Are some people predisposed to being a generalist versus a specialist? In his book, "Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World," author David Epstein discovers that early specialization is an exception, not the rule. Epstein, a former science and investigative reporter, argues that to succeed in any field, one must develop an array of interests. In interviews with renowned athletes, inventors and scientists, he explores the power of diverse experiences in a world that requires hyperspecialization. In this episode of the podcast "The Next Chapter" by American Express Business Class, Epstein and host Cardiff Garcia discuss the virtues of being a generalist on a trajectory to success.
Are some people predisposed to being a generalist versus a specialist? In his book, "Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World," author David Epstein discovers that early specialization is an exception, not the rule. Epstein, a former science and investigative reporter, argues that to succeed in any field, one must develop an array of interests. In interviews with renowned athletes, inventors and scientists, he explores the power of diverse experiences in a world that requires hyperspecialization. In this episode of the podcast "The Next Chapter" by American Express Business Class, Epstein and host Cardiff Garcia discuss the virtues of being a generalist on a trajectory to success.
INTRO
Cardiff Garcia: When we picture someone who is the very best in their field, a real master of what they do, we often think of a specialist, someone who is entirely focused on their craft. Maybe even obsessed. But today’s guest argues that this is a profound misconception. And it’s one that stops a lot of us from excelling in our own fields—and from living more rounded and more interesting lives.
Hi, I'm Cardiff Garcia, and welcome to The Next Chapter by American Express Business Class. In each episode of this podcast, we introduce you to a bestselling book that everyone in the business world can learn from. And we're also gonna hear how the author's advice has evolved since they published their work, and what they would write for their next chapter. l
Today, we're speaking with David Epstein. David is himself a great example of a generalist—someone who has spent his life alternating between different personal and professional pursuits. And it started all the way back in high school, when a broken arm caused him to switch from playing football to becoming a track star. In his career, David started as a scientist, before switching to journalism, where his work has taken him from the overnight shift at a New York Tabloid, to covering sports, to investigative journalism, and to writing two books.
David's latest book is called “Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World.” And it’s all about how our minds and our work benefit more from a variety of experiences, than from the hyper specialization we often think of as the path to excellence.
I sat down with David to discuss the virtues of being a generalist and his 2019 book "Range."
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Cardiff Garcia: David Epstein, welcome to The Next Chapter.
David Epstein: Thanks so much for having me.
Cardiff Garcia: You describe yourself as having a kind of digressive mind and personality. You like to try a lot of different things, and I'm just wondering, when did you first recognize that about yourself?
David Epstein: Yeah, that's a great question because not early, I wouldn't say like when I was a teenager, I knew exactly what I was gonna do with my life and had a very linear track in mind, and I, I kind of didn't end up doing any of that. My academic background is in like environmental science and astronomy, and at one point I was training to be an environmental scientist and I think I started to realize that the work was getting so narrow.
I was starting to ask myself, am I kind of the type of person who wants to spend my whole life learning one or two things new to the world or much shorter spans of time learning things that are new to me and synthesizing them and sharing them and so on. And so I took a, a class in science writing, and realized that science journalism seemed to actually satisfy my brand of science curiosity better than working as a scientist did.
And, and I think I started to realize from that point that, that I wanted to kind of have this, this network of interest that I could engage as opposed to becoming increasingly narrow.
Cardiff VO: One thing that I kept wondering, as I was reflecting on your own career, is whether or not people are inherently predisposed to being generalists versus being specialists. What do you think?
David Epstein: Yeah, it's a good question. I think some of it is semantic, like, what even is a, a specialist or a generalist? But I do think that people would like to be able to engage more interests than they often feel pressured to do in their work. I was interviewing a woman, who said that she feels like she didn't advance as much as she could have because she wasn't more specialized. And I looked up her publications. Every single one of her published papers had Aristotle in the title, and she felt that she was not specialized enough.
Right. And so that, I think that's a little bit, a little bit crazy. I think there's some good psychological evidence that we should really go through these periods of sort of diving deeper and then coming up and this sort of explore, exploit trade off is, is what it's called in some of the literature where you do some exploring and then you find something, you wanna go deeper and then you come back to periods of exploration.
And I think it's sometimes we, we forget to keep having those periods of exploration, as we go through careers. But I think it's critical. And again, there, there was just kind of a seminal study out, showing that most people will only have kind of one or sometimes two hot streaks at their work, essentially.
