David Epstein: 10,000 Hours Is A Lie! The Morning Habit That’s Secretly Ruining Your Day!

David Epstein: 10,000 Hours Is A Lie! The Morning Habit That’s Secretly Ruining Your Day! - 이중 자막

I always told that if you do 10,000 hours in anything, you become a in it.

Well, that's wrong.

This undermines this broader toolbox that you need for long-term development.

If you're doing that, then you're missing opportunities.

David Epstein is the New York Times best-selling author whose infamous work challenges the conventional wisdom about specialization,

productivity, and what it takes to become successful.

and people who do that repeatedly, they just keep improving.

Two, so for anything you're doing,

if you're not 15,

20% of the time failing, then you're not in your zone of optimal push, where you're getting as much better as you possibly do.

What about focus?

I get distracted easily, and I want to be more productive in the time that I spend working.

Don't start your day with email.

It's been shocking to look at the research, how big of an impairment that is.

What about now?

Notifications, so you're getting distracted all the time if you say well now I really have to hunker down

I'm gonna get rid of notifications

You will start self-interrupting to maintain the interruptions to which you have become accustomed really yeah That will go away,

but not immediately but there's a lot of things that you can do for a productive day for example That has enormous

Interesting the thing I found which was pretty shocking was they start talking about some of the dangers of specialism Yes,

Harvard blood studies found if you're in hospital with certain cardiac conditions when the most esteemed specialists are away You're less likely to die gosh.

That's terrifying the conclusion was that's because This is a sentence.

I never thought I'd say in my life.

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Let's get to the conversation.

David, yes.

How do you summarize the work that you do and why you do it?

And who are you really doing it for?

I am.

I'm obsessed with correcting what I view as mistranslations of scientific research about human development, and so that is the core of my work.

And I think I'm doing it for everyone who is curious, but either doesn't have a scientific background or doesn't have that particular scientific background.

Curious.

But interesting.

but doesn't either have the time or or the means to to go sifting through this evidence themselves.

And what is this sort of realms of self-improvement that you have focused on thus far in your career?

Well earlier on I was focused in physical skill acquisition like in in athletics but

I've moved into career and personal development generally and looking at that with a very, very kind of long lens, right?

So one of the most important things to me,

one of the most important messages that I've been working on the last few years is the fact that sometimes optimizing for short-term

development will undermine your long-term development.

So let's say if we're thinking about sports or music or something like that.

The thing to do is to get a head start and whatever you're doing,

pick something, stick with it, don't switch things because then you've lost time, focus very narrowly, do so-called deliberate practice, right?

That's not playing around,

that's not experimenting, that's effortful, cognitively engaged, better correction, and do as much of it as you possibly can to the exclusion of other things.

That's such an right, and you will jump out to a lead, right?

We that in sports and music.

We see that in school with certain Head Start programs that give people an advantage in some academic skills.

The problem is, That kind of narrow focus creates short-term results but undermines this broader toolbox that you need for long-term development.

And so you'll see what scientists call fade-out in these advantages, which isn't necessarily actually anything going on.

it's the fact that people with this broader base will catch up and surpass what appears to be a fadeout.

Okay, so if you take more time to get a broader understanding of something, whether it's in sports, if you're a sort a child prodigy, over the long term, that's going to benefit you

better and help sustain your development.

But the short term,

you might lose out because there's some kid who is doing,

you know,

really deliberate practice obsessively,

and he's going to have a, it's kind of like the tortoise in the hair analogy where, you know, the tortoise eventually wins the race?

Yeah, I mean, there's a big body of research and psychology that can be summarized with the phrase breadth of training predicts

breadth of transfer, okay?

Transfer is the ability of someone to take skills and knowledge and use it to solve a problem they haven't seen before, right?

You to a new situation and what predicts your is the breadth of problems you've been exposed to in practice.

If exposed to a broader set of problems,

you're forced to build these generalizable, flexible models that you'll be able to apply to new things going forward.

Across all of your work, at the very heart of what people are trying to achieve in their lives.

What is that?

At the very, very hard of what they're trying to achieve that you're speaking to?

Getting better, getting better at things, right?

Obviously, people want success, but I think there's pretty significant research showing

that people are often actually reacting to their trajectory as much as their actual absolute performance level,

that the feeling of improvement, the feeling of moving on, it gives them some sense of fulfillment, right?

And eventually, obviously, we'll get them to...

And so I think really this is for people who are interested in how do I get off sort of my

plateaus going forward and viewing it as a lifelong journey, as opposed to trying to peak when they're 12, right?

It out that the way to make the best 20-year-old 30-year-old is not the same as the way to make the best 10-year-old.

Is there sort of a tie in here with the subject of just happiness and how to live a happy life?

Fulfillment for sure.

Yeah.

Those exactly the same, but they're important.

So think about this in a career development perspective, right?

I think probably the most interesting research on fulfillment in careers was this project at Harvard called the Dark Horse Project.

And this was looking at how do people find,

a lot of these people were very financially successful and all that stuff, but the dependent variable was fulfillment, a fulfillment.

And when people would come in for sort of an orientation in this study,

they would say things to the researchers like, You know, I started off doing this one thing, medical school, whatever, didn't really fit me.

So I went over to this other thing and I learned I was good at something I didn't expect.

So then I went this other direction.

And you know, I came, don't tell people to do what I did because like I came out of nowhere.

And the large majority of people.

That was their story.

That's why it became named the Dark Horse Project.

Dark is this expression that means coming out of nowhere,

and that the norm in this day and age was that people who found fulfillment would travel this kind of zig-zagging path where they would learn,

maybe I'm good at something or bad at something that I didn't expect,

maybe I'm interested in something I didn't expect, and they would keep pivoting.

And they'd say, instead of saying, you know, here's this person younger than me who has more than me.

They'd say, here's who I am right now.

Here are my skills and interests.

Here are the opportunities front of me.

I'm going to try this one and maybe I'll change a year from now because I will have learned something about myself.

And they keep doing those pivots throughout their career until they achieve what economists call better match quality.

That's the degree of fit between someone's interests and abilities and the work that they do.

turns out to be extremely important for both your performance and and sense of

fulfillment and your apparent grit if you want So just on that,

before we move on to grit,

what advice does that then mean you would give to a young person at the start of their career that's thinking about how to navigate their

way to being both really competent, really good at something and successful in any sort of monetary way, but maintaining fulfillment throughout their life?

I think there are two main things that take away from that.

One is to not over focus on long-term planning.

I we lionize having long-term goals, and that's okay.

There's nothing wrong with having long-term goals.

but those aren't necessarily always so useful for you in the moment, right?

When think about myself when I was a competitive 800 meter runner,

I have a time goal for the end of the race, but that didn't help me actually do anything.

That's just, you see the clock when you're done and you're either happy or sad.

Having goals that are, let me try, let me try moving with 300 meters to go.

That gives you an actionable experiment.

So short-term plan, planning, I think is one of the takeaways, and creating what's called a self-regulatory practice.

So self-regulatory learning means basically thinking about your own thinking, taking accountability for your own learning.

And of the coolest studies in self-regulatory learning actually came out of soccer football.

done in the Netherlands,

where this woman named Ray Alfred Gemser was following kids from the age of 12,

right, up through some of them went on to teams that, you know, were runners up in the World Cup.

And what you'd see in the kids who got off performance plateaus,

there were certain physiological measures someone had to have like if a kid couldn't hit at least seven meters a second sprinting,

which isn't that fast, but they couldn't hit it, they weren't making it to the top, so there were physiological parameters.

But also the kids who would get off performance plateaus were the ones where if you look at them in video when they're younger,

they're saying go into the trainer like,

why are we doing this drill,

I think I can do this already like I think I need to work on this other thing and you know,

sometimes a trainer might be like, Oh man, just get back in line, you know.

But these are the kids that are thinking about what they need to work on, what they're good at.

They're making this cycle, the self-regulatory cycle is reflect.

What are you good or bad at, what do you need to work on?

How do you need to do that?

come up with an experiment for how you can work on that,

monitor a way to try to measure whether or objectively or subjectively, and then evaluate.

Did that experiment that I ran work in making me better at this thing or not?

And people who do that repeatedly, they just keep improving.

And I think that's what the dark horses are doing in their careers.

They're saying, I'm reflecting on what I've got.

I'm planning a way to test something that'll fail.

me, I monitor it maybe subjectively, maybe objectively, and then I evaluate what that

tells me to do for the next step and you just get better and better and better over time.

So if I'm,

say I'm in my early 20s in my career,

how do I take that and then implement that in a within my life to make sure that I'm going to get to the World Cup metaphorically speaking?

And there's something interesting about the 20s that I think is worth saying, which is there's finding in psychology called the end of history illusion.

And this is the finding that we always underestimate how much we will change,

what we think we're good at,

what we think we're bad at, how we want to spend our time, what we prioritize in friends, et cetera.

And ever at.

life.

People underestimate how much they'll change in the future.

Change continues for your whole life.

It slow down.

So constantly works in progress claiming to be finished constantly through life.

The time of personality change is about 18 to about 28 when you're telling, but it never stops.

But that's about the fastest time when we're telling people, hey, now you have to have it figured out.

And that's when they're changing like crazy.

And I think it's even more important to this self-regulatory practice.

In a journal, I would say, I mean, I do it.

These questions can be basic.

What am I trying to do?

Why?

What do I need to learn to do it?

Who do I need to help me learn that?

How am I gonna make sure that person is there to help me?

What experiment can I set up to try?

and then come back and evaluate the experiment and pick a next one, being a scientist of your own development.

I think it's counterintuitive because you would think that we would just internalize this stuff just from doing things,

but the science is pretty clear that we don't get everything we can out of our experiences

from a learning perspective unless we're doing it more explicitly.

So I would recommend for someone in their 20s to start to self-regulatory practice.

What got you into the work that you do and how do you define your profession?

Okay, so in my past life, I was training to be a scientist environmental scientist.

I like living up in the Arctic, studying the carbon cycle, I attend.

And I had been a competitive runner.

I a training partner who was one of the top-ranked guys in the 800 meters in his age group in the country.

The family of Jamaican immigrants was going to be first one to graduate college dropped dead a few steps after a race.

And our hometown paper said, well, yeah, a heart attack.

I don't even know what that means for someone of that age and health, right?

And I got curious.

And, eventually, I kind of worked up the courage or whatever that sounds silly to say it

that way, but was nervous about it to ask his family to sign a waiver along me to gather up his medical records.

Did that,

turned out he had,

like, a textbook case of this disease caused by a single genetic mutation that's almost always the cause of young athletes dropping dead.

I said, we can save some people from this with more awareness, and I decided to merge my interests in sports and science.

I I to write about sudden cardiac death in athletes for Sports Illustrated, which I grew up with.

So I got off the science track, I after my masters, kind weaved my way to Sports Illustrated.

Got there.

Pitched this story about sudden cardiac death in athletes.

They're like temp sit down, right?

And the Olympic marathon trials for 2008 US team Came to Central Park and the guy ranked fit in the country dropped dead like 10 blocks from our office and

Then they said don't you know something about this and so you know in a week

I was able to write a cover story making it look like we had done like two years of research in a week and

became the science writer at Sports Illustrated.

It an interesting,

you know,

I came in there's attempts six,

seven years behind people who were younger than me doing sort of more remedial work for them,

but I realized pretty soon my oddball background, right?

I I was shaping up to be like a typical average scientist,

but you take those average science skills and you bring them to the magazines like actually like a Nobel laureate, you know?

And so I realized I could just make my own ground instead of having to compete with anybody.

But initial impetus for getting into this merger of sports and science was was a personal tragedy.

And how do you define yourself from a CRIP perspective?

Are a writer?

Are a scientist?

How do you?

I view myself as this merger between a science writer and investigative reporter,

because what really fires me up is when I view that there's a really popular misconception about something really important to human development.

And that's what led to range.

I I was at Sports Illustrated.

The 10,000 hours rule.

work was the most famous science in human development perhaps ever in terms of

popular consumption and I said well I want to write about it and then I

started reading the research and saying this is wrong it's the most popular finding in our field it's maybe the most popular.

skill acquisition,

human development research ever done and it is not right and so those,

you know, these things kind of stick in my brain and I have to do something about it.

Ten thousand hours, what is that for someone that's never heard about it before?

Yeah, and what people think about it probably depends where they have heard of it if they've heard of it, but it's the idea, and scientists really call it the deliberate practice frame.

But it's this idea that the only route to true expertise is through 10,000 hours of so-called deliberate practice,

which is this effortful,

cognitively engaged,

like not just swatting balls at the driving range,

you're focusing on correcting errors,

kind and that there is no such thing as talent differences,

it's really just the manifestation of 10,000 hours, of differences in your amount of hours of deliberate practice.

So you should start as early as possible,

and there's something underlying it,

this little nerdy,

but called the monotonic benefits I know scientists not going to win any marketing competitions,

but that basically means that the idea that two people at the same level of performance will progress the same amount

for the same unit of deliberate practice.

