Most Replayed Moment: You’re Supposed to Feel Lost! The Truth About Career & ‘Success’ - David Epstein
Guests: David Epstein
Full transcript · Read the full conversation in order, with its original context.
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How do you summarize the work that you do and why you do it? And who are you really doing it for?
I am obsessed with correcting what I view as misinterpretations of scientific research about human development. So that is the core of my work. 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. They are curious and interested in self-improvement but don't have the time or the means to go sifting through this evidence themselves.
And what are the realms of self-improvement that you have focused on thus far in your career?
Earlier on, I was focused on physical skill acquisition, like in athletics. But increasingly, I've moved into career and personal development generally. I look at that with a very long lens. One of the most important messages 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.
If we're thinking about sports or music or something like that, the obvious thing to do is to get a head start in whatever you're doing. Pick something, stick with it, don't switch things because then you've lost time. Focus very narrowly and do as much of it as you possibly can to the exclusion of other things. That's such an obvious way. And you will jump out to a lead.
We see that in sports and music; we see that in school with certain head-start programs that give people an advantage in some academic skills. The problem is that kind of narrow focus creates short-term results but undermines this broader toolbox that you need for long-term development.
You’ll see what scientists call "fade out" in these advantages. This isn't necessarily anything going away; it's the fact that people with this broader base will catch up and surpass, so it appears to be a fade out.
Okay. So if you take more time to get a broader understanding of something—whether it's in sports or if you're a child prodigy—over the long term, that's going to benefit you better and help sustain your development. But in the short term, you might lose out because there's some kid who is doing deliberate practice obsessively. He's going to have a lead. It’s kind of like the tortoise and the hare analogy where the tortoise eventually wins the race.
Yeah. There's a big body of research in psychology that can be summarized with the phrase: breadth of training predicts breadth of transfer.
Transfer is the ability of someone to take skills and knowledge and use them to solve a problem they haven't seen before. You transfer it to a new situation. What predicts your ability to do that is the breadth of problems you've been exposed to in practice. If you're 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? What are they trying to achieve that you're speaking to?
Getting better. Getting better at things. Obviously, people want success, but there's pretty significant research showing that people are often actually reacting to their trajectory as much as their actual absolute performance level. The feeling of improvement, the feeling of moving on, gives them some sense of fulfillment. Eventually, obviously, that will get them to a higher level.
So I think really this is for people who are interested in how to get off their plateaus going forward and viewing it as a lifelong journey as opposed to trying to peak when they're 12. Turns out that the way to make the best 20-year-old, 30-year-old, or 40-year-old is not the same as the way to make the best 10-year-old.
Is there a tie-in here with the subject of just happiness and how to live a happy life?
Fulfillment, for sure. Those aren't exactly the same, but they're important. To think about this in a career development perspective, probably the most interesting research on fulfillment in careers was this project at Harvard called the Dark Horse Project. This was looking at how people find fulfillment. A lot of these people were very financially successful, but the dependent variable was fulfillment—a sense of fulfillment.
When people would come in for sort of an orientation in this study, they would say things to the researchers like, "I started off doing this one thing, medical school or whatever. It 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. Then I went in this other direction. Don't tell people to do what I did because I came out of nowhere."
The large majority of people had that story. That's why it became named the Dark Horse Project. "Dark horse" is this expression that means coming out of nowhere. The norm in this day and age was that people who found fulfillment would travel this zigzagging path where they would learn, "Maybe I'm good at something or bad at something that I didn't expect. Maybe I'm interested in something I didn't expect."
They would keep pivoting. Instead of saying, "Here's this person younger than me who has more than me," they would say, "Here's who I am right now. Here are my skills and interests. Here are the opportunities in front of me. I'm going to try this one and maybe I'll change a year from now because I will have learned something about myself." They keep doing those pivots throughout their career.
They do this 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. It turns out to be extremely important for both your performance and sense of fulfillment—and your apparent grit, if you want to talk about that.
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 a monetary way—but also maintaining fulfillment throughout their life?