And that those hot streaks are reliably preceded by periods of exploration where it seems like they're bouncing around a little bit. And what's probably going on there is people are exploring to kind of figure out what their options are, where they should direct their attention, uh, and before they dive in.
And I, I think we sometimes feel pressured to, to, to skip that part.
Cardiff Garcia: David, your first book was about sports and genetics called “The Sports Gene” range is much broader, and it includes themes from like every domain of life, work, pleasure, and so on. And there's a quote at one point that you have from Sasha Cohen, who was a silver medalist in figure skating. She says, Olympic athletes need to understand that the rules for life are different from the rules for sports.
Why don't you tell us what those differences are?
David Epstein: I think this gets at this frame that was really important for me in Range. To use the terminology of psychologist Robin Hogarth, he described this spectrum of activities from what he called kind to wicked learning environments and kind learning environments are, domains where rules are clear and don't change, or at least don't change rapidly.
Patterns repeat, feedback is quick and accurate. Maybe not a lot of ton of human dynamics involved. Work next year will look like work last year, basically. So sports in many ways.
On the other end of the spectrum are what Hogarth called wicked learning environments, where next steps and goals may not always be clear patterns don't just repeat. Rules could change if there are any, lots of human behavior involved. Feedback could be delayed or inaccurate and work next year may not look like work last year.
And so I think sports, I think there are lessons we can take from sports, but I think we have to be careful about extrapolating from relatively kind learning environments to the much more wicked ones that, that most of us are engaged in.
Cardiff Garcia: And I want to draw the explicit connection here between this analysis of kind and wicked environments to your work in Range. You talk about how a broader cognitive toolbox is necessary for navigating a wicked environment. We get that broader cognitive toolbox by doing a range of things, by having experience in a wide variety of things. Is that right?
David Epstein: That's right. There's a, a sort of classic finding that can be summarized as, breadth of training predicts breadth of transfer. So transfer is a term that, that researchers use to refer to your ability to take your skills and knowledge and apply them in a problem that you haven't quite seen before, which is what we need to do every day.
Even if we're doing things that are similar, we're having to do some transfer. Right? And what predicts your ability to do that is the breadth of the types of problems that you've, you faced in training essentially because if you faced this sort of broader mix of challenges, it forces you to build these more generalized models that can be more flexible for problem solving, if that makes sense.
And that sort of has resonated with when I talked to startup founders for example, I don't think I've ever heard one that says, “oh yeah, things worked out the way we saw it from the beginning”, right? The ones that seem to survive are the ones who hold some of their ideas lightly enough that they're willing to experiment and pivot when it makes sense, as opposed to sticking to a particular solution, like no matter what's happening around them.
Cardiff Garcia: You also write about the dangers of overconfidence that comes from having a lot of experience in one single thing as opposed to having a range of different interests or a range of different types of expertise. And so you write, for example, “whether chemists, physicists, or political scientists, the most successful problem solvers spend mental energy figuring out what type of problem they're facing before matching a strategy to it, rather than jumping in with memorized procedures,” unquote.
The people who do the memorized procedures thing tend to have a ton of experience in those procedures, but then maybe they're, they're stopped, they're prohibited from thinking a little bit more widely and creatively about the specific problem that they're confronting. Can you tell us more about that?
David Epstein: One of the hallmarks of the differences between expert problem solvers and sort of, you know, lesser problem solvers, I guess, is that time spent on figuring out the sort of deeper structure of the problem and matching a strategy to a type of problem.
This particular study came out too recently for me to put in Range, but it involved middle school math classrooms that were randomized to different types of training. Okay. And some of those math classrooms got what's called blocked practice, where you do problem type A, A, A, A, and then you practice problem type B, B, B, B, B, C, C, C, C, C, C, and so on.
Other classrooms got randomized to what's called interleaved or mixed practice, where it's as if you took all the problem types and threw them in a hat and drew them out at random, so A, B, D, C, C, B. And the first group that gets the block practice. Typically in studies like this, they progress really quickly and they feel like they're doing well, so they're happy and they rate their teachers highly, their progress is fast.
