How to Find Your Path in Life with David Epstein
01:25:18 Share

Hello and welcome to Being Well. I'm Forrest Hansen. If you're new to the show, thanks for listening today. And if you've listened before, welcome back.

I've been looking forward to this episode for a while now. I'm joined by somebody I'm a personal fan of, journalist and bestselling author David Epstein. So David, welcome to the show. How are you doing? I'm doing well. Thanks so much for having me. Really excited to be doing this with you. I've been trying to book you on the show for like several years now or something like that. I didn't know that, by the way, just by way of excuse. I only learned this recently. Yeah, an email got caught in a filter or something. It was very serendipitous that way.

Your work is kind of difficult to put into a box. It's hard to summarize, which I think is kind of analogous to what you do. So how would you summarize your work to people? Well, I think of myself as a science writer, an investigative reporter, and I think I'm drawn to work that takes on topics that are important to human performance and self-development that everyone talks about.

but that usually only with intuition. And I want to bring stories and scientific research to those big, difficult topics like the balance of nature and nurture and developing skills and how broad or specialized to be. So I'm drawn to these topics that are important to everyone, but usually only discussed with intuition. And I want to try to bring some more rigor to them to make those discussions both more interesting and more productive. So I first ran into your work

I don't know, 15 years ago at this point, something like that, where you wrote a story in Sports Illustrated where you were one of the co-authors on it talking about how Alex Rodriguez was using performance-enhancing drugs. Oh, this is very early. You've been with me almost since the beginning of my journalism career. There you go. So I literally remember where I was in college when I was reading that story. So you have a degree in environmental science and journalism.

You did research on urban air pollution. Then if I'm remembering correctly, lived in a tent in the Arctic and studied the radiation that plants give off. Then you went on to Sports Illustrated. Then you wrote a book that was called The Sports Gene. And then your most recent book is Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, which became a number one bestseller.

And your personal history is kind of an argument for what you talk about in the book, that experimenting and having this diverse background can actually be as effective as heavy specialization, which is the typical path that people are kind of taught about how to get good at something. Was that operating consciously for you when you were doing all of this, or was that more in the background? Absolutely not. Absolutely not. It makes sense in retrospect, but not prospectively it didn't. I mean, I was training...

I was on path to be a scientist. When you mentioned I lived in the Arctic, I was in grad school in environmental science. When I got off that track, I didn't think, oh, this is a strength. I mean, a few years later, I ended up at Sports Illustrated and I started as a temp fact checker. And I was maybe five years behind people for whom I was doing like their low level work. And so I was behind. But pretty soon I realized that my unusual background was

Uh, in science and actually, and then I had gotten my way into journalism by being a crime reporter at one point. And both of those backgrounds were typical in a certain milieu, but were very novel once you brought them over to a sports magazine. Right. So I think I was shaping up to be like a fine, competent scientist.

But you bring those normal scientist skills over to a sports magazine, it's like, you're like a Nobel laureate or something. So it was like, all of a sudden, it did give me the realization that you can take something that's seen as normal in one environment and bring it over somewhere else. And suddenly it's seen as something really unique. And so after that, I was able to use that to kind of zoom past that.

The people younger than me, I became the youngest senior writer at Sports Illustrated. And I did realize then that, oh, this is a thing I can keep doing where I can take something that's not unusual in the world, but bring some unusual skill to a certain domain. And then you're like on your own. You're not competing with anybody. You're just competing with yourself. You're kind of crafting your own ground. So because I was the science writer at Sports Illustrated, which wasn't something I wasn't competing with anyone else. That just wasn't a thing before I had an opportunity to craft it.

Yeah, I so relate to this on a personal level. I feel very much like a generalist. I feel like somebody who knows a good amount about a lot of different things. But I wouldn't call myself an expert in any one thing. And I was fortunate to find a career kind of like you that allowed me to do a little bit of everything, interviewing people on the show, learning about different ideas and sharing and explaining them to people. But that feeling that you said a second ago about being five years behind,

is so real in my experience of it, where when you take more of that winding path, it's really easy to feel like you're not on track or like you're not kind of where you're supposed to be. Yeah, I mean, that I think gets at one of the fundamental reasons why I kind of wanted to write Range. Like I didn't have it as a book idea initially. It sort of partly came out of this debate I was having with Malcolm Gladwell, but also when I started getting interested in some of that research

Again, when I was at Sports Illustrated that showed that future elite athletes actually delayed specialization in their main sport and kind of had this, what scientists call a sampling period where they gained a variety of skills.

I was involved for some years doing volunteering with the Pat Tillman Foundation, which people may know is Pat Tillman was an NFL player who left in the middle of his career to join the army and was killed in Afghanistan. And the foundation gives scholarships and grants for career development and career changes to soldiers and veterans and military spouses. And I got invited to give a talk to like a small group of Tillman scholars. And I just talked about some of this delayed process.

specialization in broad skills in sports. And I was like, well, since these people are not professional athletes or whatever, I'm just going to look up and see a little bit of other research in some other professional areas. So in the last two minutes of the talk, I tack on and say, you know, and this pattern may actually show up in some other places. Their reaction to it, this was like a dozen people, right? And they were like former Navy SEALs who were in grad school at Harvard who were like, oh my gosh, I'm so afraid I've been behind. And I'm like,

You got, you think you're, and it's like, that's the message that they had gotten. I'm like all of their employers, the experiences that they got, people wanted that, you know, they later learned that, that they got these experiences that they could not have gotten in any other way. And those are tremendously valuable, but it does give them the feeling of being behind at a certain point.

Yeah, so you mentioned Gladwell a second ago. And his work, particularly 10,000 Hours, is kind of the poster child for how most people are taught that getting good at something works. You pick a thing, you do it a lot, you do it until you get amazing at it, and then you become this really successful individual who goes on to achieve great things in their life. And

One way to think about your work is that it was kind of born out of asking, wait, is that actually true? And you had a sort of famous interaction with Gladwell about this at, I think it was the Sloan Sport Conference way back when, if I'm remembering correctly. That's correct. That was the first time we met. So the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, which is started by...

a guy who's now an executive with the Philadelphia 76ers. And it's ostensibly about sports analytics, but it's gotten broader and broader over the years. This is the sports nerd Super Bowl, just so people listening who might not be familiar with it. This is like the absolute spot for analytics geeks and that kind of stuff. Totally, yeah. Which I would count myself among for the record. Excellent. So this was the first time we met. So I wrote my first book, The Sports Gene, and didn't really... I thought it was just my side kind of passion project. And it kind of took off. And

I got invited to debate Malcolm because I had criticized both his kind of translation of the 10,000 hours research, but even more stridently, I think I had criticized the research itself. So again, it was my science background, you know, even though it was in the geological sciences, turned out to be very valuable for like parsing statistics in some of these papers and things like that.

And so, yeah, we got invited and I'd never met him before. Obviously, he's very clever. And there's like an MIT grad student who's supposed to do a pre-call with us to set us up, but Malcolm's very busy. So he was like, no, I'll be fine. We'll just show up there. And I'm like, oh gosh, I have no idea what to expect. But so I did a lot of homework and I guess I didn't want to get embarrassed on stage. Read all his work. Of course, he had made strong arguments for, again, we were supposed to be talking about sports. We ended up meandering in different places, but

He had made strong arguments for, to be the best athlete, you want to just pick a thing as early as possible and focus in on so-called deliberate practice, which is like not exploratory. That's effortful, coached, focused on error of correction. And what I saw was in research, you know, I was a science writer at Sports Illustrated. I saw the studies showed elite athletes did spend more time in deliberate practice, unsurprisingly. But in the studies that actually tracked performers over the course of their development, they

the pattern looked different where early on those future elites actually spent less time in deliberate practice than peers who plateaued at lower levels. They tried a variety of different activities. They gained these broad general skills, sometimes called physical literacy now, that scaffold later technical skills. They learn about their own interests and abilities and they delay specializing until later than peers who plateau at lower levels. And so I brought up some of that data. When we were coming off stage, he said,

actually, you got me on that one. That doesn't fit with what I thought and wrote. And this was in Boston, but we were both living in New York at the time. And he said, we'd both been competitive runners. Also, he said, you want to run together tomorrow when we're both home and talk about this some more. And so we ended up for like two years becoming weekend running buddies and kind of arguing about this stuff on our own time, which we came to call the Roger versus Tiger problem, contrasting the developmental paths of Tiger Woods, famously,

early prodigy, hyper-specialized, Roger Federer, much more the norm according to the science, lots of different sports early on. And that became the title of the introduction of Range, which very much came out of me and Malcolm gasping for air while arguing about the Roger versus Tiger problem. And so pretty quickly, our debates went beyond sports. We went back to the Sloan Conference five years later, maybe?