Also false, and it's one of the underlying premises of the 10,000.

Yeah, because I've always heard that.

I it's become a bit of a colloquial phrase to say,

you've not put your 10,000 hours in, which means you've not put enough practice to become a master.

I I was told that if you do 10,000 hours in anything, you become a master in it.

That's the kind of narrative, right?

Well, to take some chess research, for example, there's and it takes about 11,053 hours on average to reach international master status in chess.

So one level down from Grandmaster.

So first of all, 10,000 hours in that case would be a little low.

But some people made it in 3,000 hours because they learn a little bit more quickly.

Other people were continuing to be tracked past 20,000 hours and they still hadn't made it.

So you can have an 11,053 hours rule on the average.

Doesn't actually tell you anything about the breadth of human skill development.

So why is that so important for me to understand?

And how does that liberate me from that?

wasting my time or aiming at the wrong thing.

Well, fit turns out to be really important.

So, people learn at different rates and different things, so finding where you learn better is really important, if you want to maximize your advantages.

And I think that goes back to one of the reasons why people need to try a bunch of different things.

Because your insight into yourself is really like limited by your roster of experiences, right?

And so you kind of need to figure out where you have comparative advantages

But for a lot of people that's so-called skill stacking where instead of doing the one thing for 10,000 hours

You get proficient at a number of things and overlap them in a way that makes you very unique

And so I this idea of just head down doing the same thing I mean,

we can, should we go back all the way and talk about the research underlying the 10,000 hours ago?

Because that's where I first got onto this.

I to,

so I was a walk-on meaning I wasn't good enough to get recruited as an 800 meter runner in college and I ended up being

part of a university record holding relay.

So I went from being You know nobody to being quite good and so I was inclined to believe this 10,000 hours like yeah,

just you know Just my hard work and then when I started reading the research and I'm looking through the original paper written in 1993

And the original paper was done on 30 violinists 3-0 violinists at a world-class music academy,

okay, so let's let's start dissecting the the problems The first problem was what's called a restriction of range.

These people were already in a world-class music academy, already highly pre-selected.

Pre-selected for something, again, for the stat heads here that is correlated with your dependent variable, which is skill.

That's a problem if you're trying to develop a general skill development framework.

That would be like,

if I did a study of what causes basketball skill and I used it as my subjects only centers in the

NBA and I said well height has no effect on skill in the NBA because they're all seven feet tall so

I've squashed the variation in that variable.

So in my first book, I actually did an analytics project where I took height among American male adults and height in the NBA.

As you might imagine,

there's a very high positive correlation between a height of an American male and their chance of scoring points in the NBA.

But if you restrict the range to only players already in the NBA, the correlation turns negative because guards score more.

than other positions.

So if you didn't know that,

if you just did that study with only NBA players,

you would tell parents to have shorter children,

to have them score more points in the

So when you don't bring some sense of what's going on to your research and you restrict range that way,

you can end up with the wrong message.

Aside from that God school more points or less points.

They score more points and they're shorter Okay, right.

So you if you don't look at the whole population and you just look at people who are so highly pre-screened They're already at the top you can end up with these sort of backward advice

The other issue that caught my eye when I first read the study

Was that there was they only reported the average 10,000 hours was the average number of hours of deliberate practice

By the the 10 best violinists by the age of 20.

And then there was a second group and a lower group,

and they said there was complete correspondence, meaning nobody who had practiced fewer hours was better than anyone who had practiced more hours.

But they only included the average, so I couldn't tell that.

So I said, oh, I would like to know if that's true.

Can I see the data to see if that's true?

true.

And I contacted the,

you know, Anders Ericsson, a guy who was the father of the 10,000-hour role, though he hated that moniker, actually.

And I said, you know, can I see the data or the measures of variance to know how much variation there was between individuals.

And he said, well, You know, people were inconsistent on the repeated accounts of their practice.

So we think that's important.

I well, everyone has trouble with getting good data.

That doesn't mean they don't report the measure of variance.

So after I started criticizing this research,

20 years after the study came out, they did a paper updating it with some of the actual data.

And you could see the original conclusion was wrong.

There was not complete correspondence.

Some people who had practiced less were better than some people who had practiced more.

Some people have gone way over 10,000 hours.

Some people were way under and had done better.

There were all sorts of other factors that mattered, right?

Like, I like to call it the 625,000 hours of sleep study because the top tier group got a lot more sleep.

They were sleeping like 60 hours a week on average compared to the lower groups.

And that was a huge difference in the study, how much they were sleeping.

So it could have just been sleep.

Sleep?

Or, but there was just tremendous individual variation.

Yeah.

So this idea of an average completely obscured the real story,

which was that there were actually people who were practicing less and doing better than people who had more.

So were all one problem after another.

I said, I'm getting youth sports pitches, I'm getting investment pitches, like citing the 10,000 hours rule, it's not right.

And giving the wrong impression of how humans develop.

And this idea that you need to just pick something and stick with it,

and that's sampling to try to figure out where you have your best shot is worthless.

And that's wrong.

And so I became kind of obsessed with getting after that.

I really want to become successful in the things that I'm applying myself to in the season of my life.

So whether that's podcasting or starting businesses,

my business portfolio is quite varied,

sort of different industries from everything from sort of psychedelics,

SpaceX to whatever it might be and so when I was you know thinking about sitting down with you today

I thought maybe I'll just tell them where I'm trying to get to in my life.

I'm a 30 year old man, so You know, I'm not in the early phases of my career.

Does mean for example that I can't make ground now?

What phase of your career are you in?

I don't know because I had this 18 to 28 things

So I thought maybe I'm a little bit more rigid and you know there was research a few years ago from MIT in Northwestern and the U.S.

Census that found the average age of a founder of a fast-growing tech startup top one in 10,000

Guess what the average age was on the day of founding guess

25 45 and a 50-year-old had a better chance to go But we never hear,

just like we never hear the story of these zig zaggers,

we only hear the Tiger Woods story, we only hear like Mark Zuckerberg famously said young people are just smarter.

When he was 22, do you hear him saying that anymore?

No, surprise, surprise.

But just, we never, we, we like valorize precocity.

So I would not say that you're not in the early stages of your career.

You're certainly not by that metric.

And not to say that there aren't tremendous companies or if you know, measured market cap that they're these amazing young founders.

But they get outsized attention compared to what's the norm.

That's another thing that's really important to me.

It's not to say there aren't exceptions because there are as many different ways to the top as there are.

But I think we're constantly focusing on the exception when people should at least be aware of the norm.

So the average, so the fastest growing, did you say tech founders are?

Tech But in this context also included things in agriculture, right?

It's not just photo sharing apps like tech broadly speaking.

Which I think is important because I think it's fair to say that it's less likely a 55-year-old would understand.

some of the more emerging platforms that are native to say,

you know, like Mark Zuckerberg 22 messing around in his dorm room with computers and the internet.

Yeah, I think that's fair.

But technology touches a lot of other areas of that.

Yesterday on the way here,

I learning about a software that I had never heard of because all the computers were down in the airport, right?

Technologies all these places that we, that are not as kind of don't have the sort of figurehead that's publicly profiled the same way.

So if I do want to become a case where I understand that this season of my life,

I can do whatever I want in terms of I can aim at whatever I want, doesn't mean I'm going to be good at it.

But if I just want to be more...

in the goals that I am aiming at,

so this podcast means a lot to me,

so want to be more productive when it comes to figuring out how to move this podcast forward,

how to innovate, how to solve some of the problems and challenges that we face.

What are the first things that spring to mind when I start speaking about productivity with a very focused task?

I mean, I think a challenge for you is going to be that this podcast has gotten so big.

gotten so competent at it,

that you're going to be in what a rut of competence, what economist Russ Roberts told me, a hammock of competence.

You're an where you're so comfortable and so successful that getting better is going to be harder because there's disincentive from changing

anything that you're doing, right?

You have to take some risk.

I you know that you're an entrepreneur.

If you're going to want to get better, you're going to have take some risk.

I think that's going to be a difficult thing to do because there are people in this room that depend on you.

Risk for you is risk for them too.

And I think you have to start thinking about what would be some smart risks if you want to innovate with the podcast,

what might that look like, and finding ways to run small experiments.

I'm huge fan of low stakes practice.

How can you set up some low-stakes practice for what might be a worthwhile, larger experiment?

And I think that's the same for individuals progressing in their career.

Like, I love this phrase.

My absolute favorite phrase in range is a paraphrase from this woman named Permania Ibarra, who's a professor at the London Business School.

And she studies how people make work transitions.

we learn who we are in practice, not in theory.

So thesis of her work is that there's this idea that you can just introspect and go forth and know what you should be doing.

You like Clark Kent running into a phone booth and ripping off his becoming, comes out as Superman.

But work is part of identity and it doesn't change like that from introspect.

You actually have go try something.

see how it went,

what was unexpected,

what did you learn that you might be interested in,

or that you're better at that you did,

what's something that you're good at that you realize you're not using, and then you make your next step based on that, right?

And I think when you're so competent and successful in getting only,

you know,

tons of positive feedback,

It becomes hard to take risk and so I think that'll be a challenge for you because if you take a sufficient amount of risk,

right, you want to be in your zone of optimal push.

So for anything you're doing, if you're doing practicing whatever, physical skill, anything, if you're not at least like 15, 20% of the time.

Then you're not in your zone of optimal push where you're getting as much better as you possibly can and I think

When you have something that's very successful

That's hard and so I would start thinking about what risks you're willing to take and it doesn't mean

It's a failure if something goes backward right if the views go down or whatever metric you're measuring on it's interesting

It's one of my great And it's also one of the things that keeps me up at night,

bugs me in the shower, is how to keep a team conducting experiments and failing more when they are successful.

So when this podcast went to number one in Europe,

I hide ahead of failure,

and her sole responsibility is to increase the rate of failure and experimentation in our team, which means just get all of our different departments.

We've got different departments in this particular business,

so there's 40 odd people in this company called the Dara Vaseo,

and there is a production team, there is the social media team, there's the guest booking and We've company.

We've got And I,

I felt we're actually in LA driving down the road, not speaking to Jemima, who's the head of the guest booking and research team.

And I was saying,

like, one of the most important thing now, now that we're number one, is that we keep, like, disrupting ourselves because there's going

to be some kid,

like we were three days,

three years ago, that because of their naivety, that they're not encumbered by all of this sort of, like, convention and all this success.

So had a failure and experimentation who's in our team and it's been And now in the last couple of days,

we're running an experiment where every single one of those departments has essentially like a failure assistant in it.

Who is who's because you know what happens with people?

They get busy doing their job Yeah, and experimentation of failures always secondary to their job.

So if we put failure People into the each team and they drive the experiments.

They understand the team they drive the experiments They measure them and most importantly they report their failures and experiments back to the whole team because there's really transferable learnings

For example those one the other day where the social media team discovered this thing on tiktok

Which allows us to look at a guess like you and find your most popular videos and the social media team had figured that out,

which was really useful for them,

but then the research team over here that are book and guests who are trying to find the best video.

has ever made,

they also benefited from just the discovery of that button,

because instead of having to scroll through the entire TikTok, they can press one button and see your most popular videos.

So this real one plus one equals three and getting the teams to share their failures and experiments.

So they don't have to fail in the same ways.

So what did you just write down?

This brings up so much stuff, because the fundamental problem you're getting at here is the one called the explore exploit trade-off.

And so it explores what it sounds like, looking for new knowledge or new things that you can do that'll add value.

Exploit is taking stuff you're already good at that you already know and drilling down on it.

And this is like the fundamental challenge for people in organizations that get it good,

is once they find something they're really good at and they drill down in it, they tend to ditch explore mode, right?

And that, explore exploit.

And there's all these,

of course,

you know, these famous business cases like Kodak invents the digital camera and scuttles it because they're like why would we disrupt our own business?

What's business?

But there was this fascinating work led by a guy named Doshan Wong in Northwestern who does,

like, people will do career development studies looking at 20 people and he'll look at 20,000 people, you know, so his work's just fascinating.

And he, what he saw in this work with his colleagues was that people tend to have hot streaks in their careers.

Their work tends to come in clusters.

Most people only have one.

Some people will have more than one if they're lucky.

And what precedes a hot streak, he was looking at I think it was like 26,000 like film directors, artists, scientists.

Reliably what precedes a hot streak is a period of exploration where they're trying these different styles.

They're They're keeping a smaller team so they can be nimble,

they're moving between teams and then they find something and they they drill into it.

And if they're gonna have another hot streak,

they do it again, they zoom back out, and they go to this explore, explore, explore, and then exploit.

So they toggle between these modes instead of staying just in one,

but the clear message of his work is that,

that precedes a hot streak,

and you don't do the exploration,

you just settle in to exploit at sort of a middling level, then you're kind of sacrificing your hot streak.

So that was one of the things that came up for me.