Whereas sometimes in the, the interleaf or mixed practice group, progress can be slower at first. Sometimes there's more frustration, but when the test comes along and now everyone has to apply what they've learned in, in new problems, the interleave group blew the blocked practice group out of the water.
Like the effect size is on the order of taking a kid from the 50th percentile to like the 80th percentile. And that's all studying the same thing, but one group was forced to study it in this way where they couldn't just use procedures over and over.
The block practice group can use procedures A, A, A, B, B, B. The interleave group has to say, what problem type is this? I have to match a strategy to this type of problem.
Cardiff Garcia: Yeah, and that particular study had to do with students, with school-aged kids. Do you think that this concept also would apply to adults who are maybe starting at an organization or have been there for a little while and need to be trained or, you know, for a new task, or just need to engage or want to engage in some kind of lifelong career learning career progression?
Is it applicable to them as well, what do you think?
David Epstein: Absolutely. I mean, I think evidence that that's helpful shows up in basically everywhere it's been, it's been studied even from things as seemingly just sort of fun as if you wanted to be able to recognize a painting that you'd never seen before if you were studying painter styles instead of like looking at Van Gogh, Van Gogh, Van Gogh, Monet, Monet, Monet.
You'd wanna mix up a bunch of styles and that forces you to learn the essential kind of elements of a certain style and you'll then be able to recognize ones you've never seen before up to really any kind of learning up to motor learning, where you want people to, mix the sort of physical problems that they're trying to solve if you want them to be able to build these more powerful general skills.
So I think there's evidence that it shows up for kind of any type of learning. The problem is it tends to be slower at first. And this is a real hallmark of this skill building literature, that the kind of learning that feels best early on, that we judge our own learning based on the sense of ease or fluidity.
And where, in fact, difficulty is not a sign that you're not learning. But ease is a sign that you're not learning In fact, if you're not, if you're not even failing at, at least like 15% of the trials you're doing, whether that's a physical thing or answering questions in, in some knowledge domain, you're not mixing it up enough like you're, you're making it too easy for yourself.
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Cardiff VO: Yeah it seems like one of the underlying themes of your book Range is that short-term struggles, or even short-term failures, often end up yielding big benefits in the long-term. But that you have to be really patient before those benefits can emerge.
So I'm thinking, for example, about this from the standpoint of an organization. Which might tell its managers, “Hey, train your employees specifically for the jobs that are required of them and not for other things”, which of course sounds very sensible, right? Whereas if an organization were to say “Hey, make sure that you include in their training, you know, some abstract thinking exercises or a mix of less critical tasks that are intended to make the workers better rounded, like generalists, but are not specifically applicable right now to their jobs” that might be harder to justify that because a lot of it looks like a waste of time, to train employees that way. And the employees themselves might get frustrated. They might say, “Why am I doing all these weird exercises instead of learning how to do my job?”
And so all of this seems like it might be hard to justify that expenditure of time and money and resources because the payoff would only come much later.
David Epstein: I think first of all, you hit on what I think is the theme on every page of Range, but that probably would've been a less marketable subtitle, um, which is that sometimes optimizing for the short term, or getting a headstart, can actually undermine your long-term development.
Whether that's about learning a skill, whether that's picking a field of study or a career, whatever it is that, that, the short term and the long-term can be intentioned. You know, maybe that's like no surprise to people who think about investing and stuff like that. But I think what you say is a, is a huge issue.
I think we can split the difference with some of that, because ultimately you want the training to be effective and you want it to be effective in the medium and long term, presumably. And if we want people to be able to be problem solvers on their own, and increasingly I think that's important because there's a lot of A.I. tools that you can use if you're pretty sure that it can, you know, facing an environment where it can do something similar kind of over and over and over.
If we want people to be able to be these kind of dynamic problem solvers, then you have to give them some of this mixed practice. Like they have to be trying to face at least some diversity of problems. And I don't think that means you have to pick some random domain for them to study, but at least in the training samples that they're getting, really diversify what is the structure of the problem they're facing.
Like if they have to answer calls from customers or something, make the structure of the problems they're facing very different, it forces them to build these more generalized tools.
Cardiff Garcia: You mentioned artificial intelligence. There have been a lot of interesting developments in artificial intelligence, especially in the last few years. We now have things like
David Epstein: Last few months.