And that's also on YouTube. And in that one, at the end, I asked him, you know, has your, have your thoughts changed at all? Cause I think we both moved each other's needles on certain things. Um, and he says like, oh yeah, I think I made an error of conflation where I felt that a lot of practice is important to become great, which is true. And I conflated that with the idea that that implies the necessity of really specialization, which I now think is false. So I think he and I actually ended up on very similar territory.

There's so much in that story. For starters, just the intellectual humility that he had to talk to a person in a public forum and be like, "Yeah, you turned me around on that one." Especially the first time we met because his professional capital was in a different orbit than mine. He very much could have just tried to put his figurative writerly boot on my neck and just tried to embarrass me because he's certainly clever enough to do that.

And there was another author, because there were about a half dozen books that I think were derivative of outliers that were like 10,000 hours bestsellers. And there was another author of one of those that I was on the radio with and he did try to do it, who was better known than me. And he did just go after the route of like trying to just embarrass and denigrate me and say, you know what, you're wrong, but even if you were right, it would be the wrong message. And I thought that was very presumptuous to say, even if you're right, it would be the wrong message, right? Because that I think really lacks humility to say,

even if I'm wrong about how the world works, I know what the right message is. So that kind of grated on me a little bit. Yeah. And also, frankly, the whole 10,000 hours presumption, I do think just leaves out a lot of people who have this more varied background that you're describing. And these are people who've acquired a variety of different skill sets. They are more generalists. Maybe they're late bloomers in different kinds of ways. You give a million examples of famous people throughout history in the book who follow that kind of winding path.

And if you're just kind of fed the message that you need to do things this certain sort of way, that, you know, it's extremely demotivating. It's very difficult to kind of wrap your arms around it. Totally. There's a study I was just looking at kind of this week that I really like. It's by this guy, led by this guy at Northwestern named Dasha Wong, who just does these amazing stuff. Like when some people do studies with 26 people and he'll do with 26,000, you know, his work is just amazing. And this study looked at a number of different fields. I remember there were film directors, scientists, artists, all these things.

And basically what he found was that most people have like a hot streak in their career where they have like a sequence of their best work and it kind of comes in a row. And sometimes people will have two, but most people will only have one and some people kind of not really have one.

And what he found was that the hot streak is reliably predicted by a period of exploration of exploratory behavior coming before it. So he gets at what's called in like older sort of organizational literature, the explore exploit conundrum, which is exploit means taking knowledge you already have and, and wringing the value out of it. Explorer obviously is looking for new knowledge or trying new things. And the pattern that he saw was people do do the exploit where they focus in.

But to make that really valuable, they first go into this period of exploration. And the people who have multiple hot streaks do this sort of toggling where it's like trying out some things that helps them find something that they should drill in on. And then at a certain point, they come back up and do that exploration a little bit. So kind of the main message, as he told me from this work, is we're all probably not exploring quite enough. We want to acquire a breadth of knowledge that allows us to have a kind of like flexibility and mobility in how we think about topics.

topics, right? Specific knowledge is good for solving specific problems, but the world is complex and unpredictable and varied. You write about this a lot in the book. And therefore, having general knowledge tends to be a little bit more portable, right? And this is a great general principle, but I couldn't help when I was reading the book

that it felt to me like even while you were writing about generalism, you were really speaking to a pretty specific set of ways of thinking and being and relating to the world, kind of on the inside, that then supported what you're describing, which is this ability to make this big complicated soup from all of these different ingredients. And I'm wondering what you think those different key traits are. Before I say that, I think you're getting at something too, which is I think that

the real theme that's on every page of Range, but that would have made a completely unmarketable subtitle.

is sometimes the things you can do that are the best in the short term or that optimize short-term performance undermine long-term development. And I think that's whether it is finding your place in the world, which I think is an ongoing effort throughout our lives, developing a skill, or kids learning math, that doing the thing that will give you the quickest short-term results actually undermine long-term development. So I think you're getting at something interesting there.

But those, the traits that I think kind of the general traits that help people think in this complex world. I mean, I think curiosity obviously is, is a tremendously important one, but I think a general principle is, and, and I'm stealing the words of one of the psychologists in the book who, who summarized a huge body of knowledge. As she said, the classic summary is breadth of training predicts breadth of transfer. So transfer is,

is the term that cognitive psychologists use to describe our ability to take knowledge and use it in somewhere for a new problem that we haven't exactly seen before. That can be a little different or it can be a lot different, near transfer or so-called far transfer. And in our lives now, that was something that was not that common for most of human history. Like people faced repeated problems so they didn't really need to do a ton of transfer.

Now, it's like you cannot get by in work. In your life, a lot of things are normal, right? Like the things in your house work the same way and you unplug a drain in one apartment. The next place that you live, it'll probably be the same. But in work, it's not really like that anymore. Like you're having to face slightly new problems over and over, so you have to do transfer. And what predicts your ability to do that is the breadth of types of problems that you've faced in a particular domain or in general.

because it forces you to, instead of learning a series of steps that you can kind of execute algorithmically, it forces you to create these kind of flexible mental templates that you can kind of mix and match to different situations. And so I think this combination of curiosity, of diverse experiences where you're facing different problem types, and I think of like certain actual specific thinking tools. So if we want to get more specific about that, I mean,

like three quarters of my career, of all the projects that I've done in my career, have come out of, in one form or another, Fermi estimation, like sort of intuition for numbers that can be developed. The ability to make good numerical predictions about things. Yeah. Yeah. Or even to pick up on bad numbers. And I first was exposed to this when I took a college chemistry course, and the professor on every test would have one question that was like,

How many piano tuners are there in New York City? And you didn't have to get it right, but to get the credit, you had to get the right order of magnitude. And I was terrible at this at first. So much of my work has come out of reading some scientific paper or some news article that cites science and saying, those numbers just don't look right. Something doesn't seem right about that. If it is right, it's amazing. And there's more to it. So either it's right and it's wild and this isn't portraying how wild it really is, or it's wrong and there's something to do here.

Yeah, I want to layer a couple of other thoughts just because, again, I love this topic. I think openness to experience is a huge piece of it. Just the willingness to try something on that you're unfamiliar with. Are you somebody who tends to be more of a burrower as you talk like foxes and hedgehogs in the book?

Or are you kind of more interested and curious about a wide range of things? And then I worry about, or not worry, I wonder about the comfort with failure piece of it. Like if you're somebody who feels like you can't try something and have it not go well, it's a lot harder to try on a new experience. You're absolutely right. Openness to experience. I should have mentioned that, but thank you for filling in the gaps in my explanations. You know, and there's a little bit of work.

so openness to experience being the you know one of the the major personality traits that psychologists study and that's really associated with creativity and it also reliably declines like kind of starting in middle age and then very fast later in life but i think there's an emerging body of work that suggests that that's not inevitable and in fact while it is sort of the normal progression that people who kind of force themselves to try new things

will stem that decline. Not only is that good for cognitive, really good for cognitive aging. I just, I just saw a talk at a conference I was at by a neurologist who called, he was talking about the most important things for brain aging and a bunch of them were obvious. Like you want to have a good diet. You want to sleep.

exercise, and then the next one was do new things. He called it like power washing for your brain. But I think there's some emerging evidence that if you just do new things, you don't even have to get good at them, but they will stem some of the decline of openness to experience. So that's one thing. And you also mentioned that willingness to fail. This is like one of the, you know, thinking about the importance of experimentation. When I sort of talk to, say, businesses, if there are people who manage other people in a group that I'm talking to,

I try to impress upon them that I think one of the most important things they can do is underwrite smart risk-taking for people who are under them, right? Because I think people will tend to be too conservative in their experimentation, not because there aren't other things that they want to try or other people they want to try working with, but because they feel they're disincentivized from it. There's no incentive for it.

And usually that stuff's unspoken. It's like unspoken disincentive. But if you have a boss or manager who can underwrite smart risk taking, I think that's just like such a strong cultural force. And I've had a few of those people in my life who I look back at and I say, well, they really, they allowed me to take certain risks that I might not have taken otherwise. And those really changed my life in some significant ways.

We'll be right back to the show in just a moment. Did you know that Fast Growing Trees is the biggest online nursery in the United States with thousands of different plants and over 2 million happy customers?

They have all the plants your yard needs, like fruit trees, privacy trees, flowering trees, shrubs, and so much more. Whatever plants you're interested in, Fast Growing Trees has you covered. You can find the perfect fit for your climate and space. Fast Growing Trees makes it easy to get your dream yard. Order online and get your plants delivered directly to your door in just a few days without ever leaving home.

Their Alive and Thrive guarantee ensures your plants arrive happy and healthy, and you'll get support from their trained plant experts, on call to help you plan your landscape, choose the right plants, and learn how to care for them.