The other thing was this,

you got to something, this idea of people not only doing things that might fail, and I think that's great that they have the title.

You'll have the,

you know,

Adam Grant,

who I think we both know,

he mentioned me once something called the Hippo Effect,

where the opinion of the highest paid person in the room, I that is the acronym, where their signaling is really important for everyone else.

So if you're not just giving lip service like,

yeah, failure is good, but actually giving people that title, I think that's a great signal for, you're underwriting risk.

You're underwriting risk for people psychologically,

and you're creating what scientists who study sort of networks, like groups of teams call an import-export business of ideas.

And this is one of the hallmarks of organizations and ecosystems that learn and adapt.

To to a changing world and the import export business of ideas means you need to have information flowing through an organization

You have people doing different things.

Maybe people even moving teams here and there.

So I always think of the engineer Bill Gore who created the company founded the company that created Gore tax and he fashioned the company based on his observations

that organizations often do their most impactful work in times of crisis,

because the disciplinary boundaries go out the window and people start, what can I learn from my neighbor, you and working together?

Or is he like to say real communication happens in the carpool,

which I think is a funny saying,

but I worry about that with more hybrid and remote work,

where you can't necessarily rely on serendipity for people to be sharing these ideas in this informal way.

And I actually think we have to be a lot more thoughtful about setting up our own import-export business of ideas internally,

and it sounds to me like that's what you're doing.

Okay, so what about then on an individual level?

How do I,

as an individual,

I've got, you know, lots of things I'm doing, I'm writing some books at the moment, I do the podcast, lots other things.

How do I become more productive within an organization?

Because there's my to-do lists.

I've got 10 to-do lists from all of my different team members who can put things on there.

I get distracted easily, I think, because I end up watching a video about AI on YouTube or about rockets or something.

And want to, I want to get more done.

Really, I want to be more productive in the time that I spend working.

So this is when you know what you should be doing.

When I know what be doing.

And there's nothing wrong sometimes watching YouTube and Rocket.

Like, you get ideas from this kind of stuff.

Yeah, I to do lists is a lot of to-do lists.

Yeah.

Do get most of the done on those to-do lists?

So each team, from my chief of staff to my...

Assistant to my manager has a to-do list on Monday that they send things to me on and then I go through there

And it's either a task or it's an approval or it's just letting me know something And that's kind of how it works.

So at one point had when I was getting overwhelmed with some stuff I had a virtual assistant for a little while and we would categorize like emails into list A priority B CD all this stuff

And eventually I realized that was empowering me to do a lot of low value things.

I became efficient at doing things that I shouldn't be doing.

So was seeing this public email address of mine, that when I was oblivious to it, I wasn't answering and that was fine.

But once I knew it was there, I'm like, oh, I to answer this.

I to answer this.

I have answer this.

And so one important step for me was realizing that only the A list is the stuff that's gonna get done because I'm a limited person with a limited life.

So I think it's maybe you do need to do all that stuff or you just need to be aware of it.

But some of it is just, I think there can be a danger in someone who has a lot of support research.

where they can lose some of the aspect of prioritization,

where you just need to say, this is the list that's important, other things I might not get to.

But for someone like you,

I would suggest something like not starting your day with email or messaging because You know,

we were talking a little bit before about the thing called the zagarnic effect,

which is this idea that an unfinished task leaves like a residue in your brain,

basically, and makes it harder for you to fully transition to doing something else.

And because I expect your various inboxes will always be an unfinished task, right?

If start the day with that,

no matter what you do, the residue is going to be there for what you try to switch to next.

So I'm not saying...

But I wouldn't start with it.

I would,

the day before,

what is the thing that if I get done tomorrow,

it's going to be a good day and start with that before you do the things that might leave residue on your brain and start multitasking?

How do they know that's true?

Have they done studies on this agonic effect?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

I you can see,

you can give people,

one, you can do it in a workplace environment where researchers like Gloria Mark, for example, will be tracking

everything from someone's vision to what they're doing on their computer to their heart rate variability.

And seeing how long it takes them to get back to a task,

increased switching when there's like a residue in their brain so their rate of switching will go.

up, you know, some of their indicators of stress

response will go up, or in a cognitive task, they'll perform more poorly if there's something still stuck in their brain.

So there's also sort of laboratory experiments where you give somebody something,

don't let them finish it,

give them a cognitive task, and you see, does it impair their performance if they weren't allowed to finish the thing that started before?

I want to close off on that point of just team culture then,

how to get a team of people to do really exceptional, innovative work and to fail faster.

Is there anything else that's sort of pertinent to you,

and I'm saying this purely selfishly because it's one of the things I think a about even with this podcast is how to get

our teams failing more often.

If that's even the right thing to be aiming at,

the type of experiments we should be running, how we should be running them, anything else at all.

Yeah, I mean, I don't think, I don't, I don't lie in eyes failure for its own sake, right?

It's just, I think it's inevitable if you're experimenting enough that you'll have some failure.

But I think one

A guy I love was made a big impression I mean named Ed Hoffman was used to be chief knowledge officer at NASA.

That's like after NASA had some disasters.

Most everything they did was very successful but obviously they had some high-profile disasters.

He was brought in because they were deemed not a learning organization.

They weren't learning from lessons of the past and he was brought in to help create a knowledge system.

So that people would learn from the lessons of the past and one of the things he does in organizations

When he goes in because now he consults is he goes around and he asks people What are you good at that we're not using?

Right and people always have an answer for that and that leads to well, what's some what's next?

to try to use that thing that you're good at, that we're not using.

So think that can be kind of a foundational question to help people set up some of those experiments.

But a big impact would be,

and this is a tough one, you going ahead and failing in an experiment, because that's gonna set the agenda, right?

But you would actually have to fail.

Like this can't be,

you were off a job and you trip on the curb or something, like you have to fail with something of consequence.

And then your reaction to that can set a tone.

So that's on the team level.

So want to really think about how on an individual level, I can become a better learner.

Because one of the things I do obviously for a living is I do this podcast and I meet all these incredible people and they say things to me that in the moment

Change my life,

but I feel like I forget them five minutes later often some of them stick some of them don't So I've always wondered how can I become a better learner people come up to me in

the street and say you might you must know so many Things about so many things and also my audience they they tune in every week.

They listen to these incredible people How can we become better learners?

What it we can do to?

Retain information better and then also bring it into practice in our lives.

Oh to retain information for me.

Okay Well, for retaining information, one repetition and familiarity is important, right?

So if something that's really important to you,

you should reread it because the first time you go through,

if you're hearing new things, new terms, you're using your working memory just to keep.

So, to put this in a simple way, there's research where you look at school kids and if they're

given an essay about baseball,

say, the kids that are deemed really good readers and they're kids who are poor readers and the kids who do the worst on comprehension are the poor

readers who don't know anything about baseball, but kids who know about baseball but are not as good readers.

than the kids who are good readers but don't do anything about baseball, if only get to go through once.

Because some knowledge helps you fit into what's called your semantic network, the spider web of all the ideas in your brain.

So one, going back over things, that can be taking notes, whatever it is.

But when you learn something new, try to fit it into your semantic network.

When you learn something.

back to something you already know,

so like when you have these conversations,

you probably have a better tendency to remember things where you say,

you know, that reminds me of some other guest that either agrees or disagrees with something that some other guest said and you've attached it.

If you think of your brain as like the spider web,

things are attached by threads and if you vibrate one thread, it's more likely to shake these other ideas into your brain.

So you're learning something new, stop and try to fit it into your existing base of knowledge, if you wanna return better.

Can I use that to sort of fit it into an example?

So I'm thinking of you, you said something about, what is something I don't use, but I'm good at?

Would the listener that's listening in order to embed that think of something that they are not using that they're good at,

because then it kind of brings it into the- Absolutely.

Absolutely.

Use it as quickly as you can,

again, repetition, but fit it into your network of ideas, like stop if you have to, because, you know, you can read a ton, but if you're not

- kind of,

and I think reading even things that you don't retain still change your sensibility at some level,

even if you can't consciously pull up all of the ideas and statistics and so on,

but for things that you really want to be able to access,

connect it to other things that you already know,

and some what's called spaced repetition, like if you can have a way where you come back to it at intervals.

that'll be much better.

So use this like read-wise as a programming.

I'm like affiliated with them in any way.

It's a thing that I use where if I have highlights in Kindle books or eBooks,

it will feed me back my highlights at intervals, things that I thought were important regularly.

And that's taking advantage of what's called spaced repetition,

where if you want to actually leave a space almost to the point of forgetting something,

and then if it's brought up again, you're embedding it better in long-term memory.

So this is for learning anything, spaced repetition, language learning, all this kind of stuff.

So you would think that you should just repeat a thing a million times,

as soon as you have it,

and that's the best way to grapple onto it,

that's not the most efficient use of time, it's actually to space it out, and yourself is a great way to retain.

So something called the generation effect, which is if you have to do highlighting versus flashcards, flashcard quizzing is much better.

The Being forced to come up with an answer,

even if it's wrong, in fact, sometimes especially if it's wrong, primes your brain to then retain the right answer.

It's called something called the hyper correction effect,

where if you're really wrong about an answer, you're much more likely to remember the right answer once it's given to you.

So if you're looking up a piece of information,

I suggest you guess what it's going to be before you get doesn't matter if you're right or wrong.

It feel bad to be wrong, but it doesn't matter.

You'll better retain it when you see the right answer.

But if I'm wrong, then I guess I'm more shocked, so there's even more retention of that new answer.

It's salient.

This is one of this kind of quizzing where it feels hard, because you should do it before you know the answer.

It's something I wrote about in range called desirable difficulties.

These are things that make learning feel less fluent, they are unpleasant, they may slow you down, much better for long-term retention.

Interesting.

So, the more difficult the learning, the more you learn.

Often.

I mean.

But I guess there can be a case where something's so over your head that you're not learning anything, right?

But desirable difficulties are like one of the most famous ones is called interleaving or mixed practice.

And this is if you're training at something, you want to vary the types of process.

Let's give them some more.

DJing?

I'm DJing at the moment.

Okay, so I don't know all the skills that go into DJing, but if there's a way to do it, you should try to instead of doing the same skill over and

over and over again.

Well, let me give you a research example and then you can port it into DJing.

So in a recent study, there were dozens of middle school math classrooms, middle school is six.

that were assigned to different types of math learning.

Some of them randomly assigned.

Some of them got what's called blocked practice.

That's you give like problem type AA, AA, BB, BB, etc.

Kids make progress fast, they're happy, rate their teachers highly, etc.

Other classrooms got what's called interleaved or mixed practice where.

doing A followed by B, it's like you took all the problem types through them in a hat and drew them out at random.

Progress is slower.

They might be less happy because they don't feel like they're getting it.

But instead of having to just execute a they're having to match a strategy to a type of problem.

And when the test came along, where everyone has to transfer to new problems, the interleaved group blew the block practice group away.

It like the effect size was like taking a kid from the 50th percentile and moving them to the 80th,

just by arranging the practice in a way that made it more difficult.

What's going on there?

I think, I mean, it seems to be, and this works for physical learning as well.

I think this is one of the reasons why,

I in if you want,

why Futsal,

this, like, why, like, 90% of the footballers grow up on Futsal instead of,

like, playing on full-size pitch, is that it forces you to, instead of doing

using procedure's knowledge, which is you learn how to execute this procedure.

you're doing making connections knowledge, which is identifying the structure of a problem and freeing out a match of strategy to it.

And so your building is like mental template instead of just an ability to execute this flexible template that can be applied.

So you're getting like a broader context of the challenge versus a very narrow solution perspective to how the challenge is solved,

you're kind of understanding it from a deeper level, from different sides.

And your building's generalizable model in your head of how to approach it.

I my favorite,

and I'd the only person say this,

but my favorite study that went into range was this one,

the one that surprised me the most,

I guess,

was this one that was done at the States Air Force Academy,

which is this amazing place for experiments because they get a thousand new students every year.

those students are randomized to math classes that all have the same test and same grading everything,

then they are re-randomized the next year and re- again.

So you can get these huge experiments randomizing people to math classes and they looked at 10,000 students and found that the teachers

who are the best at getting students to do well on the test in their own class, in their own intro class, right?

teacher year one has students who score highly on their test,

those students go on to underperform in the subsequent classes,

and teachers who students sometimes rated them lowly because they thought it was hard,

don't do as well on the test the first year overperform in subsequent classes.

And the difference is the way to go.

to do really well in the test is to teach this a narrow body of knowledge that they'll have to execute at the test.

The best way to prepare them for math learning is to give them this much broader connection of ideas that will serve them later on.

So again,

this is like,

to me,

the theme on every page of range that would have made a crappy subtitle is

Sometimes what seems the best in the short-term will undermine long-term development.

The tricky thing with that,

as you say,

is I think about all the areas and industries that I'm playing in now, so I go, do have the time to go broad?

Like, I'm learning to DJ at the moment, and at the moment, I'm just trying to figure out what these fucking buttons do.

