easily radio just looks at a scan and tells you if you've got a cancer or something yeah but first of all I have yet to hear the problem of like wow too many people are having too easy access to Radiology right like I think we want more of this service but I think most doctors are not doing doctor house you know most of the stuff they're seeing is something they've seen a million times and I think a really important role for them is
strategic of well what should this mean to the person how should I deal with them and what what's reasonable to implement in their life and what's feasible for them to do to make a change and so I think it'd be great if we could Shi I don't think it will replace those doctors I think it might shift them to a more strategic role where they don't have to spend time doing the sort of more tactical stuff and can do the more strategic stuff so that's that's been e even in even in chess you know like when well like when when IBM's deep blue beat Gary casprov in chess in 1997 and he noticed that it beat Gary casprov he was so much better when he was he was the best in the world at the time now like a free app on your phone would be Gary casprov but and he noticed the computer was so much better at tactics these are these like small patterns of moves that he had spent his life memorizing but he noticed it wasn't as good at strategy which is how to arrange the battles to wage the war so he promoted what he called freestyle chess tournaments where humans and computers could play in any combination and the winners were neither supercomputers nor Grandmasters nor grandm with supercomputers two amateur chess players with three laptops they knew something about Chess they knew something about algorithmic search and they could coach the computers where to look like they couldn't even analyze their own games in like the winners press conference at a deep level because they didn't know enough about chest but I think the lesson there is it when the Tactical part was outsourced it shifted it first of all changed the people who were the best at the task like this and it shifted the humans to the more strategic level and so I think that's what we need to be ready to think about what can we hand off so that we shift to a more strategic level how might you be wrong maybe the Strategic level maybe these tools will be better at the Strategic level than we would ever be I still think there'll be a role for us in determining what their goals should be and that's a whole other level of strategy is like what kind of world do we want to live in I don't think in the near term that we're going to be taking our cues from them in that role but I think even the people like last year I
was sitting around a campfire with one guy who's running a generative AI company and another guy who was like his first investor and who himself had worked in AI like you know they were both uh technologically Adept incentives aligned and one guy was saying we'll have artificial general intelligence within three years for sure and the other guy was saying I think this is a glorified toy I still use Google more and these were two people with similar expertise with incentives aligned which to me suggests the degree to which even the people working on this stuff don't totally understand what its capabilities are or what it's doing um and so I think there's a lot that's I think there's a lot that's unknown someone made the case to me that they said uh think about it like this Steve you've got this Steve here say my IQ is 100 and there's another Steve through that war whose IQ is a thousand what would you give me to do as a task versus what would you give him to do as a task who would you want to drive your kids to school who would you want to I don't know answer you're saying we give everything to that person well this is the analogy he gave me he was like what are you left with okay even even if it comes to that point even if it comes to that point there'll still be the issue of comparative Advantage which is that these these models are incredibly energy intensive right and so you'd want to delegate energy to them for the things that you really want them to do so even if they are do end up better than us at everything because energy is not unlimited there will still be things that are more valuable to have us doing than to have them doing right even like I mean that's the case all the you may be better at certain things in your business but you're not doing them because it's a comparative advantage for you to do this instead of those other things so I think even if they do get to the point where they're better than us at everything there's still roles for humans but incredible amount of disruption right like what really worries me I mean I was reading about last year about technological innovation in history you know and we have like to put it in a very coarse nutshell it's like for 300,000 years we
lived like squirrels and then for 10,000 years we lived like farmers and then 250 years it's like everything changed every generation like crazy um and that's been hard to to adapt to um and I think you know I thought that the Industrial Revolution this you know which pulled ultimately led to pulling billions of people out of poverty you know changed everything I thought that because productivity increased so much that wages and things would have increased right along with them but it turns out that there's pretty good evidence that there was actually a gap of probably about 40 years between the increase of productivity and the increase of Wages that's not good like a 40-year gap between a huge technological disruption and like Shar shared Prosperity that's not something I think we can really afford and and what sort of helps solve the problem is that when lots of people got urbanized for the Industrial Revolution and looked around and said hey you have the same problem that I have we need to band together for Collective action I think the challenge now is we're like an invisible Factory so it's it's harder to get people to collectively act because we're not sitting next to each other dealing with this problem but I think we need to start thinking as a group of this technology is cool but identifying problems that we want it to work on not just building it out be for the sake of Jus it's cool what kind of world do we want to live in I think we need to be asking those questions I think it's quite unlikely that we'll be intentional with it in the way that you're hoping it'd be unfortunate I mean I think a good sign though I think is that even the kind of technologists who I think are usually prone to Hyperbole and saying like this will be the greatest thing even when it's obviously not going to be are sounding some notes of caution with this one in an early stage and so I think that's a tuned other people to some of those notes of caution I don't think that gets us out of the woods by any stretch the notes of caution worry me oh well that's the point they should worry I think if we if if we were where we are and not worried right now I think