Elizabeth has wanted a magnolia tree forever, so when Fast Growing Trees reached out to sponsor the show, and hey, we have a yard now, it was a great fit. This spring, Fast Growing Trees has the best deals for your yard, up to half off on select plants, among other deals. And listeners to our show get 15% off their first purchase when using the code BEINGWELL at checkout.

That's an additional 15% off at fastgrowingtrees.com using the code BEINGWELL at checkout. Now's the perfect time to plant, so use BEINGWELL to save today. Offer is valid for a limited time. Terms and conditions may apply.

Creating a truly great retail experience is hard work, especially if you're juggling in-person storefronts, online sales, staff, shipping, inventory, the whole deal. It can get complicated fast. But with Shopify's point-of-sale system, it doesn't have to.

Whether you're running one store or a thousand, Shopify's POS is like a unified command center that brings all of your operations together, in-store and online, so your customers get a seamless experience and your team gets the tools they need to close the sale on time.

Businesses using Shopify POS report up to a 22% better total cost of ownership and an average 8.9% boost in sales compared to similar businesses. So if you're building something meaningful and want to create a better retail experience, Shopify is where you start.

Want more? Check out shopify.com slash being well, all lowercase, and learn how to create the best retail experiences without complexity. Shopify.com slash being well. Now, back to the show. Maybe we should spend a minute or two here just talking about some of the problems that can come

with heavy specialization and developing a lot of expertise, in part because it is sort of the conventional model that people have about how to approach this stuff. One example you have in the book is the cardiologist conference, which certainly resonates with a lot of people. There have been a lot of social media clubs about that. Basically, the idea is that you'd think that if there were anywhere to get a heart attack, it would be at a cardiologist

conference, but there's some evidence that that is actually a pretty unsafe place to have something like that happen to you? Yeah. I mean, the specific studies I cited were slightly different, but where...

If you're checked into a teaching hospital on the dates of these cardiology conventions, you're less likely to die when the most esteemed specialists are away. And that seems to be because some of these specialists have gotten so used to doing certain procedures that they now reflexively do them over and over and over. Even if they're not the solution to the problem or even if new data shows that they actually don't work, they will kind of not be able to take on board that data the same way an objective observer would.

And so some psychologists in the past called this the Einstellung effect, where you've solved a problem a certain way so many times, you'll keep solving problems that way, even if it's not actually the solution. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Yeah, exactly. So are you familiar at all with the research on outcomes in therapy?

A little bit, but I'm not well-versed. Yeah, you're just so broad yourself in the scientific literature that you're into that I thought you might have bumped into this. But it's completely consistent with what you write about where basically there's a lot of research on whether or not therapy works, and we find over and over again that it works. It does pretty well. It's got good effect sizes, all of that. The problem, as near as we can tell, is that more experienced therapists just do not have better outcomes than newer therapists.

They just don't. That I did not know. Yeah. So the best piece of research I've ever seen on it actually came out in 2016. It's very difficult to study this. Also, the study design for this is like a total mess because therapy is a very difficult environment within which to create repeatable interactions between

clinician and client or across clinicians or stuff like that. But best piece of research I've ever seen, it was 2016. It's a Goldberg if people are into that. And it actually suggested that therapeutic outcomes got slightly worse as the clinician got more experienced. In other words, they were a more effective clinician a couple years out of graduate school than they were years down the line.

That's interesting. I mean, that's conceptually very similar to what Philip Tetlock and his group found with forecasting where at a certain level of specialization where somebody had kind of literally studied one problem for their whole career, they would become worse and worse at forecasting as they got more experience, right? They would like wrap the whole world through this one lens and cease to kind of use what he called

Which I love, even though it's a strange kind of metaphor. Dragonfly eyes. So dragonfly eyes, dragonflies, their eyes have thousands of different lenses, each one of which takes a different picture. And then there's then synthesized in the dragonfly's brain. And that's how people who are good at making predictions do that. They gather all these sort of different pictures of the world and the

the really, really specialized forecasters who did really poorly were very different than that. Yeah, the key variable in that particular study, the 2016 one that I talked about, there is a key variable here though, which is the presence or absence of whether or not the therapist was getting repeated feedback on their work. Interesting. In other words, did they care about having a learning curve?

And if they did, if there was some kind of structure in place where they got feedback from clients or they tracked their outcomes over time or they were part of a broader institution that cared about improving therapeutic outcomes, they did in fact get better over the 5 or 10 or 20 years that were looked at. But if that wasn't there, they actually got worse. They actually just decayed and fell off.

That's really interesting because that gets at a bunch of things like I'm interested in. One is which like the whole frame for range is this kind versus wicked learning environment. These were phrases coined by the psychologist Robin Hogarth, who brilliant guy who passed away recently.

And the kind learning environment meant sort of like rules were clear, patterns repeated, work next year would look like work last year. But importantly, feedback was quick and accurate. It was like built in, you know, shooting a free throw. It's like the feedback is built into the activity where the opposite end of the spectrum and wicked environments like,

Like those rules may not be clear. Lots of human dynamics might be involved, et cetera. Work might change, but feedback could be delayed or inaccurate. And I think in a lot of the areas, like one of the reasons I'm very careful about extrapolating from sports and sometimes skeptical of how it's done in a lot of writing is that in the scheme of things, some sports are more kind learning environment than others, but they're all kinder than most of the things that most of us do every day where feedback isn't just automatic. Instant feedback isn't automatically built in.

So I think we need to try to construct that. And you reminded me of some research I was reading a little while ago that looked at cardiac surgery teams. And some teams were randomized to sort of different activities. Some used 100% of the allotted time to do procedures.

And some did procedures like 80% of the time and 20% of the time was sort of reflecting as a group on what went well, what they might want to try next time. And the 80-20 groups' complications went down much faster than the 100% group. So even though they were spending less time doing, you know, what would be classified as deliberate practice, they were, I think, trying to have like a regular way of getting feedback. Yeah.

We've done a lot of content recently related to becoming a kind of expert on yourself and the ways in which over time we tend to develop a more calcified view of who we are. I've got a better and better sense of who Forrest is, my strengths, my vulnerabilities, the things that I naturally gravitate toward, you know, whatever's going on.

And that can really limit how people think about themselves and how they act in the world, kind of like you were talking about with the cardiologists, right? Like you've got this one procedure, you do it over and over again, you get kind of married to it. When I was reading range, I was just thinking about this essentially the whole time that I was reading it. And I can't remember seeing the phrase beginner's mind appear in range, which I thought was interesting because it's like pretty much exactly what you're talking about in a lot of different ways. Yeah, no, I love...

Yeah, I'm not unfamiliar with especially like the Zen concept of beginner's mind. And I love that. It is sort of like soft science-y. I'm not sure if it's necessarily consistent. Oh, that's okay. No, but I think it's super useful. I don't know. I don't... I'm trying to think right now fast and I don't have a good justification for why I didn't bring that in. Maybe if I were doing it again, I would because I both love the phrase and love the concept. Yeah, I mean, maybe I was like...

self-conscious with this already amorphous idea of bringing in more things like that. Sure. Yeah. You wanted to make it as rigorous as possible. Absolutely. Yeah. I don't think that's... Given that it's already this kind of, in many ways, squishy thing...

Yeah, so maybe I would have. I mean, so yeah, so instead I, to your point, I opted for the end of history illusion, which was this finding from some psychology research that we always underestimate our own future change. Like we think, all right, now if you ask people, have you learned a lot about yourself in the past? Yeah, well, yeah, of course. Right.

But now I pretty much know who I am, right? Yeah. And it turns out that we underestimate future change. So we are all, throughout the course of our life, we are works in progress claiming to be finished. And change does slow down. Like I think about 18 to 28 is like the period when a lot of the, like a really fast time of personality change, it does slow down, but it doesn't stop and we always underestimate it. So since that's happening anyway, I think we would do well to more proactively embrace the beginner's mind and, and,

see it as a journey. Having talked to a lot of very curious and extremely accomplished people in the course of your career and maybe just exploring it yourself, what do you think helps somebody maintain that? Do you think there are any general principles there? You mean that idea of the beginner's mind of being- Sure, yeah. Or just not getting trapped by expertise even as you develop it. Because we do want to develop a level of expertise over time, right? At some point, you got to start burrowing. Absolutely. I mean, everyone's specialized to one degree or another

You brought to mind this one piece of research that really started as a PhD dissertation that I was reading for the book that looked at people who were really accomplished in something. Maybe it'd be, say, a professional athlete or a first chair violinist in symphony or something.

And the question that this researcher was looking at was, why are some of these first chair violinists successful in going on to become, say, the CEO of the orchestra or something, you know, to these different roles and others totally flail at that, even if they have similar levels of prowess in their main thing. And his main finding was that those people are able to transition, you know, or an athlete who is able to become a coach or executive or something like that.

And his main finding was that those people who were able to make that transition successfully, there's a lot of individual variation, of course, but that they were more likely to kind of dip a toe in other things during their career. Like they were more likely to have hobbies. They were more likely to have wider social networks.