You know what I Like, there's all these buttons.

I'm trying to press them in the right order.

But you're telling me that the thing that's better for my long-term development

might be just to spend some time understanding music and how it's made,

and how understanding the beats of music and maybe spend some time making music myself,

because right now I'm just trying to smash two songs together at the right time.

I think this gets at a fundamental issue that maybe I should have brought up earlier, actually.

And it has to do with how you characterize the different tasks that you're trying to learn.

So there was a period where I was really confused about the research I was reading in

building expertise because there were two camps of researchers, both led by eminent scientists, one that would study people doing.

sort of more 10,000 hours, he kind of approach same thing over and over, and they would get better.

And this other camp that would find if people did that approach,

not only would they not get better, they would often get more confident, but not better, which was a bad combination.

And sometimes they would get even worse with really narrow focus.

And I could not figure out how to reconcile these things.

Why are they finding such different results?

Again, I'm looking through for all these signs of bad data, not finding it.

And fortunately,

I gave a talk where I was doing some of the critiquing of the science underlying the 10,000 hours rule in the Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman who wrote Thinking of

Thank you.

and someone asked,

he asked someone for my email address and like months later,

he followed up and invited me to lunch,

and we go and have lunch,

and I'm like,

and he was interested in my critique of some of the research,

and I was I'm really confused, you know, what are you working on now?

I'm working through my confusion about this, why do people sometimes get better?

narrowly focused practice, and why sometimes don't they?

He oh, I've got the paper for you.

And basically, he referred me to this body of research about kind versus wicked learning environments.

These are terms coined by a psychologist named Robin Hogarth.

Kind is like, next steps and goals are clear, rules it's based on patterns, repetitive patterns, or rules never change.

Give an example.

Chess, golf, in chess the grandmasters advantage is based on knowledge of recurring

patterns, so you better have started studying those by age 12 or your chance of reaching grandmasters

drops from about 1 in 4 to about 1 in 55, also why it's relatively so easy to offer.

automate.

Feedback is quick and accurate.

Not a lot of human behavior involved.

Work next year will look like work last year.

On the other end of the spectrum are wicked learning environments where patterns don't just repeat.

They fool you.

Rules change if there are any.

Feedback be delayed or inaccurate.

Work next year may not look like work last year.

Whether or people get better in a predictable way with this very narrow practice depends a lot on where,

on that kind to wicked spectrum, the task happens to be.

What's an example of a wicked learning environment?

So say one of the examples that I loved that he turned me to was in medicine.

There's a lot of areas in medicine where something is done and the person making the decision actually never learns of the consequence of the decision.

Or I'd say I would say like judges in some cases in like the criminal justice system are set up to have maybe the

worst judgment they could have in some ways because they almost never get feedback.

They have like very little they can do whatever they want and they almost never get any any feedback.

But in medicine,

there was this one example in one of the studies that I thought was just interesting and illustrative where this physician became famous for being able to diagnose typhoid.

It's a New York physician by feeling around palpating people's tongues, feeling around their tongues with his hand.

And you could tell, you know, a week or two before they would even get it, this person's going to get typhoid.

With colleagues later observed, he was a more prolific spreader of typhoid than even typhoid Mary.

He was spreading it with his hands by touching their tongue,

making the prediction they would get typhoid,

which would turn out to be correct, so it would reinforce the lesson that he was really good at prediction.

That's a really wicked learning environment, where the feedback he's getting is reinforcing the exact wrong level.

But I would say most of the things that most of us are doing have feedback that tends to be delayed,

sometimes it's accurate and sometimes it's not.

It's never as accurate as like I hit that golf shot and I see if it hooks or slices

and then I change the club face and try it again.

And so most of what most of us are involved.

them increasingly, right?

Like, work doesn't, next year doesn't look like work last year for most of us anymore.

And in fact,

Anders Ericsson,

again, the guy who did the research underlying the 10,000-hour rule, when he eventually wrote a book, he made this caveat

out in the book that said the

It applies to things where we know exactly how to be good and a coach can watch you do

it and correct everything that you do wrong.

So it doesn't apply to most of these other things that most of us do,

like computer programming and managing and entrepreneurship and all these other pretty big loophole, right?

In areas, you want this much broader toolbox.

I was really compelled by something I saw you talking about,

which the story of Nintendo and why they were so successful in the early days,

because they have a very broad, they take what I wrote down the quote, a lateral thinking with with technology.

Yeah, that started with a guy named Gunpei Yokoi, who was...

I scored poorly on electronics exams in university,

and so he had to settle for a low-tier job as a machine maintenance worker at a company in Kyoto that made playing cards with flowers

on them, whereas like his more prestigious peers went to big companies in Tokyo.

And the company was in huge trouble, had to diversify if it was going to survive.

And he knew...

that he wasn't equipped to work on the cutting edge,

but that there was all this information available that maybe he could just look for technology that's already

well understood and combine it in ways that his more specialized peers couldn't see.

And so he went and he took some well-known technology from the calculator industry,

some well-known technology from the credit card industry and them and made handheld games,

and those were Right,

that's what made Nintendo,

which was a found in a wooden storefront in the 19th century That's what turned it into a to a toy and game

operation So he moved from machine maintenance to developing toys and games and his magnum opus was the Game Boy, right where?

It was a technological joke in every way.

It's the processor was a decade old, the screen looks like rotting alfalfa or something.

It's and it came out at the same time

as color competitors and it blew them out of the water because he knew what customers cared about wasn't color as much as it was.

Durability, affordability, portability, battery life, game selection by using well-known technology.

People could make games quickly.

And so he kind of set this philosophy,

this lateral thinking with wither technology,

that was his phrase, which means taking things that are already well understood and moving them somewhere where they're seen as invention.

And that actually turns out to be more than norm than the exception in terms of technological innovation,

particularly sort of later in the 20th century.

forward.

Before that, it wasn't necessarily the case.

Much of the 20th century,

actually, the impactful patents, if you look at patent research, were authored by teams and

individuals that dove deeper and deeper into one area of technology as classified by the U.S.

patent office.

But starting in this sort of information age period,

particularly 80s and It becomes a lot easier to access information more broadly and the most impactful

patterns started to be authored by teams that include individuals who have worked in a whole number

of different classes and they're often merging things from different areas.

So how important is focus in this this equation focusing on one thing because you're talking

for much of this conversation about being broad and people will associate that with being unfocused?

Yeah, it's it's a right I think the differences between doing a bunch of things

sort of over your career over your life or a span and doing attempting to do a bunch of things at once.

We can't technically So we don't really multitask.

We have the capacity to do it.

We're actually just toggling between things really quickly.

And it's been shocking to me to look at the research how big of an impairment that is for people's performance,

particularly because it takes time to switch.

And so you You're not,

again, the scientist Gloria Mark, who I think has been at the forefront of study of attention, describes your brain as a whiteboard where you're doing something and to do something

else you have to erase and that residue is left and it's still going to be there when

you move to the new thing for a while.

And you can't totally get into the next thing if you're interrupted.

And it impairs your performance, and it's stressful.

That's been the most surprising part to me,

is when people are heart rate variabilities measured and some immune parameters,

that when people switch a lot,

if you just saw how many times people switched their task,

email to this other thing, to some notification over a day, you'd have a pretty good bet at predicting their stress level.

level and their performance level over the day.

Really?

Yeah.

They've done studies on this.

She has done that.

She's hooked people up, you at big organizations too, like inside Microsoft and places like that, where people are wearing heart rate variability monitors.

Everything they're doing is being tracked.

In the old days, she was like sitting behind people with a stopwatch, but technology obviously progressed.

And I think that's a surprising aspect of it.

One of the reasons that email makes people so stressed is because it leads them to do this like const.

I think in one of her studies, people were checking email, office workers were checking email on average of 77 times a day.

That's a lot of switching when you're switching in and out of email.

And that just turns out to be a stressful thing because there's switching actually takes place in two.

kind of phases where you,

the first phase is shutting down what you are doing and the next phase is activating the rules for the next task.

So even if you kind of think you're doing the same thing like you're working on focused writing,

but you're also in a Slack channel or something with a friend or colleague, those are both writing.

But they're not the same style of writing and so you're still having to activate different cognitive rules and that that comes with a switching cost

So if I can do something about it

What should I do it to make sure that I'm both happy and more productive and I would again,

not start your day with something that is inherently a multitask.

So if you cannot start with email,

I would not start with it because I view that,

at least for me, as something that will start the day with multitasking and will always feel unfinished, like never feel like it's finished.

Block out times where you designate on your calendar that this is the only thing that you're doing and leave some buffer for it,

because there's something called the planning fallacy we always overestimate how much we can get done in a given amount of time.

So I'd say fewer things on your to-do list, fewer things.

And on the top, maybe even just one thing that's, if I get this done, this was a good productive day.

Focus on that thing, you pay yourself first, do the important thing first.

And really try to have some, when you're trying to be focused.

It's to mingle with people and exchange ideas when that's what you wanna do.

But when you really have to be focused to try to be in a place that's as distraction-free as possible.

And that includes even turning down or off music, even though it's pleasant and can help your act.

and can motivate, but it also does have an impairment on cognitive function, because are paying attention to it, to some degree.

So don't listen to music while I'm doing my work.

I mean,

it's hard to say,

because I do it sometimes too,

because it can have an energizing effect or it can have a calming effect, and those are good, but it does take up brain space.

So you have to balance those.

How do they know it takes up brain space?

You can see how people perform on tasks,

when the music is on or when the music is off,

and it's not as big a deal if the music is very familiar,

where you're kind of like,

It's not novel,

so you're not attending to it the same way,

but when I'm trying to be super focused now,

I'll turn the music off, but if I feel my sort of motivation waning, then maybe I'll tune it back on.

But I want to use it deliberately instead of just having it in the background all the time because it takes up a space.

And if it's real noise, like...

Decibels is a logarithmic scale, so small differences are actually a deal.

But you go from,

it's like maybe 70 to 80 decibels,

that's like the difference of going from a washing machine to a vacuum cleaner thereabouts in your background noise,

that has an enormous influence on your cognitive ability and your productivity, like a 15 decrement.

Just become sound.

Yeah.

Volume sorry.

Because attend to it.

You I that's how our break, like, focus is a challenge because this is not the situation that we evolved in, right?

We in a situation where paying attention to novel stimuli is a really good thing.

And sometimes it's still a very good thing.

But it's at odds with a lot of these modern things that we're trying to do that are pretty new tasks for people.

What about instrumental music?

Because tend to find that if I'm listening to music that has lyrics in it,

then I find it quite distracting when I'm trying to do some work, specifically writing work or reading work.

So when I'm researching,

guess what I'm like I was today in my hotel room,

I had a song playing,

it was a rap song and it was,

I could,

I could feel my brain subtly jumping from the screen that I was reading to the rap lyrics,

to the screen, to the rap lyrics, almost like just oscillating between the two.

And thought, you've got to turn that off because you're not reading.

I turned it off and I really made progress.

But but I sometimes when I write like books and stuff like that, I put instrumentals, on.

And there's actually some apps in the app store now that are called like focus music and then lyric free music.

And maybe like not lots of tonal changes or not very complex melodies maybe repeating.

I mean I think that's gonna be better right the less novelty there is for you to attend to that's better.

it's also worth trying it with nothing.

And depends how much you're pushing yourself, right?

Like tiny,

an improvement of motivation or your affect or feeling good might be worth it if you're not all the way at the edge pushing yourself.

Like, don't know if you've ever been on a,

there was a time where I was trying to do some foreign language lessons that I was listening to while I would be running.

And I started hitting it hard while I was running,

I couldn't even remember what was said, because as you switch into being really focused, right?

And so I think it depends.

If you're pushing yourself all the way you need everything,

like there are times when I'm writing where I'm trying to balance a of ideas in my head,

and I almost feel like I'm overheating a little bit.

And if I'm in that phase,

I want every So I push the distractions out, but, but like there's also times to be, to be pleasant.

I think, I think part of what's sensible is working in intervals planning to work in intervals focus hard for.

do the Maya Angelou then switch to your little

mind where you're doing something that's sort of more fun and refreshing and maybe you like to incubate for a few minutes also.

Take a shower, take a walk, you know?

What about notifications?

Because I have a lot of notifications.

I try and turn them all off, but they're still there in the background.

And you used talking before we got going about this sort of internal barometer of distraction that we all have.

Yeah, yeah, this is, so this is another aspect of, of Dr.

Mark's work where she found that we have this kind of internal mechanism where,

if you're getting distracted all the time by notifications or whatever it is and switching a lot,

if you say,

well, now I really have to hunker down, I'm going to get rid of the notifications or whatever this stuff is, you will start self-interrupting to maintain the cadence

of interruptions to which you have become accustomed.

right?

As if we have some internal like distractometer that is saying, this is your normal cadence of interruption.

I'm going to it by popping into your brain.

Oh, here's this thing I need to check.