I think there are two main things to take away from that. One is to not over-focus on long-term planning. I think we lionize having long-term goals. 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.
When I think about myself when I was a competitive 800-meter runner, I could have a time goal for the end of the race, but that didn't help me actually do anything. You just see the clock when you're done and you're either happy or sad. Having goals like, "Let me try moving with 300 meters to go," gives you an actionable experiment.
Short-term planning, I think, is one of the takeaways, along with creating what's called a self-regulatory practice. Self-regulatory learning basically means thinking about your own thinking—taking accountability for your own learning.
some of the coolest studies in self-regulatory learning actually came out of soccer—football—done in the Netherlands. This woman named Marije Elferink-Gemser was following kids from the age of 12 up through—some of them went on to teams that were runners-up in the World Cup.
What she’d see in the kids who got off performance plateaus were certain physiological measures someone had to have. If a kid couldn't hit at least seven meters a second sprinting, which isn't that fast, but if 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 who, if you look at them in video when they're younger, they're saying to the trainer, "Why are we doing this drill? I think I can do this already. I think I need to work on this other thing." Sometimes a trainer might be like, "Oh man, just get back in line."
But these are the kids that are thinking about what they need to work on and 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? Plan—come up with an experiment for how you can work on that. Monitor—a way to try to measure whether objectively or subjectively. And Evaluate—did that experiment that I ran work in making me better at this thing or not?
People who do that repeatedly just keep improving. 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 will fit me, I monitor it maybe subjectively or objectively, and then I evaluate what that tells me to do for the next step." You just get better and better over time.
So if I'm, say, in my early 20s in my career, how do I take that and then implement that within my life to make sure that I'm going to get to the "World Cup," metaphorically speaking?
There’s something interesting about the 20s that I think is worth saying. There is this finding in psychology called the "end of history illusion." This is the finding that we always underestimate how much we will change—what we think we're good at, what we think we're bad at, how we want to spend our time, what we prioritize in friends, etc.
At every step in life, people underestimate how much they'll change in the future. Change continues for your whole life. It does slow down, so we're constantly works in progress claiming to be finished. The fastest time of personality change is about 18 to about 28. That's when we're telling people, "Hey, now you have to have it figured out," when they're changing like crazy.
So I think it's even more important to have this self-regulatory practice. In a journal, I would say. I mean, I do it. These questions can be basic: What am I trying to do? Why? What do I need to learn to do it? Who do I need to help me learn that? How am I going to make sure that person is there to help me? What experiment can I set up to try it? And then come back and evaluate the experiment and pick a next one.
Being a scientist of your own development is counterintuitive. 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 the self-regulatory practice.
What got you into the work that you do and how do you define your profession?
In my past life, I was training to be a scientist. I was an environmental scientist. I was living up in the Arctic studying the carbon cycle in a tent. I had been a competitive runner. I had a training partner who was one of the top-ranked guys in the 800 meters in his age group in the country. He was from a family of Jamaican immigrants and was going to be the first one to graduate college. He dropped dead a few steps after a race.
Our hometown paper said he had a heart attack. I didn't even know what that meant for someone of that age and health. I got curious. Eventually, I worked up the courage to ask his family to sign a waiver allowing me to gather his medical records. It turned out he had 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." I decided to merge my interests in sports and science. I said I wanted to write about sudden cardiac death in athletes for Sports Illustrated, which I grew up with. So I got off the science track; I left after my master's.
I kind of weaved my way to Sports Illustrated. I got in there as a temp, six or seven years behind people who were younger than me doing more remedial work for them. But I realized pretty soon that my oddball background—I think I was shaping up to be a typical, average scientist—but you take those average science skills and you bring them to a sports magazine, and you're like a Nobel laureate.
I realized I could just make my own ground instead of having to compete with anybody. But the initial impetus for getting into this merger of sports and science was a personal tragedy.
And how do you define yourself from a career perspective? Are you a writer? Are you a scientist? How do you...
I view myself as this merger between a science writer and investigative reporter. What really fires me up is when I view that there's a really popular misconception about something really important to human development.