And they often identified opportunities through that. So the phrase that he used, if I recall correctly, was that they more traveled an eight lane highway rather than a one way street. A bunch of researchers converged on this and all tried to coin their own terms to describe it. So like one would use network of enterprise. So you'd say like they have a thing they're focused on, but they have this network of enterprise, other things going on.

And I don't know if all these researchers just want to coin their own phrases or they just weren't aware of one another. I'm not really sure. I think to some extent. But yeah, but I think it was this like curiosity and kind of dipping their toes in things. And often those were things that started as just kind of hobbies. And in some cases, things that were a break from their main thing. So with all of this width, all of this generalism, one of the big advantages of it, the network of enterprise or whatever they're talking about, one of the big advantages of it is you're more likely to find something where you eventually go, yeah,

Yeah, that's what I want to do. You're more likely to find a good fit. And that's a major focus of your work because one of the things you write about in the book, a phrase that really stuck with me, is that fit looks like grit. In other words, you're more likely to stick with something if it feels like a really good way to connect to who you are, what your strengths are, what you're good at, what you care about. And one of the most common questions that we get on the podcast is some version of,

I can't figure out who I am, what I want to do, what really matters to me, all of that kind of stuff. And as somebody who's really looked at this, I'm wondering what you've learned about what tends to help people find a good fit. Yeah, I think this is a lifelong quest, by the way. So I think one thing to be aware of is the so-called arrival fallacy. That's like you will arrive at a moment and be like, I'm there. I figured it all out. Because, well, the world's changing and you are changing. And so it's always going to be a moving target.

And one of the pieces of research that kind of influenced me in this was the so-called Dark Horse Project at Harvard that studied how do people find kind of fulfillment in their work. Some of these people also got wealthy, but the dependent variable was fulfillment. Yeah, do they feel good about it? Yeah. And the reason it was called the Dark Horse Project is because when people were brought in at first sort of for an informational interview, they would say, well, you know, I did this in my career and I started in that direction. It didn't work, so I went this other way. And I came out of nowhere. Dark Horse means someone who came out of nowhere. Right.

to find my thing. So don't tell people to do what I do. And it turned out that like 80% of the people were like that. There were some people who had followed a much more linear path, but it was the minority and not a particularly big minority. And what was common to these people was this sort of habit of mind that was like, instead of looking around and saying, here's who's younger than me and has more than me, because there's always someone like that, they would say, well, here's who I am right now. Here are my skills and interests.

Here are the opportunities in front of me. I'm going to take this one and maybe a year from now I'll change because I will have learned something about myself. So they're in this constant state of, it sounds bad, but short-term planning, right? It doesn't mean that they don't necessarily have long-term goals.

Well, it sounds bad, but I think that it's great that it sounds bad because it's the whole game. Because so many people get stuck in like the 10-year plan and then the stakes get so high and then they just end up not actualizing around it. And it's okay to have that, I think, but I think you should hold it loosely, you know? Because it's really hard to know on a timescale like that.

you know, of what opportunities are going to come up. I mean, I think about myself when I was a teenager, I, I, you know, when I was 16, I knew exactly what I was going to do with my life. I was going to go to the air force Academy, be a pilot, be an astronaut. I didn't do any of those things, right? That was all. I didn't even want to hear anything else. And as it's turned out, every important project in my life has been an opportunistic pivot where I've been aiming in one direction and something has come along and I would just be an idiot not to respond to that opportunity.

And so I think when the 10-year plan gets in the way of people making opportunistic pivots based on what they've learned, or they go into some experience and it's not what they expected, but they stick with it anyway, I think it's the people who end up having that good fit say, what is this

what is this lesson teaching me? You know, it's like one of my friends, Dan Pink, wrote this great book about regret. And I wish I had kind of come up with the frame that he did. My takeaway from the book was that when we have regrets, you can either say no regrets, like you push it out and you don't learn anything from it. You say no regrets or you wallow and ruminate. And obviously, you know that you become unhappy or the middle path is what is this feeling teaching me for next time?

And I feel like that's the same way about a lot of our experiences in life and work and relationships. Instead of just pushing it away and be like, well, I got through that or putting your head down and saying it's not what I expected, but I have to forge ahead. What is this feeling teaching me and how do I use that for my next pivot? But you have to be willing to, you know, constantly have things not exactly meeting your expectations and then pivoting based on that. We figure out what we like by trying stuff out and then seeing whether or not we like it.

When you say this to somebody, it sounds completely obvious, but it's actually the exact opposite of how we're taught to figure out what our career path is. We're taught to take these different personality tests, half of which are total junk science, that express to us what we should be doing. And then we're going to build this long-term plan and we're supposed to follow this clear path. There's never a clear path, the whole thing. I was a polycom major in college in large part because I liked the West Wing in high school.

And then out of college, I got a small taste of working in PR and politics, and I immediately hated it. And then I went, well, I guess I'm screwed. And then various things happened from there, and I turned out not to be screwed. But I think that's just so many people's experience, some version of that. I mean, your insight into yourself is like

really limited by your roster of previous experiences, right? And so the idea that you know ahead of time, like my favorite quote from the book was a paraphrase of this woman named Herminia Ibarra, who studied, she's a London business school professor and studied people's work transitions. And when I read her book and thought about my own work transitions, I'm like, it was just one of those works where you're like, I could be a character in this. It resonated so much.

And the phrase that I loved was, we learn who we are in practice, not in theory. And she was trying to summarize her read of a lot of work and including the kind of personality tests that you're talking about, which I think personality tests, if you're using it for reflection, reflective exercise, fine. Having a good time, want to relate to other people. Sure. Great. Totally. But if it's like you're trying to get a static picture of yourself, I think it can be dangerous. And her point was that

there are all these messages that suggest you should just like introspect. And once you've got the plan, then you go forth and execute, you know? And so if you're going to career change, it's like, you know, Clark Kent, like running into the phone booth and ripping off his suit and he comes out as Superman. But it's not like that. In fact, you actually have to do stuff. And then you act, as she said, you act and then think. We always say think and then act. No, you have to act and then think. What did this teach me? And in this book, Working Identity, where she tracked people's career transitions, what she found is that

They usually start with these tiny, sometimes even accidental, you know, some discussion with somebody at a cocktail party, you know, some class you take, some little keyhole view into a new world, and then it escalates from there. It's not this like flying leap of a transition. I think this is kind of the answer to one of the potential objections to generalism that can come along, which is that information overload stops people from acting, basically. I think that's fair.

The book I'm finishing up right now is about how constraints can be useful. Yeah, there you go. The older I've gotten, the more... I would have denied this in the past, but I now explicitly realize that there's a heavy research component in all of my books. Maybe in all of everybody's books. I think in almost everybody's book, yes. Totally. But I now much more explicitly acknowledge and realize it. And so leaving off of range, I kind of...

felt, all right, a natural next question is you get these breadth of skills and experiences, but at some point you have to channel that into something that's good for you, to contentment or to achievement or whatever it is you're looking for. So I think that criticism or challenge is...

True and pervasive. Yeah. Which is why you're writing the next book about it. Yeah. Have you seen anything? Maybe, I mean, spoilers maybe here. Is there anything you've found in the research where people with this more kind of perusing nature tend to have more issues around failure to launch or actually picking something to dig into? Or is that just not there?

I don't know. I'm also not totally sure how you would study that, but maybe just more anecdotally. That's what I'm wondering. I'm trying to think if anything is close to operationalize that. So let me think in a very narrow sense. Or even, frankly, your own vibe, just your own sense of talking with people about this, which I know is not necessarily the best data. Okay, so I wrote about 3M in range sum.

And one of the ways I got interested in 3M was I was looking at these rank peer rankings of the most innovative companies in the world. And I'm like, all right, Apple, Google. And then every year 3M is like number four or five. And I'm like the post-it people.

It turns out they do a lot of other stuff that I had no idea about. They have like 7,000 inventors and they have to make like a quarter of their revenue from products that didn't exist five years ago every year. And they had done some really interesting internal research where they actually classified people as generalists or specialists and a few other things based on the number of different technological classes as defined by the patent office that that person had ever worked in.

And, you know, roughly speaking, they found that there were generalists who had worked in a bunch of different technological classes and specialists who drilled down into a small number or one. And both of those types of people made contributions. But then there were dilettantes who kind of weren't that broad or deep, who didn't make very much of contributions. And then there were polymaths who would go in and out of areas of depth. So they had areas of depth, but they would at certain points sacrifice more depth for breadth and kind of connect areas. And they were like the blockbusters.