Oh, here's this person I didn't respond to, you know, you'll self interrupt.

That will go away, but not immediately.

So if you want to have a lower cadence of interruption,

you need to like build by getting rid of those external interruptions,

know that you're going to be self-interrupting for a while, and that'll go down more slowly.

So it has to be more habit formation instead of just, today, I shall be, you know, uninterruptible.

Okay, so just want to make sure I'm clear on this.

So say that I get a notification every I get 10 notifications a minute, and that's what I'm used to.

right?

And then I decide to turn my notifications off.

Because I'm used to 10 notifications per minute,

you're saying that I will basically think of 10 things per minute to interrupt myself when with for a while,

because that's what I'm used to.

So we get comfortable with a certain level of interruption at a certain cadence.

And even if we remove the thing that's interrupting us, we'll just replace it with something else that interrupts us that amount at that cadence.

Yes, you can see in studies where people are taking cognitive tests if they have their phone invisible, even if it's off.

The people who are more phone dependent.

used to interruptions, they'll have a bigger impairment on the test if the phone is even like visible or around them.

Yeah and so it's you know what thing did I forget to do and I think something that can help with this is

keep a pad nearby and when that thing pops into your head of the...

forgot to do,

or who you forgot to respond to,

write it down so at least it's,

maybe that helps it not stick in your mind where you're trying to hold it in working memory, like outsource it.

So least it's not sitting in there and I think that can help the adjustment.

It makes me think a lot about people that struggle with sleep and just sleep hygiene generally because if we're,

you know,

if our phone is this thing of interruption throughout the day,

then go to bed cuddling our phone which a lot of people do,

it's probably gonna have quite a big impact on our ability to sleep.

Yeah, I mean, I wonder if, you know, I there's some, I think our phones are really

useful for certain things,

and I think they are disruptive for other things,

and I wonder if sleep is one of the most important, because you don't really want to be like leaving residue on your brain.

So I would put the phone as far away as possible when you're really trying to sleep and not at the last minute either personally

What'd you do?

Oh, I leave it in a different floor and airplane mode Have you always done that?

No When did you start doing that?

Well, I definitely do it when I'm in the process of writing a book because then all these things that I take for granted

I'm like now I really got to lock in and be better And I have a five-year-old son,

and I was more of a person who would work at night,

like I would do a of my writing in the wee hours, and he's getting up early, no matter what.

And so I realized that I had to start being a lot more efficient about some of my schedule and started thinking a lot more about

it.

about having it be dark, having it be quiet, having it be cool, not having the phone around.

The last thing I'm reading,

not being work-related otherwise,

I'll be thinking about that and it'll take me longer to go to sleep,

so I think I became a better about it when my son came around.

It's funny you mentioned that you've got a son because much of your work made me think about it.

what I'll do when I'm a parent someday,

because you talk about how these early years where if a child focuses on being a specialist in something particular or a generalist,

they have wildly different outcomes.

And think as a big football fan and a big Manchester United fan,

I always thought,

when my kid comes out with my wife someday,

the first thing I'm gonna get him doing from the age of two months old is kicking a football around.

because then he'll be a Manchester United player, I'll get to go to the games, I'll be in the players box, everything will be great.

But your work seems to that if I want him to become a Manchester star, maybe I shouldn't do that.

You know,

I'm not convinced that you are going to be like a vicarious living kind of dad,

maybe you'll turn out to be, but I'm not convinced.

But let me tell you,

you just remind me of interesting where I was wondering,

this research in sports that shows that the people who go on to the highest levels,

again, there are a ton of different paths, but they tend to follow the Roger path, not the Tiger path.

So Tiger Woods,

we know, or very early specialization famously, Roger Federer played a whole bunch of different sports, didn't specialize until later than some of his peers.

So Tiger was playing golf since he was...

Because he was at his father gave him a when he ten months old, when he was two, just as a toy.

He wasn't trying to teach him to be a golfer, he gave him a toy.

As Tiger himself said, my father never once asked me to play.

It always me asking him to let me play, but that's ignored.

At two, he was on national television.

You you can go on YouTube, see him on national TV, showing off his swing.

And then by three, he's saying, I'm going to the world's next great golfer.

Just world famous as a teenager.

By age of 21, he's the greatest golfer in the world, right?

On the other hand, Roger played a variety of different sports.

basketball, rugby, skateboarding, soccer.

Mother a tennis coach, but to coach him because he wouldn't return balls normally.

I guess didn't like to live or practice.

Kept doing, let's see, he handball, he some rugby, skiing, swimming, wrestling.

When his coaches wanted to move him up to play with older boys,

he declined because he just wanted to talk about pro wrestling with his friends after practice.

And he was not focused on being the next great from an early age like Tiger was.

In fact,

when he became good enough to warrant an interview with his local newspaper,

the asked him what he'd buy with his first hypothetical paycheck if he ever became a pro and he him Mercedes.

His mom was aghast, right?

And thought this was like go.

And so she asks the reporter to hear the interview recording.

Turns out he just said, mayor CDs in Swiss German.

He wanted more CDs, not a Mercedes, right?

She fine with that.

So he went on to be every bit as famous as Tiger Woods.

But even tennis enthusiasts don't usually know anything about his developmental story, even though it's the norm according to the song.

science.

We only tell, we only tell the tiger stories, even though that, that one's the exception, right?

And this is, why do we only tell the tiger story?

This is part of the I've had with, with Malcolm Gladwell when we're running together.

And he said,

well, he told me, it's a human cat video, you know, you go on YouTube and see him at two years

old and you can't, you got to share it.

I think But I think it's also because it feels like this tidy narrative that we can extrapolate

to anything we want to be good at in our own lives.

The problem is, as we talked about, golf is almost a uniquely horrible model of almost everything else that humans want to learn.

It's like the epitome of a kind learning environment where the situation isn't changing and you're not having to react,

so I it's a And we underplay,

even for famous people,

the normal developmental trajectory,

like once gave a talk to a small group of people about some of this research and sports,

showing that the typical path to becoming elite is with a sampling period.

You a broad range of skills, learn about your own interests and abilities, delay specializing to later than possible.

And Serena Williams sat in the second row,

and I'm freaking out,

because you can present all the data you want,

but if the goat stands up and says you're an idiot, it's going to be a bad day, right?

And I'm like, please don't let her ask a question.

Of course she raises her hand for the first thing, and she goes, I think my father was ahead of his time.

He had me do ballet, track and field, gymnastics, Taekwondo, learn to throw a football for the overhand snapping motion of a serve.

When there was too much travel on like the, you know, a youth tour, he took me off so I could focus on school.

I'd been a senior writer at Sports Illustrated and I had never heard that.

I assumed that she was this kind of quintessential tiger story.

So even those stories, when you look more deeply, they're not as clear-cut as we tend to think.

Well, I learned this myself when I didn't know this as the rule, but I found the story of Lomuchad.

because I,

my friend of mine brought me ringside to a fight in New York City and I sat at the side of the ring watching this guy called Viscilla Machenka

that I'd never seen in my life and I just couldn't believe.

his footwork, I'd never seen anything like it in my life.

And then I, after the fight, he won the fight, of course.

After the fight,

I looked into his win record and it was something like he'd won 300 of his amateur fights and only ever lost one.

And then he'd gone back and beat the guy that he'd lost against.

And in my mind, I'd never seen a boxer like it ever.

And then when I read into your work,

you've mentioned him as well as being one of these examples that had a really varied early upbringing, didn't just focus on boxing.

And that's ultimately what made his skills stack so unusual and therefore probably what made him.

His story surprised even me where he took several years off to learn dance like that.

I I wouldn't usually expect someone to take years off.

It's sort of do things in those same years.

So was amazing, but.

His father's called Anatoly.

And think it was his father that took him off into dance classes or And then let him go back to boxing.

So for your prospective child, I wouldn't say like don't expose them to soccer.

I cause I think a lot of this isn't,

I think there's a few things going, there are three buckets of things going on with why this delayed specialization works in sports.

One is match quality, again, the degree of fit between who you are and what you do.

Is that about passion, like what you were passionate about?

Ability and interests.

Okay.

And the earlier you forced selection, the more likely you put the wrong person in the wrong spot.

Okay.

So when selection is way pre-pubers.

Okay, you're probably putting people in the side.

My kid might want to be a boxer, but I'm forcing him to be a soccer player, and he might miss his potential with boxing.

Premature optimization.

And that's also why we often see on junior teams the relative age effect.

You where kids born earlier in their birth cohort are way overrepresented on junior and youth national teams,

because when they're eight or whatever and selected,

if they're eight and 10 months versus just turned eight,

that's a huge difference of development in that age and coaches mistake that biological maturation for talent.

youth teams are overloaded with kids born early in their youth cohort and also

in school especially boys if they're younger in their age cohort are much more likely

to get diagnosed with ADHD but they're just acting like the younger boys that they are.

And and then that disappears at the top level so it's not It's not a good thing,

so there's the relative age effect that's one, or premature choosing.

There's injury,

which is we now see a lot of adult-style overuse injuries in kids,

and the main predictor of that is nine months a year of one sport and one sport only.

So this isn't about less sports.

There seems to be a protective effect of diversifying.

That is separate from just doing less,

but actually balancing yourself out in some way,

but then there's a skill learning advantage where it's similar to language,

where kids who grow up with multiple languages,

they will often show a little delay in some of their language skills,

but that delay is totally wiped out in the long run, and they have an advantage for subsequently learning.

It looks very similar in a lot of these skills,

where if you're diversifying, there may be some delay, but you have an advantage for picking up other skills later on.

And I don't think this is about whether you're putting on a basketball jersey or a football jersey.

I think it's about variability in your problem solving, which is why I think so many of the great footballers group.

Where?

What's footstone?

It's footsalls with a small ball, soccer-like game with a small ball.

I the bazillion name is like football day slow, which it means like football in a room.

Small stays on the ground,

played in a small space and kids will be playing on, you know, cobblestones one day and concrete the next day.

And it's like in a phone booth,

you at hyper speed,

and so there's no,

no one's drifting down the field and everyone's having to judge,

even if you don't have the ball, pick up on body movements to try to anticipate what's coming next.

I the touches are about six times as frequent as in, as in full scale football.

And so I think it engenders a lot more of this sort of variability.

then does just sort of the full-scale game.

It makes your reactions a lot faster as well.

You have to make decisions faster with the board.

It's funny you're talking about the Tiger example and why people broadcast that story more than they broadcast.

what you consider to be the average, which is just people having this varied upbringing and then eventually finding one thing and taking it forward.

It made me think that from my experience, people broadcast that they basically broadcast anything that's the exception because it's the exception.

So the story of,

you know,

Tiger is one example,

but on the other side,

with someone like Anthony Joshua,

who started boxing at,

I'm going to butcher this,

but let's say,

I hear that all the time because it's so unusual that he would become well

champion but start at 24 and the other story that you hear all the time is like

the child prodigy story of like I don't know Michael Jackson or a Tiger Woods that started when they were two.

You don't hear about the person that starts.

it like 15, because it's not interesting, because it's the norm.

Right, or who ramps up in sort of a normal way, when they started, because early exposure is great.

Yeah.

Early exposure is good.

But and it's a little more equivocal, right?

It's less of a prescription also.

So when someone starts late, we think they defy the odds, this is amazing.

And when someone starts early, that's a very easy And so I think a lot of it is about that ease.

We referenced the word match quality, but also we talked about passion a little bit, which is one factor of match quality.

A lot of people are trying to figure out what they should be aiming at in their life,

and one of the most popular questions I get from young people is, how do I find my passion?

How do I know what it is?

Or at least like what's the process defining it and it's they refer to it as if it's the sort of Easter egg

But and there's one of them and they have to go find it not one and it's singular because passion Yeah,

no, I don't, first of all, I think losing the idea that it is, I mean, that's like the idea that there's like a single soulmate out there for you, you know?

And I mean,

obviously I found my single soulmate, but for most of the rest of you, there's a lot of things you might be interested in.

In fact, the more things you try, you'll probably figure out the more things that you're interested in.

It was just last week's.

I was at the Pentagon spending some time with a lieutenant general who helped with a program

they call talent-based branching there where they were losing a lot of the people they identified as the highest potential or leaving the army.

And they started this pilot program called talent-based branching where instead of saying here's your path,

you know, here's your career path, get up or out.

They'd pair them with sort of a coach like figure and they'd have them dabble in like five different career paths a little bit,

reflect on it with their coach, take some tests, how did this fit you?

They have to keep track of their reflections in non-line portal, again, self-regulatory learning.

Got do it explicitly.

In that process, 90% of the army cadets who went through that process.

process, change their career preference.

And is just from a little bit of dabbling, because you don't know what's out there.

You don't know what the opportunities are.

And you know, it helped retention so people were more likely to stay if they find better fit.

This is,

I think,

actually one of the really important things about,

and I'll circle back to passion a little bit there, but when we think about grit, right, which everyone thinks of it.