Cardiff Garcia: Last few months, even
A.I. is in your book and you write that A.I. runs on the rules that humans give them, and that if people and the labor market more generally want to adapt to A.I., then people need to learn how to bring the uniquely human contribution to their work. What is that contribution and how does it relate to the ideas in range?
David Epstein: Yeah, I think the places where humans have more to contribute is at the more strategic level of things. In medical diagnosis where a lot of diagnoses are kind of obvious, you know, common things that are coming up over and over.
But I think for decades now, there's been evidence that simple statistical tables can often do diagnosis really, really well and sometimes better than humans. And so maybe in that case the role for the doctor should be more understanding the context of a patient's life, and how should we respond to this diagnosis or should we treat this diagnosis I think moving to this much more strategic level.
So to give an example that, I think is interesting, but that is not in the book. When I was looking back at coverage of the ATM coming online in the United States in, in 1970 about. Some of the news coverage is pretty apocalyptic. Like there's, I think there were something like 300,000 bank tellers at the time, and the suggestion is that they're all gonna go out of business overnight.
And instead what happened over the next 50 years is there were more ATMs, there were more bank tellers, not fewer, because the ATMs made branches cheaper to operate. So, banks could open more branches, fewer tellers per branch, but more tellers overall. But more interesting than that is it fundamentally changed the job from one of someone who's doing these repetitive cash transactions, basically to one of someone who's like a customer service rep and a marketing professional or a financial advisor.
This much broader mix of skills that are much more at the strategic level and I think like, maybe that sounds like a silly example, but I think that's often been the case in looking at the history of technological disruption is that there, there are consequences for people, right?
There are very human consequences and some people are dislocated, but usually the places that have had more automation and more digital technology have ended up with more work overall. So I think we should be thinking about what can we take off our plate to allow humans to focus on the strategy?
Cardiff Garcia: I was also delighted that you wrote about one of my favorite economics papers of the last decade or so, which showed that the average age of successful startup founders is older than the stereotype would suggest. It's actually roughly the mid forties. It's not people who are in their early twenties or whatever.
We hear about the high profile examples, of course, of the young 23 year old genius prodigy founder. But actually the older you get, the more likely your startup is to succeed. How does that relate to the ideas in range, and were you as excited by that finding as I was?
David Epstein: I was surprised by it, and I should say a, a famous VC whose work I really admire got a little annoyed at me for sharing it. But it's, I mean that's,
Cardiff Garcia: Because they all give money to young people only.
David Epstein: Right. Well, so I think he felt from his experience that it was wrong. But this is research done by MIT and Northwestern in the US Census Bureau that found the average age of a founder of a fast growing startup.
And this was one in 1000. So the top, top one in 1000, uh, on the day of founding was 45. And that a 50 year old was much more likely than a 30 year old to start a, a fast growing startup, and I thought that was really, really interesting and important. And that's not to say that young people shouldn't try startups, but I think it falls in line with this body of evidence that suggests that people actually tend to have to go through more sort of trial and error, and more zigzagging in their life before they realize how to fit their skills and interests and abilities into a need in the world.
Cardiff Garcia: You also highlight a bunch of studies showing the importance of being able to think like an outsider, even when you're thinking about your own situation or your own problems. I think my favorite one that you brought up was, that a group of private equity investors were asked to predict the return that they were gonna get on their own investments.
But then when they were shown a bunch of outside investments that had very similar characteristics to their own investments, their predictions were for much lower returns. And then they revised down their estimates for what they were gonna get, for what their, uh, investments were gonna return as well.
And this applies across a bunch of other domains as well. And I'm kind of just curious to know what is going on there.
David Epstein: Yeah. This is,called the taking the outside view so intuitively for our own projects, whether it's about how much time do we think a project is gonna take, how much money do we think it's gonna cost, you know, how long and how much is it gonna cost to remodel your house, whatever it is. We use what's called the inside view, which is we look at all the details of our problem.
What's the work we need to get done, how quickly do we think we can do it? And we make the judgment based on that. And that turns out not to be the right place to start. It doesn't mean you have to neglect the inside view, but the place you wanna start is with the not intuitive, so-called outside view.
And so what you wanna do is build what's called like a reference class where instead of focusing on your own home renovation, you should go find out what was the case for all the people in your neighborhood that had similar houses to yours.