That's what led to *Range*. I was at Sports Illustrated and the 10,000-hours rule work was the most famous science in human development perhaps ever in terms of popular consumption. 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, maybe the most popular skill acquisition human development research ever done, and it is not right. So these things kind of stick in my brain and I have to do something about it.
10,000 hours—what is that for someone that's never heard about it before?
It’s the idea—scientists really call it the deliberate practice framework—that the only route to true expertise is through 10,000 hours of so-called deliberate practice. This is effortless, cognitively engaged practice—not just swatting balls at the driving range, but focusing on correcting errors. It posits that there is no such thing as talent differences; it’s really just the manifestation of differences in your amount of hours of deliberate practice.
So you should start as early as possible. There's something underlying it, a little nerdy, called the "monotonic benefits assumption." That basically means that two people at the same level of performance will progress the same amount for the same unit of deliberate practice. Also false. It’s one of the underlying premises of the 10,000-hour rule.
Yeah, because I've always heard that. 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 in to become a master. That's the narrative, right?
Well, to take some chess research for example, people have been tracked and it takes about 11,053 hours on average to reach international master status in chess—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 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, but it doesn't actually tell you anything about the breadth of human skill development.
So why is that so important for me to understand? How does that liberate me from wasting my time or aiming at the wrong thing?
Fit turns out to be really important. People learn at different rates in different things, so finding where you learn best is really important if you want to maximize your advantages. That goes back to one of the reasons why people need to try a bunch of different things. Your insight into yourself is really limited by your roster of experiences.
You kind of need to figure out where you have comparative advantages. For a lot of people, that's so-called "skill stacking," where instead of doing 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. So this idea of just head down doing the same thing... should we go back all the way and talk about the research underlying the 10,000-hour rule?
Please.
That's where I first got onto this. 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. I went from being a nobody to being quite good. So I was inclined to believe this 10,000 hours—just my hard work.
And then when I started reading the research and looking through the original paper written in 1993, the original paper was done on 30 violinists at a world-class music academy. Let's start dissecting the problems here. The first problem was what's called a restriction of range. These people were already in a world-class music academy, already highly pre-selected.
Pre-selected for something that is correlated with your dependent variable, which is skill. That’s a problem if you're trying to develop a general skill development framework. That would be like, to give an analogy, if I did a study of what causes basketball skill and I used as my subjects only centers in the NBA. I would say 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.
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 height of an American male and their chance of scoring points in the NBA. But if you restrict the range to only players already in the NBA, the correlation turns negative because guards score more points than other positions.
So if you didn't know that, if you just did that study with only NBA players, you would tell parents to have shorter children to have them score more points in the NBA. 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.
Guards score more points or less points?
They score more points and they're shorter. So 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 this sort of backward advice.
The other issue that caught my eye when I first read the study was that they only reported the average. 10,000 hours was the average number of hours of deliberate practice by 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. I said I would like to know if that's true. Can I see the data to see if that's true? And so I contacted Anders Ericsson, a wonderful guy who was the "father" of the 10,000-hour rule, although he hated that moniker, actually. I said, "Anders, can I see the data or the measures of variance to know how much variation there was between individuals?"
He said, "Well, people were inconsistent on their repeated accounts of their practice, so we don't think that's important." I said, "Well, everyone has trouble with getting good data, that doesn't mean you don't report the measure of variance."
So after I started criticizing this research, 20 years after this 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 had gone way over 10,000 hours, some people were way under and had done better. There were all sorts of other factors that mattered. 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 there was just tremendous individual variation. 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 practiced more.
One problem after another. I'm getting youth sports pitches, I'm getting investment pitches citing the 10,000-hours rule. It's not right, and it's giving the wrong impression of how humans develop and this idea that you need to just pick something and stick with it and that sampling to try to figure out where you have your best shot is worthless. 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 this season of my life, whether that's podcasting or starting businesses. My business portfolio is quite varied. When I was thinking about sitting down with you today, I thought maybe I'll just tell him where I'm trying to get to in my life. I'm a 30-year-old man, so I'm not in the early phases of my career. Does that mean, for example, that I can't make ground now?