So the polymath was the best thing to be. The generalists and the specialists made contributions. And the dilettantes who kind of bounced around and like never went deep on anything and didn't kind of connect things broadly either were the worst category to be in. You know, that's not talking about the wider world, you know, and I'm wary of like

a possible reading of my work as saying, well, people should just like pinball all over the place. You know, I actually think, and I tried to get at this with some of the Van Gogh story where I used his, him as an example of some of the research on match quality. Again, how people find work that fits them of actually you should, you don't want to just be dip a single toe into everything all the time. You actually want to kind of like dive in, but be willing to come out and switch.

And I think the slicing the Gordian knot about this is the, I think it was Frances Hesselbein was her name if I remember correctly, that I was doing what was needed at the time. And that's the phrase from the book. That's the quote that just like totally hit me in the stomach. And I was like, I'm putting that on my wall. She was like my favorite person. I mean,

Can I just say, just tell an outside of the book story here? Also, in like the best possible way. Yeah, please. Yeah. And she was working up until she became kind of a personal mentor to me a little bit. Oh, that's very beautiful. So we stayed in very good touch afterward. And, you know, she passed away a little while ago. She was still working up until like, but teaching at West Point and working at a leadership institute in Manhattan, like several days a week. And she was 107. So, and if she would joke with me, she'd still say, who knows what's next? Like, I never predicted any things I'm going to do. So who knows what's next? But yeah.

So total aside, I just want to do a tangent because I'm such a big, like I get tingles when I talk about her. She took her first professional job at the age of 54. She went on to become the CEO of the Girl Scouts. She had one semester of junior college education. She saved the organization, tripled minority membership, added 130,000 volunteers. You know, she turned the cookie business into the hundreds of millions of dollars a year business that it is now, etc.,

And she changed the organization from one of those preparing girls for life in the home to one prepping them for careers in math and science and stuff. So she gave me as a souvenir, a binary code badge that came out of her tenure for girls learning about computers. And this is aside from the other stuff we've been talking about. But one of the days when I was interviewing her and after the... Because this was like maybe the third time I was interviewing her. I did a bunch of interviews with her. And there'd be like military generals and business people waiting at her door. And so I started to learn that I wanted to book the interview slot before lunch because nobody would be...

looking in the door, like pressuring me to get out. And so she invited me to lunch this one day and we go to the cafeteria in her building and someone in front of us in line is being really rude to the checkout person. And Francis comes up next. He's just like watching, doesn't say anything. And then comes up next and starts talking to that person saying,

God, it is so busy in here. This must be like so stressful. You're doing a great job. Like you did a really good job not getting upset at that person. And this is like, I'm just looking around here and this is like a crazy place. And you could see like everyone else in line watching this instantly as a better person. Like I'm coming up after her and I'm like standing straighter and being like, I'm going to be extremely nice to this person. It's a very powerful energy. I mean, that's what she always said was, you know, leadership is a matter of how to be, not how to do. And it

And it was the same thing even when I was talking to her on the phone once when she was in the hospital, you know, toward the end of her life. And so I could hear someone in the background yelling at a nurse about something. And the next thing, France, hold on. You're doing such a great job. Like, this is a really hard job. She's like being around her just made me want to be a better person. And whatever the problem that she saw in front of her, you know, usually in her community early in her life.

That's what she pivoted to because she was always looking for an opportunity to be a problem solver. And that for me is kind of the 90-10 on a lot of this, that idea of, okay, there's something that's in front of you at any given moment. You're interested in it because the path to this point has led you to a place where hopefully you're not totally disinterested in what's going on around you or what's going on in your life. And you're thinking about this problem in this kind of open-minded way that we've talked about, holding a lot,

with it. And you're just kind of dealing with the problem as it sits in front of you, as opposed to necessarily getting so wrapped up in what's coming years and years down the line. And I just thought that her story in the book was such a beautiful articulation of that. I'm probably going to frame that quote or something because Lord knows I need more of it. And for me, it was just such a slice through of so much of what we talk about. I appreciate that because I feel like

When I was in my own head doing the book, you have no idea if anyone's going to read it or if they do, if it's going to be digested in the way you want. But one thing I was very confident I wanted to do was bring more attention to Frances' story because she had these amazing accolades. I mean, she had two dozen honorary degrees in her office and swords from the military and all this crazy stuff. And Peter Drucker, the famous management guru, called her the greatest CEO in America, but she was not a self-promoter, right? So

She just didn't get the kind of attention that I thought she and her story deserved. So I appreciate you bringing that up. Yeah, no, totally. It hit me super hard. I thought that, I mean, it was just such a fantastic example of everything else that you talk about. And so as part of all of this, you've learned a lot about how to actually get good at something. Let's say here, hypothetically, I said, David, I'm a middle-aged adult. In theory, I'm 37, but

but middle-aged-ish adult. Pre-middle age. Pre-middle age. Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate that. Pre-middle age. I want to become really good at something. Maybe I'm changing careers and there's a new set of things I need to get good at. Maybe I have a new interest that I've really gotten into here.

Maybe if you want bonus points, I look inside and I kind of go, I feel like it would be really helpful for me to develop this particular new quality inside of myself, more determination, more grit, more stick-to-it-edness, more compassion, whatever it is that's going on inside of me. And I kind of put you in charge of my life. I say, all right, David, I will do within reason whatever you tell me to do.

what would you set up for me? What kind of overall framework would you try to build? Okay, to some degree it might depend on what exactly the thing is, right? Because if we wanted to make you a chess grandmaster, I would say, "No, we do actually need to do narrow specialization and just focus in on that." And you should have started when you were seven. Right. If you didn't start studying patterns by age 12, your chance of reaching master status drops in order of magnitude. I think one thing

that I would want to do for sure. And that actually makes me worry a little bit about our modern work environment is being around other people that you can learn from. And I was just reading, there was some research in Northwestern, just looking at mentoring and it made a, I think, strong case that the most of the benefit from mentoring actually comes from implicit knowledge. So like the mentees, seeing how the mentor

behaves or talks, not so much the stuff that they're telling them. And I worry about that with more sort of remote and hybrid work. And I think about myself at Sports Illustrated as a temp fact checker, where suddenly I'm in this, like I'm doing boring work, but I'm

I'm suddenly surrounded entirely by people who are better than me at the thing that I want to get good at all the time. Every interaction I see is someone better than me at the things that I want to be good at. For the record, David, this is the single best argument I have yet heard about why like return to work.

Should possibly be a thing. I'm a huge advocate for like at-home work and all of that and hybrid roles. But no, I've actually never heard somebody say this and this is the best argument I've heard. Yeah, no, I mean, I think we need to be flexible and I think there are massive advantages to hybrid and remote work. But I think there are things that were left to the proverbial water cooler in the past that I now think we need to be more systematic about.

Or find a way to recapture an aspect of that. Yeah. Yeah. Or like Bill Gore, who founded the company that created Gore-Tex. And he would say that organizations did their most impactful work in times of crisis because the disciplinary boundaries fly out the window and people learn from one another. Or he would say real communication happens in the carpool. And what he meant was like through these informal mechanisms, which is a nice saying. And now I wonder, well, where's the carpool? Right? So I think we need to be...

We just need to be more cognizant of that. So I would want to get you around people. I don't think that means I don't want you to copy those people, but I do want you to start observing and thinking about those things and picking up implicit knowledge. And I think no matter, basically no matter what the skill is, and this would, and this I think would run whether even if it was chess or something else, is I would want you to set up a system of self-regulatory behavior. So to give an example of what that is, basically thinking about your own thinking.

And we talked about feedback, right? The importance of feedback. And you mentioned in outcomes research with therapists that feedback is this like, you know, incredibly important factor. Total game changer. Yeah. So, you know, there's this huge body of work on self-regulatory learning. There was a woman in the Netherlands named Marije Elfrind Gemzer who had followed soccer players in the Netherlands and also some students just in school from age 12, some of them up to the pros who were on the team that were World Cup runners-up.

and looking for what predicts the people who are going to get to the top. And there were certain physical traits, like if a kid couldn't sprint seven meters a second, they were never going to be a pro, period. That's not that fast, but that seems to be a limit.

But there were behavioral traits and she would video these kids, you know, from age 12 and the ones who would tend to get off of performance plateaus would be the ones in the video who were like going to a trainer. Like, why are we doing this thing again today? I actually think I need to work on this other thing. I've already got this down. And sometimes coaches like that and sometimes they're like, oh, geez, just like get in line, you know, but that's a kid taking responsibility for their own learning.

And those kids would come over time to evaluate their own strengths and weaknesses more objectively. So what you would see in these learners, some people did this reflexively, but most didn't. But they could have a system. It's basically a system of you come up with a goal. Let's say, you know, you want to score more penalty kicks or something. So you say, okay, that's the thing I want to do. Here's my hypothesis for how I'm going to do it. I'm going to do 50 kicks after practice every day and track where they go.

And so you make a hypothesis for how you can test it. You implement that, you measure to the best you can. Then you reflect on that and do set the next experiment.