I think about this,

and reason that the Army made me think about it,

my semantic network,

is that the most famous grit research was done at West Point at the United States Military Academy by Angela Duckworth and her colleagues,

and it found that the grit survey,

the grit survey is a 12-question survey,

half the points are awarded for consistency of interests, not changing what you're interested in, and half the points for persistence of effort or perseverance.

It turns out to be a good predictor of who would get through this very rigorous orientation at West Point called Beast.

Also has some predictive value for who would graduate.

So just to give you some context,

for the listeners that,

from the way that I understood this,

that Angela Duckworth did this day to basically figure out what it was that made people more

likely to get through this very rigorous selection process at an army barracks or something,

and she determined that this grit, as she called it, was the thing that allowed people to be successful.

So that study, I've heard this all over the place, that actually what makes people successful, even in my team, is grit.

And that survey turned out to be a better predictor

than were some traditional metrics of who would get through beast like test scores and stuff like that.

It also had some value for who would get through the military academy, as did some of those traditional metrics.

But tons of those,

like since about the mid 1990s,

those very gritty cadets at West Point have been,

almost half of them have been quitting,

almost on the day that they have a five-year active duty service commitment after they graduate, and almost half of them have been quitting.

And so the Army at a point said, we've got a millennial grit problem, you like much avocado toast, not enough mortgages or like whatever.

And then some scientists were also officers decided to study the problem, and they said, we haven't gotten a grit problem overnight.

We've got a match.

Right?

When the army looked like the rest of the economy,

where it was more up or out and you faced the same kind of problems year over year,

and you could have a period of training followed by a period of working, doing similar things, ladder was limited, that was fine.

It mimicked the rest of the Then you move into this whatever you want to call it, knowledge, creativity, information, economy.

and people who can engage in creative problem solving and knowledge creation have tremendous ladder mobility.

They have lots of opportunities.

These young people are learning things about themselves in the early 20s,

and they have no agency over career switching to match it, so they were just quitting.

When the Army first didn't realize this,

so they threw attention bonuses at people, and the ones who were to stay took it, ones who were to leave left anyway, half billions.

dollars, taxpayer money didn't fix the problem.

But what I think it shows is that how limited your insight into what you might want to do is based on the things that you've tried,

again, her mini-e-bar as we learn who we are in practice, not in theory.

And I think the biggest problem for young people is if they're sitting around introspecting to try to figure out what they're passionate about.

go and try something.

It's certainly not going to be the first thing.

It may be.

You may get lucky, but it's probably not going to be the first thing.

So you should get going on that experiment process and start building a model of the world so that you understand what your options are.

And I also think the issue with passion And happiness is,

again, like I was talking about, I think it was, I can't remember everything that was before the recording started and after, but like when I used to run the 800 meters

or now when I write books, if you ask me at any given moment, am I enjoying this?

Am I happy about it?

You know, am I passionate about it?

Sometimes no, I want to throw my computer out the window.

Are you crazy?

But it's so engaging, it's so compelling, and it pushes me in a way to learn that I can't do just on my free time.

And I don't think we have to think about just passion, find something that is so incredibly engaging to you, and then go from there.

And engaging really is,

how do you know that it's engaged, when you sort of drop into that flow state where there's nothing else seems to matter or.

Flow, I flow is a tricky one,

because a lot easier,

it shows up a lot more in people that are surfing or painting than it does in some kinds of knowledge work,

but I think when you When you get really engaged in something,

you have a curiosity about how you can get better at it, what else you can learn next.

I it stimulates this kind of curiosity that you don't see in people when they're just in something where they're going through the motions.

You start to understand,

I remember when my then girlfriend, now wife, it was important to me for health that both of us be lifelong exercisers.

For example, the first time we moved in together and I'm saying, all right, we got to identify.

something that works for you and I take her to a gym and drop her off and not

realizing I have you know decades of learning how to do stuff in a gym that I take for And then I realized,

okay, I need to sort of walk this walk with her.

And we would try different things, like running, she wasn't as into that.

So then,

you know,

try some other thing,

et cetera, et And she found one kind of class and she comes home, this we did this and then we did this.

It was so hard.

Let me show you this other thing we did.

I'm like, you found it.

And the one problem was then when we were looking at moving states we had to be within 15 minutes of that kind of class walking distance for any house that we were going to buy.

But it's like you can see this curiosity develop when someone hits something.

It's so engaging that they want to understand how to be better.

They to talk to other people doing it.

They get so curious about it.

You have to experiment.

I wish there were a way out of that.

I wish you could say this is the thing that's going to work for you.

Maybe someday.

With AI.

Me.

Highly unlikely.

And AI just like changes the feel that you're playing in, right?

And I think experimentation,

I think it's going to be even more important as people can't expect to be doing the same thing their whole careers anymore.

I mean, there are that they can expect to carry through, but not the same exact thing.

When I saw your video called why divergent thinkers beat geniuses in the real world,

I thought you were going to talk about neurodivergence in the video.

So if someone that was diagnosed with ADHD,

maybe when I was about 30 years old,

I thought, oh, he's going to explain why neurodivergence, things like ADHD and autism result in better outcomes in the real world.

Has your work ever had any crossovers with neurodivergence?

Not a lot,

but I mean,

I have read some of that Something that's really important is the more different types of thinking that we can like get into a stew,

the better off I think we all are.

I mean,

there are reasons why ADHD,

like there's some,

it's not a big body of work,

but I think it's relevant where you can look at nomadic populations that then settled and you can see certain genes.

that are associated with and these are these are small effects but you can see

certain genes that are associated with like novelty seeking with ADHD will

apparently start to be like selected out once they settle and it's more common and when they're nomadic.

And that suggests to me is that these are things,

this attentiveness to lots of different stimuli that are really important, have been important for us ancestrally and are still important.

And so they're still here.

They may be maladaptive if you're telling someone they have to sit still in a for 10 hours a day,

which I think is a difficult environment for anyone to adjust to.

But I think,

I to some extent,

and I think this has happened sometimes in some companies that look for opportunities for people with autism,

where you say, okay, where is this adaptive?

Where is this type of thinking adaptive instead of maladaptive?

It's useful instead of unproductive.

And think if we're not doing that,

then you're missing opportunities to really use people Yeah,

I mean,

it's interesting because your work does,

whether it is endeavoring to intentionally or not, it really does make a great case for diversity in the workplace.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You want to do a quiz?

Sure.

Okay.

And here.

It's called my white coat and my head with a little stethoscope around my neck.

Okay.

Because what all doctors look like.

And I'm your patient.

Okay.

And I've got a malignant stomach tumor.

And there's a new type of ray or focused radiation that can destroy the tumor if it's at sufficient intensity.

The problem is at that intensity, it will also destroy healthy tissue in my stomach.

So how can you save me?

Okay.

While you're thinking of that.

There's once this generally had to capture a fortress to liberate a country from a brutal dictator.

And he had plenty enough troops to do it.

And there were roads radiating out like wheel spokes from the fortress.

But they were strewn with land mines.

So if he marched all his troops down any one road, he'd suffer a of casualties.

So yeah, the idea, let's split up in a single file lines, go to the different spoke-like paths and we'll.

Synchronize our watches, and they converge there at the same time, and they liberate the fortress.

Okay?

Or they capture the fortress, liberate the country.

One more story.

This one's a fire in a small town, in danger of spreading to neighboring structures.

Fortunately, it's near Lake, so neighbors are coming and they're filling pales and bailing water on it.

Not working.

Fire Chief shows up.

Everyone, get in a circle, fill up your buckets, get in a circle around the fire on the count

of three, one, two, three, dampens the fire.

And they put it out, fire chief gets a raise, okay, can you save me now?

It doesn't matter.

I'm giving you a very quick version,

but the answer is you can arrange multiple low-intensity rays around me so that they converge at the focal point.

So they go through my torso without damaging me because they're low-intensity, but they converge at the right spot, making high intensity.

And this is a very truncated version.

If you were getting the real test, you would had lot more time and still most people don't solve it, so don't worry.

It's called the dunker radiation problem.

This is a very truncated version of a large body of research that shows that when you're facing a novel problem,

the number of solutions and the chance of coming up with a solution are predicted by the number and breadth of analogies that your group can come up with.

And what predicts that is the breadth of experience of the people in the group.

So if you're facing a novel problem and you have only people with the same expertise, it's not much better than having one brain.

What you want to do is come up with what's called a reference class where you sit down and come up with as many structurally similar analogies from all sorts of

different areas.

Like this sounds kind of like this and this other thing and they don't have to be as far-flung as well.

But in the studies where people have more time,

with each successive story, you tell them more people will start solving the original one, even though they don't know that they're related.

And you want to get people together who are really different,

come up with a whole bunch of these,

like this kind of feels like this, look for which ones are structurally similar, and you'll start thinking about it.

Yeah, I mean, that's just such a brilliant case for diversity in thinking and experience

when you're building a team, when you're co-founding a team, when coming at a problem, and I was thinking actually yesterday about microphones.

So this is the first podcast we've ever recorded if people are watching, they might notice this all of a sudden.

It'd be interesting to know if you noticed this before I mentioned it, but there's no microphone.

phone here and this is the first podcast we've ever recorded where there isn't a

microphone here and I was thinking as you were speaking then about how when we had the debate about

how to solve this problem with and the problem that we're trying to solve for is that there's

guest bang on the table and it comes through the microphone people send me messages on LinkedIn

saying hey it's so annoying that people bang and then whatever so the microphones are now above us.

And as we sat around the three of us yesterday, it's kind of a little analogy for what you're describing.

You've got Will,

who's got his experience in audio,

you've got Jack,

who's got his experience,

and then you've got me,

who's got basically no experience,

but I do do a TV show called Dragon's Den,

where we wear a different type of microphone,

and we were all chucking in our solutions to this problem based on our own perspectives of audio recording.

Jack's solution one,

but my solution before that was while on Dragon's Den,

we have one glued to our chest, so why can't we just glue it to the guest's chest?

And it was interesting watching us all iterate through these different solutions that come from different places,

doing this kind of cost-benefit analysis on each and other.

Obviously, one of the problems with my solution is guests that will touch their chest, and then that'll fuck that up.

So, yeah, yeah, yeah, they touch themselves, and then also, we have to growth them when they arrive, which we didn't like.

But it's the same thing, and you need a really diverse set of experiences to hone in on the winning solution.

But in most pursuits, what we do is we collect people who have done it properly.

Clif people have done it and that it's not done that you don't want those people

You just don't want only those people yeah

And the tendency also is often to use the first analogy that comes

up You don't want to do that either you want to like have a menu of possible solutions to to look at because

Like there's this thing called the creative cliff illusion people think they're most their best ideas and most creative ideas will come either all.

And in fact, they tend to come later as you're trying to come up with ideas.

Interesting.

Yeah, so but our inclination is that it's like this flash of lightning and either it comes or it Shit, that's made me question a lot of things I do, because sometimes I get an idea

and I write it down and I share it straight away.

Oh, there's nothing wrong with sharing that here, right?

But you're, if you're like trying to solve a real problem, I wouldn't stop at your first idea.

Throw down the discussion and then allow it to- And keep, yeah, stay open to it.

And don't assume that, you know, if something didn't come to you with like a flash of insight that you should just stop thinking.

You're writing a book about constraints.

Yeah.

And you, you know, I'm not going to give away all of the things in the book because- It wraps on it.

Especially since half of it isn't written, so I can't even give away that.

But I found this story about Apple really important because it's helped me think about some of the things I'm doing in business,

but also in my life.

Are you able to share that story of Apple what you've discovered in terms of focus and constraints?

Sure.

Not Apple so much as another company called General Magic that was a lot of the team that designed the original.

Came to this company and it was like the the hottest thing in Silicon Valley and they were gonna build the iPhone.

They had the idea, they had the vision, like the drawings they have look like the iPhone.

They had the team from the magazine, this incredible talent.

They went public in a so-called concept IPO.

They didn't have a product yet, but the idea was so hot that they were taken public.

And long story short, it turned into a disaster because they had no boundaries.

They had as much money as they wanted.

They didn't have any customer in mind.

Anything they thought was cool.

They built it.

And so the project just grew and grew and grew.

and never found the focus to kind of turn into anything usable but a lot of

the alumni that came out of there realized that that was a problem and so going

forward they would You're better off envisioning a customer even if it's the wrong person than none at all and just building something that's cool,

because even if it's wrong,

you can learn that you were wrong by trying something,

whereas if you don't have one, you don't even have sort of a feedback mechanism for learning.

And so it was spending some time with some of those alumni got me really interested in constraints.

and I'm still putting together some of that writing,

so I don't know that I can do it justice at the depth that I could if I'd already written it.

It's interesting with the words you use because there appears to be a bit of a paradox or contradiction

in this idea of breadth and then constraints and focus and it's this interest that you know.

I mean that's part of the reason I got interested in it because a question after

range that people had for me was how do you know when to focus?