that would be a lot worse what is the most important idea in your work that we haven't discussed in your opinion in the sports Gene I think the most important idea um that we haven't discussed is that uh Talent at Baseline like the talent you if you take a test in something your let's say you haven't trained in that thing that we'll call that your talent Baseline is sometimes correlated with your ability to improve from training so people training looks just like medicine because of differences between us some medicine might work for you in a way that it doesn't for me training is similar two people will get different results from the same exact training and sometimes how good you are to start is predictive of how rapidly you'll improve but very often it is not and that's a huge deal because we usually judge people's potential based on what we see right now or what we see at Baseline before they've really had a chance to train what I think the science shows is that this Talent of trainability is even more important than Talent at at Baseline and so if you're trying to evaluate people before they've really had a chance to find a training that fits for them again it's a messy answer because it means people have to experiment with the kind of training that works for them and that trainability is the most important kind of talent and I think that's a different picture of talent okay this is quite this is very important because it immediately as a employer I thought when I'm hiring people I you know if I'm hiring a producer for one of our podcasts whatever I shouldn't be focusing so much on if I'm was planning for them to work with for me and with me for 10 years I should be thinking about their trainability yeah I was going to say it depends how quickly you need them to get going right if you need them if you need to know what they know today and they need to be using that thing tomorrow yeah that's one thing um but if if it's about how good they're gonna get in the long run you just shouldn't assume that what you're seeing today predicts like their ability to improve at a certain can you measure someone's train ABY I mean you can measure it very easily and things like their aerobic capacity you
know the amount of oxygen that they can uh move through their body I mean some of the initial studies of this were done in in scenarios like that where you had everyone doing the exact same training and you were literally measuring physiological parameters you can do it in other types of cognitive testing and ability testing if you're looking for a sort of specific task that's a little harder if you're looking for a task that's customized to something in your business I think that's more difficult it's going to be a little more subjective I guess you could you can kind of look at other areas of their life I guess in the professional context to see how quickly they developed one of the things I look at when people apply for jobs to work in one of my businesses is I look at their LinkedIn resume but specifically how quickly they got promoted and moved through departments because that's kind of an indicator it's obviously not the most important thing but you'll go you click on someone's LinkedIn and you'll see they joined as an intern and then a year later they were a manager of the team then a year later they were the like director of the team then a year later they moved up to a different department a year later they became the global head and I'm like oh my God that this person really moves through the system well um and that is an indicator of a few things they get on with people because someone's pulling them up and saying that person go up their team are also um basically voting that they should be the manager um they have Proficiency in in learning rapidly because especially if they jump between sort of departments from HR to um culture whatever um and I I always think that makes them a bit more adaptable and teachable if they've shown that track record of changing profession and moving up the organization quickly interesting because that feels a little related to I think the an important idea that we didn't talk about from range has to do with so-called serial innovators these are people who make repeated creative contributions to their organizations no matter where they are even when they're changing like I said changing places and these people like a woman named Abby Griffin a professor and her colleagues who studied these people some of the
descriptions of who they are uh these are like literal phrases from her work they are systems thinkers they read more and more widely than their peers they have a need to learn outside their domain they have a need to communicate with people with expertise outside of their own area they appear to flit among ideas which doesn't usually sound like a compliment um they repurpose things are already available in new ways all these sorts of things and you can feel in her writing almost she's almost like talking to HR people saying just so you know when you define a role too narrowly you're making sure you select these people out or force them to go somewhere else to try to cultivate that kind of breath and I don't think you can create these people from Whole cloth but I think you can absolutely stifle them by not allowing them to do that kind of moving around internally and so I think when you're looking at hiring I think the organizations that I've been around at least that disrupt themselves continually instead of waiting to get disrupted Reserve at least some of their hiring for instead of saying here's a square peg for a square hole that we need tomorrow they say what is something we want that we would have trouble teaching let's go get someone with that and we can coach them up on the stuff we're good at so like an extreme example of this was this investment firm in Scotland I spent some time with bayy gford this like incredibly uh successful firm and I think they this is Extreme but someone there told me like they won't hire anybody with an MBA I think that's I don't think you should rule out things like that but anyway but what they would go is they'd say we want someone who has experience in this or that or this kind of thinking let's go get them because we can't teach that thing and then we can coach them up on finance it's going to take them an extra few months to get going because we're gonna have to teach them but the stuff that why should we hire for exactly the stuff that we can most easily teach let's hire for the stuff we want but that we would have trouble teaching and then we can teach them on it and I think the places that are looking to disrupt themselves keep sort of an eye open for that kind of