And I wrote just a, I wrote like half a page or something about her work in soccer players. But then when I had to write a book, because I was researching it before I was writing the book, I went back to her and was like, I've never written anything longer than 7,000 words. Now I have to write 100,000 words. Help. And she said, if I had to summarize the self-regulatory behavior work in one word, it would be reflection. People think they learn everything that's worth learning just from doing something. But in fact,

you really magnify your learning if you have an explicit system of reflection. So she gave me a series of simple questions and she said,

answer these every month, you know, in a journal. I don't remember them all exactly, but it was, it was, it was like, what am I, what am I trying to do? Why do I want to do it? Am I sure I want to do it? Who do I need to help me figure out how to do it? You know, what are the things I need to learn to do it? What's the next thing I'm going to try? How am I going to measure that? And I'm like, well, I'm going to answer these the same all the time and never answered them the same. And so one thing led to another, and this is where I get to this, that we were talking about early, my book of small experiments.

So this became a practice. This is for people who can't see it. I have a little notebook with Alice from Lewis Carroll's Alice looking behind a curtain and it says curiouser and curiouser. And I use it the same way that I used a notebook when I was a science grad student, which is I make a hypothesis for some way I think I can get better at something, find a way to test it. So an example was when I got

In a previous job, I was sort of a traditional investigative reporter for a little while, like doing drug cartel reporting and stuff. And in that job, your lawyers really want you to use lots of quotes, put things in other people's words if you can. And I got sort of stuck in a certain style of writing. And then when it came to right range, I wasn't sure what was wrong, but I knew it wasn't working. And in retrospect, I think it's because it's exhausting to read that kind of style of writing I was doing at the length of a book.

Sure. And yeah, it gets very dense. Yeah. And so I felt, all right, I need to try something to find like different. I thought it was a structural issue. I need to find some different structures. So read fiction. I took a signed up for beginners online fiction writing course that I saw like taped to, you know, a light pole in Brooklyn.

And it was a revelation. We had to write stories with all dialogue and then short stories with no dialogue. And I realized I was so much better at doing it with no dialogue and just with narration. I went back and ripped up every page and started taking out quotes and using my narration instead.

And it also helped me identify places where I was using quotes because I didn't understand something well enough, which meant I needed to go back to research. And I didn't know, that's not what I was expecting to get out of that class.

But I knew something needed to change. And so I started setting up very explicit experiments and then reflecting back on them. And I think that pattern, which in some things like in chess and sports is like built into the endeavor and that makes the feedback natural, is not built in to most things that we do in life. And so I think if you want to take a wicked learning environment where feedback is delayed or absent or inaccurate and make it a little more kind is the best thing you can do.

if it doesn't have a built-in fast feedback system, you have to create them yourself. And so that's the thing that I would do no matter what you're doing. That's really great advice. And I'm wondering...

Whether it's about the people that you've talked to or it's about yourself, you seem quite open to this kind of experimentation process. I would imagine that's natural because it was built into your training as a scientist. You create a hypothesis and part of your job is to attempt to disprove that hypothesis. You're trying to make yourself wrong. So being comfortable with failure is essentially the whole game.

But a lot of people really do not feel that way. And also, frankly, a lot of people are in environments where failing is very high stakes, or they get a lot of negative feedback from the outside if they don't do it quite right, if they try something and it doesn't work out. Have you found anything that tends to support people in being able to risk those experiments or fail in that way? This was just a topic of my...

newsletter sort of recently where I was talking about, and I should say like, I don't like failing at stuff either, but the newsletter comes up. David writes on sub stack, by the way, we'll put a plug in for it. Well, thank you. But it's a periodic though. So don't have high expectations. Like it's just kind of a, but that, and part of the reason that it's a periodic is when I left sort of normal journalism jobs, um,

and became just a book writer, it's like all of your projects are big things, like a long magazine article that's an excerpt or a book. And I started to get this kind of perfectionism paralysis. Not that anything I'm doing is perfect. I don't mean it that way. Just like everything had to be- You hold yourself to a standard. Yeah, everything had to be an eight, nine, or 10. And the newsletter, if it's a six and a half, that's okay.

And every time I send it out, there's never a time I send out the newsletter where I wasn't like, there's a few more things I want to bring into this or some other thing I want to do and like send. People aren't going to worry about the thing that isn't there. They just want the stuff that is there to be interesting. Maybe I should edit it down more, make it more, no, send. And it's been an incredibly useful exercise for me in having an outlet where something can be a six and a half.

And it's not the end of the world. And constantly. It can be a six and a half, twice a month, or whatever it is when I'm sending it out. And in the...

Two of the recent newsletters talked about having hobbies and touched on the research that finds that if you have a hobby, it can improve your self-efficacy, your feeling of your ability to overcome challenges or solve problems, specifically if it's unrelated to your work. Specifically if it's unrelated to your work. If it's really closely related to your work, then you would want it to be really casual work.

but you want something different. And it seems to be, so Steve Magnus, who is this author who I was interviewing kind of two newsletters ago, just wrote this, wrote a book called Win the Inside Game. And some of it is really about that kind of diversification of your identity so that when there's a failure in one area, you're not like,

you know, your sort of view of yourself in the world doesn't become immediately like disjointed, incoherent. You kind of have these other places where you can enjoy or relax or connect with people or like move over for a moment to kind of recover. And I think that's a really important thing. Like I'm very pro hobby for that reason. You know, so naturally I like forced myself to pick. So I've been, I now have a dancing hobby that I picked up like exactly for this reason because it's like a

place I go where nothing else I'm doing matters. This is amazing. This is my primary hobby, David. You're killing me. Is it? That's so funny. Yeah. What kind of dancing are you doing? Shuffling. So this is like a, it grows from my interest in constraints again, because I'm writing a book about constraints. And I watched a documentary about clubs in Melbourne and

And they got so crowded that people kind of invented this form of dancing that would allow you to do stuff and change directions in a very small space. So I was like, oh, I'm already interested in constraints. So yeah, that was it. It's a kind of extreme practice of it. Well, I actually wanted to ask you about the rewriting your personal narrative.

piece that you did, which is the one you're referring to. And that's another advantage of the kind of generalism that you talk about a lot in that you have a more varied sense of who you are and therefore all of your eggs aren't in one basket. I don't know that I can describe it any more eloquently than you just did. And I think it's true. I think it feels that way to me in practice too, because I think there have been times in my life when I'm... The biggest bummer is when I was holding onto something so tightly that went well,

But if you're, I think if you don't have any of that diversification, it can go well and it's still going to be a disappointment. That was like a real realization for me where I had a definitely a long phase in my life where I was subscribed to the arrival fallacy of if I just nailed this project, you know, or if I just become like a senior writer at Sports Illustrated or whatever, then like everything's going to be great, you know?

It's like people who climb Mount Everest for their midlife crisis. It's like, that's a cool thing to do, but like they're still going to be with themselves when they get down, you know? Yeah. Yeah. That's extremely real. And so it wasn't even failure that I had a problem with so much. It was that the disappointing realization of some successes where if all the eggs are in that basket, it's still not a full life, I think. So I am friends with a lot of extremely high level dancers. So I do West Coast Swing as the style of dance that I do.

And you see this over and over again in them where there's heavy priority placed on some semi-distant goal. It's not too distant, but it's not happening tomorrow. And if they're really lucky and they work really hard,

they do eventually get there. And they get there and they go, "Huh, that was nice, but it didn't quite feel like what I wanted it to feel like after I was putting all this effort into it." And there's a kind of disappointment there. And it's often after that disappointment that the person has the realization you're describing. They got down off the mountain and they go, "Wait a second,

I'm still off the mountain inside of my own head and I still need to kind of take out the trash every day regardless of this great checkmark that now rests on my wall. And so maybe the recommendation for people is just to be conscious that that's a thing before you go through all of this driving hoping that it won't be a thing for you. It in some ways feels like a very privileged thing to say of like, "Oh, you have a success and it's not what you want." Because I know when you feel like you haven't had a big success,

then you maybe would give everything to have one. And yet I think it's the reality. And like you said, I've spent a lot of time with people who've achieved at the highest levels of whatever their thing is. And that alone doesn't like make life for them. You know, I think that's an important realization. And I mean, I learned that the hard way too, of like one achievement doesn't, it doesn't like make your life just great. All the other parts of your life that it doesn't have anything to do with, it doesn't like magically make them all great.

We'll be back to the show in just a minute, but first a word from our sponsors.

A few years into doing the podcast, I put together a list of dream sponsors for the show. And at the very top of that list was today's sponsor, Headspace. Headspace is the app that has helped me and over a hundred million other people with their mental health and well-being with guided meditations, mindfulness practices, breathing and calming exercises, and so much more. Headspace combines the scientifically proven benefits of meditation and mindfulness with modern technology.