What phase of your career are you in? I don't know, because I had this 18 to 28 thing, so I thought maybe I'm a little bit more rigid. There was research a few years ago from MIT and Northwestern and the US Census Bureau that found the average age of a founder of a fast-growing tech startup—top one in 10,000—guess what the average age was on the day of foundation?
25?
45. And a 50-year-old had a better chance than a 30-year-old. But we never—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 we just valorize precocity. I would not say that you're not in the early stages of your career. You're certainly not by that metric. And that's not to say that there aren't tremendous companies, or if you measure by market cap, that there are 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—is not to say there aren't exceptions, because there are as many different ways to the top as there are human beings. But I think we're constantly focusing on the exception when people should at least be aware of the norm.
So the average, the fastest growing—did you say tech founders?
Tech startups. But tech in this context also included things in agriculture. It's not just photo-sharing apps.
Which I think is important because it's less likely a 55-year-old would understand some of the more emerging platforms that are native to say a Mark Zuckerberg at 22 messing around in his dorm room with computers and the internet.
I think that's fair. But technology touches a lot of other areas of life. Yesterday on the way here, I was learning about a software that I had never heard of because all of the computers were down in the airport. Technology's in all these places that are not as—don't have this sort of figurehead that's publicly profiled the same way.
So if I do want to become—okay, so I understand that at this season of my life I can do whatever I want in terms of I can aim at whatever I want. Doesn't mean I'm going to be good at it. But if I just want to be more productive in the goals that I am aiming at—so say this podcast means a lot to me—I 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 and you've gotten so competent at it that you're going to be in what economist Russ Roberts told me is a "hammock of competence." You're in an area where you're so comfortable and so successful that getting better is going to be harder because there's disincentive from changing anything that you're doing.
You have to take some risk. You're an entrepreneur. If you're going to want to get better, you're going to have to take some risk. I think that's going to be a difficult thing to do because there are people in this room that depend on you. Risk for you is risk for them too. And so I think you have to start thinking about what would be some smart risks if you want to innovate with the podcast—what might that look like?
Finding ways to run small experiments. I'm a huge fan of low-stakes practice for individuals progressing in their career.
I love this phrase—my absolute favorite phrase in *Range* was a paraphrase from this woman named Herminia Ibarra, who's a professor at the London Business School. She studies how people make work transitions. Her phrase was: we learn who we are in practice, not in theory.
The thesis of her work is that there's this idea that you can just introspect and go forth and know what you should be doing, like Clark Kent running into a phone booth and ripping off his and becoming—comes out as Superman. But work is part of identity and it doesn't change like that from introspect.
You actually have to go try something, see how it went, what was unexpected, what did you learn that you might be interested in or that you're better at that you didn't know? What's something that you're good at that you realized you're not using? And then you make your next step based on that.
I think when you're so competent and successful and getting only tons of positive feedback for something, it becomes hard to take risk. And so I think that'll be a challenge for you. Because if you take the sufficient amount of risk—you want to be in your zone of optimal push.
For anything you're doing, practicing whatever physical skill, anything, if you're not at least 15-20% of the time failing, then you're not in your zone of optimal push where you're getting as much better as you possibly can. And I think when you have something that's very successful, that's hard. And so I would start thinking about what risks you're willing to take. It doesn't mean it's a failure if something goes backward—if the views go down or whatever metric you're measuring on.
What you just listened to was a most replayed moment from a previous episode. If you want to listen to that full episode, I've linked it down below. Check the description. Thanks.
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The process only takes minutes, and it could mean hundreds more in your pocket. Visit progressive.com after this episode to see if you could save. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary, not available in all states.
The Diary of a CEO is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you can save some cash? Progressive makes it easy. Just drop in some details about yourself and see if you are eligible to save money when you bundle your home and auto policies.
The process only takes minutes, and it could mean hundreds more in your pocket. Visit progressive.com after this episode to see if you could save. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary, not available in all states.