thing not for every hire but for some I want to share something with you that I found to be quite gamechanging if you're like me and always looking for new ways to add more plants to your meals then you'll want to keep listening for the next 30 seconds because I've got breaking news specifically for you from Zoe who sponsored this podcast introducing Zoe's daily 30 which is creating a supplement Revolution made from 30 plants it's designed to be add a your meal of choice every day no Ultra process pills no shakes just real food I just scoop and sprinkle it onto my breakfast every day which is usually eggs and avocado it's easy seamless and it's a great way to fuel my day and the best part is it tastes great and and because it's Zoe you know there's rigorous science backing it too which I love for my listeners Zoe is offering an exclusive 10% discount on your first order of daily 30 plus with the code podcast 10 just go to zoe.com da30 to get started it's already sold out twice since launching in July join me and let me know what you think one of the things I really love about your work is you always cite different studies and they're particularly fascinating I wrote down tons of different studies from different points that you've made made today but are there is there a favorite study that you that surprised you the most or shifted your your sort of Paradigm the most some of the the research about forecasting totally shocked me so the most famous work ever done on on forecasting making predictions was a 20-year uh program of research that had people making predictions about geopolitical you know social technological events and they had to get they got 83,000 probability predictions because people had to make specific probability predictions of the likelihood of an event by a specific deadline so like 20 20% probability of this happening by this time correct like that there's going to be and it would be very specific it would be a 20% chance that within the next 12 months there will be a military confrontation that causes at least five casualties in the South China Sea like it had to be very specific so that they could say if someone was right or wrong and they needed so many because they had to
differentiate luck from uh good luck and bad luck from skill and the worst forecasters turn turned out to be like the most narrowly specialized people who were it do not that these people are not important for generating knowledge but who came to see the whole world through sort of one lens or mental model and would they had spent their whole careers kind of studying one problem and and would see the whole world around that and they would wrap everything into that story basically so in in this this research they were called The Hedgehogs who knew one big thing whereas the good forecasters were the foxes who knew many little things and sometimes they had an area of expertise and sometimes they didn't but more important than what they thought was how they thought they would collect different perspectives they use social media anything they had to take their own hypothesis and tell get other people to falsify it for them uh and those people turned out to be the the best forecasters and when they were put together in groups with one another they became even better because they had this approach of of sort of borrowing from the scientific method to test their own ideas basically and it just surprised me that these sort of random people in many cases in a tournament where they were pitted against the intelligence community in the United States that had access to classified information that they did not they beat them handily and I just wouldn't have believed that unless I unless I saw it that that body of research about forecasting the ability to see around the corner a a big aspect of what made people good at it was actually the researcher who led this work described those people as having dragonfly eyes dragonfly's eyes are made of thousands of different lenses each one of which takes a separate picture and they are synthesized in the dragonfly's brain and so these people are gathering all these different perspectives and they can seem sort of confused and equivocal so they might not make for good TV guests they actually found in the research because they don't go on and say this is how it is like the housing crash is coming and bl blah you know they're more circumspect in some ways they might not
be as good TV guest but they're very good forecasters it just made me think that on a personal level I need to keep pushing myself out outside of my zone of comfort more that's one of the big things I took away from the book range but also just much of your work is it's easy to get complacent in What I Know Who I Am My identity what I do and in fact that's probably the biggest risk to my future success but also probably to my fulfillment as well and it it goes against our natural inclination to push into uh unknown territory yeah because the older we get the more like you know they say you can't teach an old dog new tricks I think it's more like the old dog doesn't really want to know learn new Tri tricks you know can't see the point in learning a new trick and to that point of the of the so-called Big Five personality traits in Psychology one of them is called openness to experience which is the most predictive of creativity and in in middle age it reliably goes down goes down but actually a study I loved in the book found that if you force older people to do something new can be some sodoku or something even if they don't get good at that thing if it's new to them it will improve their openness to experience so you can actually stem the decline of openness to experience it's not inevitable just by forcing yourself to do new stuff that you're not competent at is like great for brain health uh it makes your life feel longer because our memory Works in sort of chapters where when you try new stuff it's like a new chapter so it'll make your life feel like it's not passing as quickly and it keeps your openness to experience from declining and so just like picking something to do that's new even if you're not planning on getting really good at it I think is important it's funny I said that thing a second ago about um when I look at someone's LinkedIn and then I looked down and I found this little research um piece that LinkedIn did that I'd pulled out that said one of the best predictors of who um would become an executive in a company yeah was the number of different job functions that individual had worked across an industry so that's research done by LinkedIn wasn't it yeah wasited that was on about a half million members yeah and and the interesting thing about