And whether you're a total newbie or have been meditating for years, there is always content for what you're going through. Rick and I have been on the Headspace podcast. We've worked with them in the past. And I've used the app myself for years.

With over a thousand hours of mindfulness exercises, it's maybe the most complete meditation library that I'm aware of. And hey, also the people we've met who work over there are really good people and that always helps too. Feel good and mean it when you say it. For a limited time, get Headspace free for 60 days. You can go to headspace.com slash beingwell60. That's H-E-A-D-S-P-A-C-E dot com slash beingwell60 to

Out here, there's no one way of doing things. No unwritten rules and no shortage of adventure. Because out here, the only requirement is having fun.

Now, back to the show.

Is there anything in the work that you're doing right now where you're focusing on constraint that you think is particularly relevant to what we're talking about today that you would like to share? Yeah. I mean, I fell into this a little bit because after Range, I had basically total autonomy in my work. And that's what I thought I wanted. And, you know, fast forward two years and I realized there's such a thing as too much autonomy, you know? Because I had all that autonomy, I'd say I find book writing very difficult. And I

People always ask, oh, but do you just love writing? I'm like, well, I used to be like a college 800 meter runner. And if you'd asked me at any given moment, I would have said, no, this is torture, but it's incredibly engaging. Like, so I don't know if I'd say, do I love it every second, but I find it extremely engaging. And that is an important thing for me. And so I was saying, well, I don't want to do another book unless I find the perfect topic. So I'm dipping my toe in this and this and this. And of course, one, there's no perfect topic. And two, you're certainly not going to know until you dive into it.

And then I was reading Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. He coined that phrase to mean the feeling of being like so immersed in an activity that you kind of lose track of time passing and all around you. And there's a part in it where he's actually talking about marriage, where he says, one of the great things, if you're married and committed, like you can be married and not committed, but if you're married and committed, one of the great things is you can stop spending energy wondering how to live and start spending your energy living.

Instead of just like looking around the corner for that. And I was like, this is me with potential topics. I'm spending all my time wondering if there's like a better one just around the corner. You're speaking to my experience here as somebody who has yet to write a solo book, David, and wrestles with a million topics that you could potentially write about. Yeah, totally. So I read that quote and I said, this is me.

And at that moment, as soon as I finished that paragraph, I had already had some interesting constraints, partly because of it's sort of a natural progression out of range. Finished that paragraph and I said, I'm picking a topic today. It's going to be constraints. And that was, and then I wrote a proposal after that. And so that was, again, the realization that I needed to just like dive into a thing and have some anchoring to help me research a topic of interest. Because otherwise I was so surface level that I wasn't even getting to the point of like realizing how interesting a topic could be.

I'm going to ask you an impossible question, so do with it what you will. What you're describing, which is that kind of moment where you see something or you hear something and it just hits you a certain kind of way and it kind of wakes you up and you go, wait a second, I'm just going to do this today.

is present all over the place. It's present in so many of the stories that you talk about in the book. Somebody just kind of has this moment. It's present in therapy. We talk about it all the time in therapy where sometimes there's just a defining moment where things just click for a person and everything changes from there on out.

For starters, do you think I'm describing this accurately? But then also, is there anything that you just think kind of big picture tends to help people have that moment of coalescing around something? Is it just like the dam breaks and the water goes through because a lot of water builds up? Is there...

A characteristic of it? I don't know if this even makes sense as a question. That is a great question. No, it makes sense. I definitely don't know the answer, but I can only speak to my, I mean, what you're saying definitely resonates with how my feeling was, where it was like all of a sudden this moment of clarity that I didn't even realize I was looking for.

It seems to be how it works, but I don't know if there's anything even in knowing that that's kind of how it works that helps us do it better. I mean, I know that when I sort of have ideas that kind of like light me on fire a little where I'm just like, you know, they feel like some sort of departure. It often happens when I'm running. I mean, I run a lot and I'll be...

stuck in some writing or some research or whatever it is. And I'll be thinking about this problem I need to solve and I'll go running and I won't get the solution to that problem. But some other thing that I didn't know I was thinking about. I mean, that's like the whole frame for range, which I think, so the stuff about the kind of wicked learning environments is only a short part of the book. But to me, it was the frame through which I sort of saw everything in the book. And that kind of came to me

you know, while I was running. I mean, I had read the research, but I was like thinking about how to, how to sort of position all this stuff.

I do think this really relates to a lot of what you talk about in range because that multi-modality of it does seem to be a feature of it, at least in my experience. When I'm doing something that's not quite connected to what I'm thinking about or I'm in a different environment is a big one for me. For whatever reason, the dots just get connected in a different way. We mentioned the network of enterprise. And one of the researchers who used that phrase when he would look at eminent creators having their network of enterprise

one of the things he was writing about was that they would have these different things going on and when they get stuck in one, they could kind of temporarily move to another one and sort of circle back. And was it that they were getting a break from the main one that was kind of like

You know, the so-called effort. Some people call this the shower effect where like suddenly you have these ideas in the shower because you're just like not, you know, was it that or was it that something about this other area informs it? I don't know. But that seems to be a thing that having these other spots you can kind of shift over to might just like change your mind when it's stuck. You know, I mean, I think we do know that anchoring is like a huge problem for problem solving. Like people.

typically to the first solution that's apparent to them, they get stuck to and it's really hard for them to get off of it. And there are ways to do that, like throw in team members they're not used to, or I saw some cool work on teams doing remote problem solving. They often didn't do as well as they could because they get anchored to their first solution. And

When the researchers threw in AI bots programmed to behave randomly, that improved the team's performance, which seems really counterintuitive. But it's because they would just knock them off of their early solutions and they would find better stuff. So I think having these other things to move over to can kind of counteract some of that anchoring. Yeah, because whatever you're working on,

I think anchoring is like a really tough thing to defeat. I mean, when I write a draft, right? And I think everybody, because I have written it down, I'm suddenly attached to it. It doesn't mean the place that I started is the best place to start, but because it's there, it's almost like immediately limiting the ways that I think about in this project. And I need to step, one, I need to get someone else's eyeballs on it and I need to step away from it and look at something else to try to get unanchored to the degree that's possible.

One of the very, very few things I remember that took place in a class in high school was a high school English class, which actually was about poetry. And the teacher was talking about their own experience working on a poem in, I think, some college course they took. And they wrote this whole poem that they loved. And they turned it in.

And the teacher had gave it back to them and crossed out everything in the poem except a random line about two thirds down. And they had circled that line and they'd crossed everything else out. And the person after the class was like, what the hell is this? You just crossed out my whole poem. And they were like, that's the poem. Start there.

have that be the first sentence of what you're actually doing. And then they wrote it and they were like, it's one of the best things I ever wrote. That's amazing. Which is kind of what you're describing. Yeah, that's like, I have a way, way less beautiful version of that story, which is when I became a writer, lots of my friends would ask me to help them with essays for like a job or a grad school or whatever. And very often, my first advice would be, you're starting in the wrong place. And that's not usually what they wanted to hear. Can you just make like,

just make the sentences better. It's like really you're starting in the wrong place, but because you've started there, you're suddenly attached to it, right? Yeah. Dumping 19 pages of a 20 page thing that you wrote does not feel particularly good as somebody who has had to do this before. It is not an enjoyable experience. I mean, that, that what I mentioned in my, when we were talking about the book of small experiments, that fiction class is the thing that got me to go back and start over with range. Basically. I didn't start over with all the material, but I

There was not a page that went untouched after that, but it was like, I had a break. I took this class, you know, gave me a realization. I went back and did it. I don't think I would have otherwise because one, it's annoying and anchoring bias is a real thing.

This is kind of a concept, like what gets you to those moments where you just ignite around an idea. And I think we've given just a lot of examples here already of you're setting it down for a minute, you're taking a break from it, you're acquiring more general knowledge, you're getting outside of your typical environment. For me, that's a huge one, going for a walk, going for a run, just getting out of the office. Because I feel like I think that, you know, I work in the room that I record and I feel like I think the same thoughts in here constantly. And so it's kind of helpful to just have a

a pattern interrupt from it. And that's really what helps me with that process.

I don't know. Great question. Great question for a future newsletter or something. Who knows? I even have a chair in my office usually that just faces the opposite direction if I'm just like, "I'm not going anywhere, but I just want to face the opposite direction." That's honestly not a bad idea. And I think that's kind of the advice for people who are listening and maybe summarizes a lot of what we've been talking about today, which is this value of just shaking up the way that we look at things

and being comfortable with that being part of the process, even if it can feel like it's slowing you down or kicking the can down the road a little bit, it can still be a very fruitful part of the whole thing. Yeah. And I mean, especially if people I think are, everyone knows that adage, like if they're looking for some kind of change, it's like if you do the same thing and expect to get different results, that's probably not the best way to go about it.