So, it really very much came out of this question, because eventually you get this broad toolbox,

you have to focus it into achievement at some point, right?

You want to just pinball forever.

Which is what you said is your, like, close streaks.

Hot streaks, right?

You to focus into a hot streak eventually.

And it also came out of this aspect of research,

you know,

I'll research as research,

where my own biggest challenge,

the bigger my projects are, and the, you know, books being big projects for me, the harder it is for me to draw the boundaries.

of what is in balance,

because the topics I take on in my books are by definition can't be perfectly answered,

balance nature and nurture and developing a skill, how broad or specialized to be and when.

And so I've had so much trouble saying this is the boundary for what fits in here.

there.

And so I myself wanted to get better at learning how to use constraints in my own work.

So for the first time with this book,

for the first time I said,

because I,

for both of my previous books,

I've written like 150%

the length of a book and then had to cut back because I just shove in everything I think is interesting.

This time I said, I'm going to an architecture ahead of time force myself to adhere to that.

And one of the first I'm that.

that.

was it's I usually just don't write the chapters in order and I started with this

book with my normal process of I'm going to jump in with chapter five because I

just did the research and I realized because I was starting to see like this

is gonna break some of the structure up and down stream

I'm leaving all these blanks because I don't know what I will have already so I actually have to go back and start an order.

So after being in writing for whatever,

almost 20 years,

suddenly I have a totally new work process and I'm writing an order for the first time, which is interesting and a bit scary.

But I'm writing at length, too.

I'm actually going to turn in the book at the length of a book for the first time.

Are you not at all concerned about

as a writer because you know these models are getting smarter and smarter every single week and just

generally How do you look at the sort of future of work in a world of AI?

It feels like it's gonna be such a disruptive force in You know,

oh I think it is career planning and like yeah, what do I do with my future?

I mean it might touch everything but one I love playing with it

So I have these competing forces of like maybe at all You know, I'm a very curious person.

And so if I'm I play with probably about four different AI Programs a day,

but the one that's the most useful to me is called site.ai again I don't have like any affiliation with any of these things.

I'm just a subscriber.

scit.ai where I can put in a scientific paper and it'll make like a map showing all the other

papers that cite it and it'll try to automatically sort them into those that agree and disagree.

And it really,

hopefully, will show the snippet of how the target paper was cited in these other ones that I used to have to spend

like go sit in a research library and be doing that by like scanning down a paper to find that.

So it's like a day now is an hour.

And so, and I love that.

Like if that means my books don't sell as well,

but I get to learn 10 times as much science, that's a trade off I'm definitely willing to make personally.

I'm not saying everyone should be willing to make that, but I'm willing to make that.

But in terms of work generally being disrupted.

Yeah, I mean, I think the model that I think of for sort of,

there's no singular model,

but how technological innovation has disrupted work in the past, a model that I like that I can tell sort of quickly.

is the introduction of the ATM in the United States, having around 1970.

So cash machine.

And I went back and looked at news coverage and it says,

like every 300,000 bank tellers are going to go out of business overnight.

And instead, what happened over the next 40 years, as there were more ATMs, there were more bank tellers.

not fewer, because ATEMs made branches, bank branches, cheaper to so there were fewer branches overall, fewer tellers per branch, but more branches overall, sorry.

But it fundamentally changed the job from someone who's doing these repetitive transactions,

repetitive cash transactions to someone who's like,

like a marketing professional and a customer service representative and maybe a financial advisor,

it shifted them to these strategic goals where it's much broader mix of strategic skills.

So if we can outsource some of that kinder learning environment repetitive stuff to shift humans to being more strategic.

A good thing, right?

You about,

I know radiologists have been some of the people,

the other medical imaging have been some of the people who have often in these reports by banks that say who's going to be replaced.

They're often high on the list because they say the technology can read these pictures very easily.

Radiologist looks at a scan and tells you if you've got a cancer or something.

Yeah.

But first of all, I have yet to hear the problem of like, wow, too many people are having too easy access to radiology, right?

Like, I think we want more of this service.

But think most doctors are not doing Dr.

House.

You most of the stuff they're seeing is something they've seen a million times.

And I think a really important.

of, well, what should this mean to the person?

How should I deal with them?

And what's reasonable to implement in their life?

And what's feasible for them to do to make a change?

And so I think it'd be great if we could shift.

I don't think it will replace those doctors.

I think it might shift them to a more strategic role where they don't have to spend time doing the sort of more tactical

stuff and can do the more strategic stuff.

So that's been even in chess,

you like when Well, when IBM's deep blue beat Gary Kasparov in chess in 1997, and he noticed that it beat Gary Kasparov.

He so much better when he was the best in the world at the time.

Now a free app on your phone would beat Gary Kasparov.

And he noticed the computer was so much better at tactics, these these like small patterns of moves that he had spent his life memorizing.

But he noticed it wasn't as good at strategy, which is how to arrange the battles to wage the war.

So he promoted what he called freestyle chess tournaments, where humans' computers could play in any combination.

And were neither supercomputers nor grandmasters nor grandmasters with supercomputers.

Two amateur chess players with three laptops.

They knew something about chess.

They knew something about algorithmic search.

And they could coach the computers where to look like they couldn't even analyze their own games in like the winner's press conference

At a deep level because they didn't know enough about chess

But I think the lesson there is it when the tactical part was outsourced

It shifted it first of all changed the people who were the best at the task going

And it shifted the humans to the more strategic level.

And I think that's what we need to be ready to think about.

What can we hand off so that we shift to a more strategic level?

How might you be wrong?

Maybe the strategic level, maybe these tools will be better at the strategic level than we would ever be.

I still think there'll be a role for us in determining what their goals should be.

And that's a whole other level of strategy is like, what kind of world do we want to live?

I don't think in the near term that we're going to be taking our cues from them in that role.

But think even the people,

last year I was sitting around a campfire with one guy who's running a generative AI company and another guy who was his first investor and who

himself had worked in an AI like,

you they were both technologically adapt, incentives And one guy was saying, we'll have artificial general intelligence within three years for sure.

And the other guy was saying, I think this is a glorified toy.

I use Google more.

And these were two people with similar expertise with incentives aligned,

which to me suggests the degree to which even the people working on this stuff don't totally understand what its capabilities are.

And so I think there's a lot that's, I think there's a lot that's unknown.

Someone made the case to me that they said, think about it like this, Steve.

You've got this Steve here saying my IQ is 100, and there's another Steve through that War Who's IQ is 1000.

What would you give me to do as a task versus what would you give him to do as a task?

Who would you want to drive?

Who would you want to I don't know if you're saying we give everything to that well?

This the analogy he gave me he was like what are you left with even even if it comes to that point even if it comes to that point

They'll still be the issue of comparative advantage

Which is that these these models are incredibly energy intensive right and so you'd want to delegate energy to?

for the things that you really want them to do.

So even if they are,

do end up better than us at everything,

because energy is not unlimited, there will still be things that are more valuable to have us doing than to have them doing, right?

Like, I mean, that's the case all the time.

You may be better at certain things in your business, but you're not doing them, because...

Because it's compared to advantage for you to do this instead of those other things.

So I think even if they do get to the point where they're better than us at everything,

there's still roles for humans, but incredible amount of disruption, right?

Like, what really worries me, I mean, I reading about last year about technological

innovation in history,

you and we have to put it in a very coarse nutshell,

it's like for 300,000 years we lived like squirrels,

and then for 10,000 years we lived like farmers,

and then 250 years it's like everything changed, every generation like crazy, and that's been hard to to adapt to.

And I think, you know, I thought, the Industrial Revolution, which ultimately led to pulling billions of people out of poverty, changed everything.

I thought that because productivity increased so much that wages and things would have increased right along with them.

But it turns out that there's pretty good evidence that there was actually a gap of probably about 40 years between the increase of productivity

and the increase of wages.

And that's not good,

like a 40-year gap between a huge technological disruption and like shared prosperity, that's not something I think we can really afford.

And sort of helps solve the problem is that when lots of people have got urbanized for the Industrial Revolution and looked around and said,

hey, you have the same problem that I have, we need to band together for collective action.

I think the challenge now is we're like an invisible factory so it's it's harder to get people to

collectively act because we're not sitting next to each other.

We're with this problem but I think we need to start thinking as a group of this technology is cool

but identifying problems that we want it to work on not just building it out for the sake of just

it's cool what kind of world we want to live in.

I think we need to be asking those questions.

I think it's quite unlikely that will be intentional with it in the way that you're hyping.

It'd be unfortunate.

I I think a good sign though,

I think,

is that even the kind of technologists who I think are usually prone to hyperbole and saying,

like, this will be the greatest thing even when it's obviously not going to be are sounding some notes of caution with this one

in an early stage.

And so I think that's attuned other people to some of those notes of caution.

I don't think that gets us out of the woods by any stretch.

The notes of caution worry, man.

Oh, well, that's the point.

They should worry.

I if we were where we are and not worried right now, I think that would be a lot.

What is the most important idea in your work that we haven't discussed in your opinion?

In the sports gene,

I think the most important idea that we haven't discussed is that talent at baseline,

if you take a test in something,

let's say you haven't trained in that thing, that we'll call that your talent baseline, is sometimes, Correlated with your ability to improve from training.

So training looks just like medicine because of differences between us.

Some medicine might work for you in a way that it doesn't for me.

Training is similar.

Two people will get different results from the same example.

And sometimes how good you are to start is predictive of how rapidly you improve, but very often it is not.

And that's a huge deal because we usually judge people's potential based on what we see right now or what we see at Baseline before they've really had a chance to train.

But what I think the science shows is that this talent of trainability is even more important than talent at baseline.

And so if you're trying to evaluate people before they've really had a chance to find a that fits for them,

again, it's a messy answer because it means people have to experiment with the kind of training that works for them.

And that trainability is the most important kind of talent.

And I think that's a different picture of talent.

Okay, this is quite, this is very important because it immediately answered employer, I thought, when I'm hiring people.

I, you know, if I'm hiring a producer for one of our podcasts, whatever, I shouldn't be

focusing so much on if I'm planning for them to work for me and with me for 10 years,

I should be thinking about their trainability.

Yeah, I was going to say it depends how quickly you need them to get going, right?

If you need them, if you need to know what they know today and they need to be using that thing tomorrow, that's one thing.

But if,

if it's about how good they're going to get in the long run,

you just shouldn't assume that what you're seeing today predicts like their ability to improve.

Can you measure someone's training?

that see?

I mean,

you can measure it very easily in things like their aerobic capacity, you the amount of oxygen that they can move through their body.

I mean, some of the initial studies of this were done in scenarios like that.

We had everyone doing the exact same training, and you were literally measuring physiological parameters.

You can do it in other types of cognitive testing and ability testing.

If you're looking for a sort of specific task, that's a little harder.

If looking for a task that's customized to something in your business, I think that's more difficult.

It's to be a little more subjective.

I guess you can kind of look at other areas of their life, I guess, in the professional context to see how quickly they developed.

One of the things I look at when people apply for jobs to work in one of my businesses is

I look at their LinkedIn resume, but specifically how quickly they got promoted and moved through departments because that's kind of an indicator.

It's obviously not the most important thing,

but you'll go and you'll click on someone's LinkedIn and you'll see they joined as an intern and then a year later they were a manager

of the team.

Then a year later they were the director of the team.

Then a year later they were moved up to a different department.

A year later they became the global head and I'm like,

oh my God, that this person really moves through the system well and that is an indicator of a few things.

They got on with people because someone's pulling them up and saying that person go up.

Their team are also basically voting that they should be the manager.

They have proficiency in learning rapidly because especially if they jump between departments from HR to culture or whatever.

I always think that makes them a bit more adaptable and teachable if they've shown that track record of changing,

professions and moving up the organization quickly.

Interesting, because that feels a little related to, I think that an important idea that we

didn't talk about from range has to do with so-called serial innovators.

These are people who make repeated creative contributions to their organizations no matter where they are, even when they're changing, like I said, changing places.

And people,

like a woman named Abby Griffin,

a professor and her colleagues who studied these people, some of the descriptions of who they are, these are like literal phrases from her work.

They are systems thinkers.

They read more and more widely than their peers.

They have a need to learn outside their domain.

They have a to communicate with people with expertise outside of their own area.

They appear to flit among ideas, which doesn't usually sound like a compliment.

They repurpose things that already available in new ways, all these sorts of things.

And you can feel in her writing almost, she's almost like talking to HR people.

Just so you know,

when you define a role too narrowly,

you're making sure you select these people out or force them to go somewhere else to try to cultivate that kind of breath.

And I don't think you can create these people from whole cloth, but I think you can absolutely stifle them.

By not allowing them to do that kind of moving around internally.

And so I think when you're looking at hiring I Think the organizations that I've been around at

least They disrupt themselves continually instead of waiting to get disrupted

Reserve at least some of their hiring for instead of saying here's a square peg for a square hole that we need

tomorrow They say what is something we?