that was I when I was in contact with LinkedIn uh talking about that and trying to get some of that data I said I kind of feel like your guy's product might militate against people doing this because you're saying this is this is who's doing the best but they might want a much cleaner kind of linear trajectory yeah um so maybe you should build another product where they can build a narrative into it and say Here's why I switched here's what I learned and what so what's the actual can you recap to me what the actual finding was I mean that was that was pretty much it that across a half million members that the strongest predictor of who was going to go on to become a future executive um was uh the number of different job functions that they' worked across in industry in a specific industry in Industry so not changing Industries not changing Industries although changing Industries there was a bunch of lower level stuff and changing Industries was useful at times also but to be an executive in a particular industry lots of job functions across that across an industry and does that mean different departments within that industry they characterize job functions you have to be doing something fundamentally different okay so give me an example I mean let's say I think probably the easiest one is where you go from being a a a a performer or a good performer to being someone who's managing other performers right classic one doesn't have to be progression though because but that's I think a very a very simple one right or in my industry it'd be like going from writing to editing would for sure be one which is kind of a mix of writing and and managing but that's the side step in your industry and side step yep for sure I mean some people would well I guess it depends some people would would view that and in some places it's going up but i' a side step the other thing I found which was uh pretty shocking was the in the part of your book where you start talking about some of the dangers of specialism and you referenced a study that found cardiac patients were less likely to die if they were they were admitted to a hospital yeah when the doctors were away we can tie in a few of the things we've been talking about to uh uh cardiac s to surgery here so so
this was this study so I think because I'm I'm conscious when I write about dangers specialization hugely important obviously and in medicine it would be crazy to say that specialization in medicine increasing specialization hasn't been both inevitable and beneficial in many ways but the point I was trying to make is that it's also an underrecognized double-edged sword to the point where these two Harvard Le studies found that if you're checked in to a teaching hospital with certain cardiac conditions on the dates of a national Cardiology convention when the most esteemed Specialists are away you're less likely to die that that makes no sense right that's suboptimal outcome and and the conclusion was that's because these researchers or these these surgeons have done the same procedure so many times that they will continue to do it even if it's not the right solution to the problem or if data shows that it doesn't work anymore and so this called the einstellung effect in Psychology where you've done you've solved a problem a certain way so many times that you will continue solving problems that way even if the problem has changed or if new data emerges that shows it's not the right solution so it's not to say those people aren't important but they are human and so they fall prey to the Ein stong effect that's again why you want some of this this mixture and to tyion surgery you know we've also been talking about distraction and focus one of those same researchers did some work that showed that if you have a surgical procedure and this this research looked at 980,000 procedures that if you have a procedure on the surgeon's birthday you're more likely to die within the 30 days after the surgical procedure and they attribute it to the increased distractions that the surgeon is having on their birthday they don't know whether it's external or internal distraction um but you might not want to have your again and you know and this these are not huge effects but over a large number of people it makes a difference and if yeah gosh that's terrifying so you one of the things I've come to learn today really is that knowledge is a double-edged sword like
deep knowledge on one thing really is a double-edged sword it will be your making but in the long term it might also be your breaking yeah and that really resonates with me because as we started the conversation with there's a lot of things that I'm like really knowledgeable about and know a lot about and in fact that's my biggest curse and I have to find a way to basically self-d disrupt myself continually and always assume that I am wrong and not not always assume I'm wrong always assume that there's a significant possibility that I'm wrong today and maybe yesterday I was correct but today I could be entirely wrong um I mean I've changed my mind about like fundamental beliefs I had you know when I was younger and it's weird to think I mean like I was a grad student environmental sciences and I was firmly of the belief that uh environmental preservation and technological progress were at odds and I feel completely the opposite now you know I think there are technological things we can do that ruin the environment but I actually think the salvation of the environment requires technological progress It's just like fundamental beliefs about the world so I think we should be open to that updating and from a career perspective you know if artificial super intelligence and like some new form of free energy does everything better than us then it does and we'll have to reorient life in some pretty dramatic ways uh but until then I think we need to dispense with the idea that you can live in a world where you did a period of training for most of us and then you're just going to benefit off only that training for the rest of your life you don't have to keep relearning we have a closing tradition on this podcast David where the last yeah I know I love this tradition I want to do it to like my friends when they come over interesting the last guest leaves a question for the next guest interesting oh boy it's so funny watching people's body language when I open this book they start to get quite nervous and it's so funny I've asked I don't know [ __ ] [ __ ] 100 questions today and it's when I come to this question that people take the longest time to answer so I'm like these questions just better than my questions um no some reason people get