David, thanks so much for doing this with me today. I've completely enjoyed this. Love talking with you. Thanks for being on the show. That's a total pleasure. And I've learned a lot from you in this conversation. Thank you, man. I appreciate that.

I loved talking with David today. I got so much out of this conversation personally. In the first half of it, we talked about his book Range, the general topics that he explored inside of the book, the power of generalism broadly, how to not get so down on yourself if you feel like you've taken more of a winding path toward what you're going to end up doing in your life.

We also talked about some of the problems of developing expertise. Of course, in general, expertise is a great thing. We love expertise on the podcast. I have all of these world-class experts on, but there's no doubt that it comes with some problems. And this is also intended as a kind of balancing of the scales.

of how most people tend to approach becoming good at anything. To become good at something, you're supposed to pick one fairly narrow thing, drill down into it over time, spend your 10,000 hours, and you kind of just call it a day. If you do it for long enough, if you do it hard enough, you will eventually get good at it.

And David, in this very provocative way, really raised a lot of questions about that model when he was doing his work on the book. And he started finding different things. He started finding that extreme specialists tend to be more like hedgehogs. They burrow down into something very deeply, but they don't have the cross-domain knowledge that can really support somebody in making good decisions, particularly in environments that are more dynamic, unpredictable, in a word, more wicked.

Borrowing insights from fields that maybe you're not a part of right now or maybe your work doesn't seem to be taking place inside can lead to really interesting outcomes, even breakthroughs. Nobel laureates tend to have diverse hobbies. That was one of the things that he wrote about in the book.

And one of the major problems with heavy specialization and particularly heavy early specialization is you're trying to develop a skill set or predict a career for a person who does not exist yet. And this was a major theme that we talked about during the conversation.

We're constantly changing. The person you are today is very different from the person you were 10 years ago, and it's probably pretty different from the person who you're going to be 10 years from now. So the whole concept of a 10-year plan is that if I kind of wrapped myself in cellophane and dropped myself into a particular situation 10 years from now, would I feel happy and fulfilled or not? Would I be engaged with that work? Would I like what I was doing?

That sounds nice, but the problem is that the person you are 10 years from now is a completely different person, and you don't know what that person's going to like.

So the idea that we're just going to narrow ourselves in and go after this specific thing that's going to take a long time for us to get to out of the hope that we will eventually feel good when we get there is kind of a fool's errand. And so there's this push and pull. On the one hand, we do have to eventually find something or find a set of things that we are really interested in, really engaged by, really care about. We do have to burrow down eventually.

But on the other hand, we want to kind of defer that burrowing. And even while we're burrowing, we want to go as wide as we can with it so we can pick up all of these diverse skills that then support us in being even more successful when we find the thing that we're most interested in. And David even talked about the problems with thinking in terms of, oh, I'll find the one thing, right? Toward the end of the conversation, we talked about the hunt for a good book topic.

And implicit in that, there's the premise that there is the perfect book topic out there somewhere, that there is this great optimal career for you, that there is that perfect partner, maybe to even take it to a totally different domain. But the perfect book, the perfect partner, the perfect career just does not exist. There are just books and careers and partners.

And so part of the project is getting enough sense of what's going on out there and being open to those different experiences, to experimentation, having some psychological flexibility, being willing to risk failure in different kinds of ways. That then opens you up to the possibility of finding this thing that actually ends up being a really good fit for you.

One small example of this is even the research on therapy, where there's very little evidence that more experienced clinicians have better outcomes than less experienced clinicians. Specialists struggle to adapt when their standard tools fail. And so part of the question is, can we get comfortable with dropping our familiar tools, developing that beginner's mind, taking a fresh look at a situation, and then going from there?

One of the things that David talked about was this idea of dark horses. These are people who seem to come out of nowhere to become successful and very fulfilled by a career. And the general principle in what he learned about them is that most great career paths are accidental and nonlinear. To steal the phrase from Francis Hasselbein, they were just doing what was needed at the time.

And this requires a few things. We have to be willing to brave potential failures. We have to be willing to experiment and just kind of find out for ourselves. We need to be willing to do and then learn as opposed to trying to find the perfect solution before we move into action, which is a great way to overthink and to stop yourself from doing much of anything at all. And if you're able to find those good fits, if you're able to sample, if you're able to explore,

you will look like somebody who has a lot of grit. And this was one of the phrases, fit looks like grit, that really stuck with me after I read the book.

And if you're able to sample, if you're able to explore, you're going to be more likely to find a good fit for you. And if you find a good fit, you're going to look like somebody who has a lot of grit, who's willing to stick with it and keep going and try different things on and triumph over adversity because you care enough about whatever it is that you're doing or you're sufficiently talented at it in order to keep on plugging away even when things get hard.

I then asked David if I wanted to get really good at something, because he's a total expert in peak performance and elite athletes, that kind of stuff. If I wanted to get really great at something, how would he set up my life? What advice would he give me? What would he really advocate for? And he named a couple of different things. The first thing that he talked about was putting me in environments with people who were more like what I wanted to become.

We learn a lot of explicit skills from the people that we're learning from inside of coaching frameworks and things like that. But a lot of what we learn is a way of being, a way of moving through the world. And it's hard to pick that up if you're not getting much face time with other people who are really good at this thing.

He then talked essentially about running different experiments, running experiments on yourself, shortening that cycle of feedback so that when you're engaging with something that you're interested in or interested in learning about, you can have a shorter iteration cycle where you do something, you get more immediate feedback on it, and then you're able to change and iterate for the future.

Inside of this is the premise that you're going to fail a reasonable amount of the time or, you know, fail in quotation marks, right? You're going to try stuff on and it's not going to work out. You're going to take a big swing and you're going to miss the ball. You're going to look a little silly. You're going to fall on your face. You're going to eat some dirt. That's the way it goes.

That is part of the learning process. So inside of ourselves, we need to develop A, a model of learning that includes failure as a normal part of the process, and then B, the kind of self-confidence, self-assuredness that we need to keep on trying things even when we feel like it's not going perfectly.

And then toward the end of the conversation, I just kind of let myself go a little bit and ask David about a lot of stuff that I was personally interested in. And we talked in particular about this moment of breakthrough that you often see in people who are exploring an idea or are trying to find their next project, their next career, the next thing that really lights them up.

where it feels like all of this water accrues behind the dam and there's just this one moment where the water breaks through and everything kind of changes for that person. And so I asked him, what do you think contributes to that moment happening? And it's kind of an impossible question to answer.

And we talked about some things that could maybe contribute to it. First, just that, again, generalism in general, the idea of taking in information from different disciplines, shaking up your line of thought if you're working on a project or a career or book, a hobby, putting yourself into a slightly different environment, disrupting where and when you're normally thinking about something or chewing on something. And I think cross-modality is a big part of this,

If you're doing something very academic and very heady, getting into your body more. If you're doing something that's more focused on the body, getting into more of a thought process around it, shaking up where you're working and what you're learning about at any given moment. David talked about having a chair in his office that just faces a different direction, and sometimes he sits in that chair if he wants to see things a slightly different way. Another

Another piece of it is probably a willingness to separate from what you've already created. We talked about the idea of circling the one sentence in the poem and then starting from there, even if it was toward the end of the poem. And this then requires that you be willing to let go of a lot of stuff that you've already created and a lot of stuff you've already done. And that's often a pretty painful process for people. I can speak personally about that one.

I completely loved this conversation. It's one of my favorite ones I've had on the podcast. I learned so much from David's book. Again, it's Range, Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. It came out a number of years ago. And apparently David is working on another book. We might talk about it on the podcast, who knows, in about a year or so. And until then, if you would like to follow David's work, you can find him on Substack. It's the Range Widely Substack.

I've included a link to it down below if you would like to check it out. And hey, while you're down there, you can subscribe to the podcast if you haven't done that already. That really helps us. You can also find us on Patreon. It's patreon.com slash beingwellpodcast. And for the cost of just a couple of dollars a month, you can support the show and receive a bunch of bonuses in return.

And if you've made it this far, if you're one of the people who listened to the end of the episode, I've got a question for you. I would love to get a sense from you of the topics, the ideas, the experts that you would like us to talk to on the podcast in the future. It would be incredibly helpful for me to get more of a sense of that from the people who listen to the show. So you can reach us at contact at beingwellpodcast.com and just put something in the subject like request for guests or

and give us some ideas if you want to request for topics, if you want to tell us about general stuff that you would like us to explore. If you're watching on YouTube, you can leave a comment down below with that information. And just in general, I so appreciate how engaged people are with the show. It's been so deeply meaningful for me to do this work and to have so many people who listen to the podcast. It just kind of blows my mind whenever I think about the number of people who are watching and listening. And I

really engaging in a serious way with the content that we put out. So thanks again for listening to the show. Until next time, I'll talk to you soon.