That we would have trouble teaching Let's go get someone with that and we can coach them up on the stuff.

We're good at so like An extreme example of this was this investment firm in Scotland.

I some time with Bailey Gifford this like incredibly and And I think they,

this is extreme, but someone there told me like they won't hire anybody with an MBA.

I that's,

I don't think you should rule out things like that,

but anyway,

but what they would go is they'd say,

we want someone who has experience in this or that or this kind of thinking,

let's go get them because we can't teach that thing and then we can coach them up on finance.

It's going to take them an extra few months to get going because we're going to have But the stuff that,

why should we hire for exactly the stuff that we can most easily teach?

That's higher for the stuff we want, but that we would have trouble teaching.

And we can teach them on it.

And I think the places that are looking to disrupt themselves keep sort of an eye open for that kind of thing.

Not for every hire.

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One of the things I really love about your work is you always cite different studies and they're particularly fascinating.

I wrote down tons of different studies from different points that you've made today.

But is there a favorite study that you, that surprised you the most, or your paradigm the most?

Some of the research about forecasting totally shocked me.

So the most famous work ever done on forecasting,

making predictions,

was a 20 year,

a program of research that had people making predictions about geopolitical,

you know,

social And they had to get,

they got 83,000 probability predictions because people had to make specific probability predictions of the likelihood of an event by a specific deadline.

So like 20% probability of this happening by this time?

Correct.

Like there's going to be, and it would be very specific.

It be like a 20%

chance that within the next 12 months,

there will be a military confrontation that causes at least five casualties in the South China Sea,

like it had to be very specific so that they could say if someone was right or wrong.

And they needed so many because they had to differentiate luck from good luck and bad luck from.

skill.

And the worst forecasters turned out to be like the most narrowly specialized people who were,

it doesn't,

not that these people are not important for generating knowledge,

but who came to see the whole world through sort of one lens or mental model and would,

they had spent their whole career as kind of studying one problem and would see the whole world around that.

They would wrap everything into that story, basically.

So in this research,

they called the hedgehogs who knew one big thing,

whereas the good forecasters were the foxes who knew many little things,

and sometimes they had an area of expertise, and sometimes they didn't, but more important than what they thought was how they thought.

collect different perspectives.

They social media and anything they had to take their own hypothesis and tell get other people to falsify it for them.

And those people turned out to be the best forecasters.

And when they were put together in groups with one another,

they became even better because they had this approach of sort of borrowing from the scientific method to test their own ideas basically.

And it just surprised me that these sort of random people in many cases,

in a tournament where they were pitted against the intelligence community in the United States that had access to classified information that they did not,

they beat them.

And I just wouldn't have believed that unless I saw it,

that that body of research about forecasting the ability to see around the corner,

a big aspect of what made people good at it was actually the researcher who led this work described those people as having dragonfly eyes,

dragonflies eyes are made of thousands of different lenses,

each one of which takes a separate picture and they are synthesized in the And so,

these people are gathering all these different perspectives and they can seem sort of confused and equivocal.

So they might not make for good TV guests they actually found in the research because they don't go on and say,

this is how it is, like the housing crash is coming and they're more circumspect in some ways.

They not be as good TV guests, but very good forecasters.

It just made me think that.

On a personal level, I need to keep pushing myself outside of my zone of comfort more.

That's one of the big things I took away from the book,

Range, but also just much of your work is it's easy to get complacent in what I know, who I am, my density, what I do.

And fact, that's probably the biggest risk to my future success, but also probably to my fulfillment as well.

And it goes against our natural impact.

to push into unknown territory because the older we get, the more like, you know, they you can't teach an old dog new tricks.

I think it's more like the older doesn't really want to know learn new tricks.

You know, can't see the point in learning a new trick.

And to that point,

Of the so-called big five personality traits in psychology, one of them is called Openness to Experience, which is the most predictive of creativity.

And middle age,

it reliably goes down,

but actually a I loved in the book found that if you force older people to do something new,

it be some Sudoku or something, even if they don't get good at that thing, if it's not.

It will improve their openness to experience so you can actually stem the decline of openness to experience is not inevitable

Just by forcing yourself to do new stuff that you're not coming to net is like great for brain health

It makes your life feel longer because our memory works in sort of chapters where when you try new stuff

It's like a new chapter so it'll make your life feel like it's not passed and it keeps your openness to experience from declining.

And just like picking something to do that's new, even if you're not planning getting really good at it, I think is important.

It's funny,

I said that thing a second ago about when I look at someone's LinkedIn,

and then I looked down and I found this little research piece that LinkedIn did that I pulled out,

that said one of the best predictors,

would become an executive in a company, was the number of different job functions that individual had worked across an industry.

So researched on by LinkedIn, wasn't it?

Yeah, I was on about a half million members, yeah.

And interesting thing about that was,

I, when I was in contact with LinkedIn talking about that

and trying to get some of that data,

I said,

I kind of feel like your guy's product might militate against people doing this because you're saying this is who's doing the best,

but they might want a much cleaner, kind of linear trajectory.

So you should build another product where they can build a narrative into it and say,

here's why I switched, here's what I learned and what so.

What's the actual, can you recap to me what the actual finding was?

I mean,

that was pretty much it that across a half million members that the strong predictor of who was going to go on to become a future executive was.

was the number of different job functions that they've worked across in industry.

In a specific industry.

In yeah.

So changing industries.

Not changing industries.

Although changing industries, there was a bunch of lower level stuff and changing industries was useful at times also.

But to be an executive in a particular industry, lots of job functions across that, across an industry.

And does that mean different departments within that industry?

They characterize job functions, you have to be doing something fundamentally different.

Okay.

So.

Okay.

So.

I mean,

let's say,

I think probably the easiest one is where you go from being a performer or a good performer to being someone who's managing other performers,

right?

Oh, okay.

That's kind of a classic one.

Progression.

It have to be progression, though, because, but that's, I think, a very, a very simple one, right?

Or my industry, it'd be like going from writing to editing, would for sure be one, which is kind of amazing.

of writing and managing.

But that's a side step in your industry.

Side step, yep, for sure.

I mean, some people would...

Well, I guess it depends.

Some people would view that and in some places it's going up, but I'd view it as a side step.

The other thing I found,

which was pretty shocking,

was in the part of your book where you start talking about some of the dangers of some of

and you referenced a study that found cardiac patients were less likely to die if they were

admitted to a hospital when the doctors were away?

We can tie in a few of the things we've been talking about to cardiac surgery here.

So was this study.

So I think because I'm conscious when I write about dangerous specializations, hugely important obviously and in medicine.

it would be crazy to say that specialization in medicine, increasing specialization hasn't been both inevitable and beneficial in many ways.

But the point I was trying to make is that it's also an under-recognized double-edged sword

to the point where these two Harvard-led studies found that if you're checked in to a teaching hospital,

with certain cardiac conditions on the dates of a National Cardiology Convention when the most esteemed specialists are away, you're less likely to die.

That makes a nice sense.

Right, that's sub-optimal outcome.

And conclusion was that's because these researchers,

or these surgeons,

have done the same procedure so many times that they will continue to do it

even if it's not the right solution to the problem or if data shows that it work anymore.

And so it's called the Einstein effect in psychology,

where you've done,

you've solved a problem a way so many times that you will continue solving problems that way,

even if the problem has changed or if new data emerges that shows it's not the right solution.

So it's not to say those people are important, but they are huge.

human.

And so they fall prey to the einsilon effect.

That's again why you want some of this mixture.

And tie in surgery, you we've also been talking about distraction and focus.

One of those same researchers did some work that showed that if you have a surgical procedure,

and research looked at 980,000 procedures, that if you have a procedure on the surgeon's birthday.

you're more likely to die within the 30 days after the surgical procedure,

and they attribute it to the increased distractions that the surgeon is having on their birthday.

They don't know whether it's external or internal distraction,

but you might not want to have your—again,

you know, and this—these are not huge effects, but over a number of people, it makes a difference.

And if, yeah, gosh, that's terrifying.

So one of the things I've come to learn today, really, is that knowledge is a double edged sword.

Like deep knowledge on one thing really is a double edged sword.

It will be your making, but in the long time it might also be your breaking.

And really resonates with me because as we started the conversation with, there's a lot of things that I'm like really knowledgeable about.

and in fact that's my biggest curse and I have to find a way to basically self-disrupt myself

continually and always assume that I am wrong and not always assume I'm wrong always assume

that there's a significant possibility that I'm wrong today and maybe yesterday I was correct but today I could be entirely wrong.

I mean I've changed my mind about like the fundamental beliefs I had you know when I was younger and it's weird to think.

I mean like I was a grad student in environmental sciences and I was firmly of the belief that environmental preservation and technological progress were adopted.

And I feel completely the opposite now,

you know,

I think there are technological things we can do that ruin the environment But I actually think the salvation of the environment requires Technological progress.

It's just like fundamental beliefs about the world So I think we should be open to that updating and from a career perspective,

you know If artificial super intelligence and like some new form of free energy

Does everything better than us than it does and we'll have to reorient life in some pretty dramatic ways

But until then I think we

need Dispense with the idea that you can live in a world where you did a period of training for most of us

And then you're just going to benefit off only that training for the rest of your life

You don't have to keep relearning We have a closing tradition on this podcast David.

Yeah, I I love this tradition I want to do it to like my friends when they come over

Interesting the last day sleeps a question for the next guest Oh boy.

It's so funny watching people's body language when I open this book, they start to get quite nervous.

And funny, I've asked, I don't know if I can share 100 questions today.

And it's when I come to this question that people take the longest time to answer.

So like, these questions just better than my questions.

Those other questions are things that are so top of mind for me that it's like a

choice between which of the three things that are in my mind should I spit out.

This is like...

This is very different.

What's your favourite sandwich?

I'm I don't know if that was it after all.

I'm going get off easy.

No, it's much more difficult than that.

The question is, what is your biggest fear?

how do you plan to face it?

I have a tendency that I think in some ways is good and fits with some of the things I've said but in some ways it's better.

want to start things over a lot and sometimes that means burning them down even if they're going well and in the past

I think I had that tendency with some of my personal relationships to I couldn't accept something going well and

It had to change or get better and that led me to sometimes I think

Burn down some personal relationships

in ways that I'm embarrassed of that I regret and I see this even in my own

work where I actually value it because I end up doing all these new novel things but

it's almost like I can't and it's good because like after my first book that

like brand yourself as a sports gene guy I'm like no that's dead to me now

that's dead to me before it's even published it's dead to me me.

And that led me to do these other interesting things.

But I sometimes worry that I have this like pathologic, why can't I just accept this thing is good and let it be good.

And it worries me much less in my work life.

It worries me a little in my work life.

I always want to burn something down and start over.

But it does worry me there.

But I have more of a fear of it in the Friendships because I know what I've done in the past.

I think I'm better with it now, but Thinking about the values.

I my life going forward.

I want You know several relationships that were hugely important to me

Went away for things that were preventable because

I was like if it's not perfect burn it down and I think that was a really destructive impulse

What is that you what is that when does that come from I don't know I think it's like this

Feeling of always want to be in becoming like this feeling of starting over and improving that I find in intoxicating

But I don't think that has to apply to personal relationships and so a that I really want to work on.

I this book that kind of influenced me about philosophy and it's centered what's called narrative values.

These are objectively across cultures, things that people value.

So could be like heroism, right?

Loyalty, people value in that other culture.

And that you are subjectively attracted to.

And one of the ones that I think is valued in a lot of cultures that I'm attracted to,

but that I've not been good at is forgiveness.

And so my project is, that's a narrative value.

I wanna start building into my story to be a more forgiving person, because it's not, I'm not good at it.

and I need to get good at it and I'm afraid that I won't get good at it but I really want to.

Well we learn don't we and that's that's much of what is what is at the very heart of your work how to become Barrett Learning and you've

clearly demonstrated that you're learning in that regard.

I much of the first.

The first step in learning is figuring out that we have a problem or something to solve, as said, with your experiments book.

And books are so unbelievably wonderful because they present a completely original, challenging, unconventional approach to solving problems.

And do go out a lot of the things that many of us have accepted as narratives in our life.

And if we've accepted them as narratives their faults, then they're probably in some way doing us a disservice in a short or long term.

And that's why I find your work so wonderfully important because in many respects, it is that counter-narrative.

that we've accepted,

and you do go the extra mile,

even though it probably gives you a I'm sure,

because a lot of authors that I speak to don't go the extra mile to figure out if what we're being told is true.

And ultimately that's a means to an end and the end is to allow all of us to live more optimized,

fulfilled and happy and productive lives and whatever domain and whatever definition we class those words.

So you David for doing the work you do.

I'm so excited to read whatever you make next and you're writing a book on constraints and I just already know that if it's anything like these two books range and the sports gene,

it's going to be one of the most important books I've ever read.

So thank you.

I was a wonderful compliment.

I want to add anything to that.

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