nervous those other questions are things that are so top of mind for me that there's it's like a choice between which of the three things that are in my mind should I spit out this is like yeah this is very different yeah uh what's your favorite sandwich I'm joking imagine if that was it after all I'm going to get off easy no it's much more difficult than that the question is what what is your biggest fear and how do you plan to face it I have a tendency that I think in some ways is good um and fits with some of the things I've said but in some ways is bad to want to start things over a lot and sometimes that means burning them down even if they're going well and in the past I think I had that tendency with some of my personal relationships to I couldn't accept something going well and it had to change or get better and that led me to sometimes I think burn down some personal relationships in ways that I'm embarrassed of that I regret um and I see this even in my own work where I actually value it because I end up doing all these new novel things but it's almost like I can't and it's good because like after my first book they're like brand yourself as a sports Gene guy I'm like no that's dead to me now it's dead to me before it's even published it's dead to me and that led me to do these other interesting things but I sometimes worry that I have this like pathologic why can't I just accept this is this thing is good um and and let it be good and it worries me much less in my work life it worries me a little in my work life that I'll always want to burn something down and start over but it does worry me there but I have a more of a fear of it in the context of like friendships because I know what I've done in the past I think I'm better with it now but thinking about the values I have in my life going forward I don't want you know several relationships that were hugely important to me uh went away for things that were preventable because I was like if it's not perfect burn it down and I think that was a really destructive impulse um what is that in you what is that where does that come from I don't know I
think it's like this feeling of always want to be in becoming like this feeling of starting over and improving that I find intoxicating um but I don't think that has to apply to to personal relationships uh and so a value that I really want to work on I read this this book that kind of influenced me about philosophy and it's centered what's called narrative values these values that are objectively across cultures things that people value so it's could be like heroism right loyalty people value that other country and that you are subjectively attracted to and one of the ones that I think is valued in a lot of cultures that I'm attracted to but that I've not been good at is forgiveness and so my project is that's a narrative value I want to start building into my story to be a more forgiving person because it's not it's I'm not good at it uh and I need to get good at it and I'm afraid that I won't get good at it but I really want to well we learn don't we and that's um that's much of what is what is at the very heart of your work how to become better at learning and you've clearly demonstrated that you're learning in that regard I think much of the first the first step in learning is figuring out that we have a problem or some something to solve as you said with your experiments book and your books are so unbelievably wonderful because they present a completely original challenging unconventional approach to solving problems and you you do go at a lot of the things that many of us have accepted as narratives in our life and if we've accepted them as narratives and they're false then they're probably in some way doing us a dis service in the short or long term and that's why I find your work so wonderfully important because in many respects it is that counternarrative to a lot of the things that we've accepted and you do go the extra mile even though it probably gives you a headache I'm sure because a lot of authors that I speak to don't go the extra mile to figure out um if if what we're being told is true and ultimately that's a means to an end and the end is to allow all of us to live more optimized fulfilled and happy and productive lives in whatever domain in whatever definition we class those words
so thank you David for doing the work you do I'm so excited to read whatever you make next um and you're writing a book on constraints and I just already know that if it's anything like these two books range and the sports Gene it's going to be one of the most important books I've ever read so thank you that was a wonderful compliment I don't want to add anything to that [Music] perfect Ted has quite frankly taken the nation by storm a small green energy drink that you've probably seen popping up through a Tesco or through waitrose they've grown by almost 10,000% in a very short period of time because people are sick and tired of the typical unhealthy energy drinks and they've been looking for an alternative perfect Ted is the drink that I drink as I'm sat here during the podcast because it gives me increased f focus it doesn't give me crashes which sometimes might happen if I'm having a 3 4 5 6 hour conversation with someone on the podcast and it tastes amazing it's exactly what I've been looking for in terms of energy that's why I'm an investor and that's why they sponsor this podcast and for a limited time perfect Ted have given Diary of CEO listeners only a huge 40% off if you use the code diary 40 at checkout don't tell anybody about this and you can only get this online for a limited time so make sure sure you don't miss out [Music] [Music]