And usually you'll probably end up 50 to a hundred percent higher basically, and it taking longer. And so you can go to that inside view. It doesn't mean you shouldn't know anything about the details of your project, but I use this like constantly when I'm trying to decide how much work I can get done in a certain amount of time.
Um, I've, I've tracked some of that for myself now. So my instinct is always, I've noticed, and I think this is the case with almost everybody, to think that they'll be able to get more done in a certain amount of time than they actually can. And so if you actually track yourself, then you start having a reference class and realizing, um, I need to take that outside view and see what usually happens.
Instead of the inside view of what do I think is gonna happen this time based on the features here.
Cardiff Garcia: Do we overrate perseverance as a virtue
David Epstein: Man, that's a tough question. I wanna say no, I don't think we overrate perseverance, but I do think we underrate strategic quitting, if I'm allowed to say that those things coexist. And because usually by the time, often by the time we quit something we've, it was like, past time when we, when we…
Cardiff Garcia: should have happened a while ago. Right?
David Epstein: Right. And so I think in the, in the afterward of the book, I, because of this question, I decided to write more about something I had barely mentioned, that when I added it to the paperback, something I barely mentioned called the Talent-Based Branching Program in the Army and basically it was a response to the fact that retention was not going so well for, soldiers who had been deemed kind of the most talented, like people who had gone to West Point and, and they were, they were quitting in high numbers.
And so leaders were being lost, future leaders, and in order to try to improve retention, the Army started these programs like one called Talent-Based Branching, where instead of saying the traditional model of Here's your career track, get up or out, they'd say, Hey, we're gonna pair you with sort of a coach or a mentor.
Try this one career track, see how it fits you. Keep track of your reflections in an online portal. Then try another and another, and, you know, at least two others dabble in at least five career tracks and keep track of these reflections. And 90% of cadets who went through the talent-based branching change one of their top three career preferences just by having this opportunity to, to dabble a little bit.
And I think talent-based branching is basically like strategic quitting, right? It's saying we're gonna give you these chances to, to dabble in something, reflect on it, and then strategically pivot. But it's a much better branding than, than saying quitting. Whereas normally you could say, throw the person into the first one.
And if they, if it's not a fit for them, then is that a lack of perseverance? Well, Maybe sometimes it is. But I think that research shows that it's more often a problem when people want to quit of match quality, which is a term that means a degree of fit between their interests and abilities and the work that they do.
And as one of the researchers who does this work, told me this phrase that I like said, “when you get fit, it looks like grit”. Meaning, if you can get people in work that fits their interests and abilities well, they will display the characteristics of grit, perseverance, even if they didn't before. And interventions to improve people's grit have not done so well.
Whereas improving people's match quality can functionally improve their grit immediately. Don't think about strategic pivoting as a failure of perseverance, but rather as smart strategy and persevering and trying to find something that's better for you.
Cardiff Garcia: That's fascinating. The idea that those two things matching and perseverance essentially are symbiotic, that better matching will probably make you more gritty, more likely to persevere, and once you're there, if you've found a better match than your perseverance will also help you succeed. Right. It sounds like that's essentially what you're saying.
David Epstein: Absolutely. And, and I think people know this at some level, like I was a college athlete and a track runner, and there were, there were people who were, you know, their perseverance, like boggled the mind on the track, and then they seem to have none of it in the classroom and vice versa. So I think we're all aware that we've been in situations that bring out our own perseverance and others that, that don't, but we tend not to, not to think of it like that way.
So I, I think we should think of grit as what psychologists call a state, not a trait. A trait is something about you, no matter what you're doing, right? It's just like an inherent part of you. A state is a function of you that might be stable, but in a given context. So you might say, David is an introvert at a giant rave, but an extrovert with a small team at work, which is true, and those things are stable, but they're not necessarily incompatible, like the different context can, can bring out different things in people.
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Cardiff VO: You're listening to The Next Chapter, by American Express Business Class. When we come back, I'll ask David what he would write for his next chapter, and why he says the message of the book is “Don’t feel behind.”
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Cardiff Garcia: Range was first published in 2019, which temporally doesn't seem that long ago. But in terms of what's happened to the world in the time since, you know, so much has radically changed. I think in your paperback you also did add an afterward, but even since then, I'm kind of curious to know if you could now add a new chapter to Range.
What would be its theme based, either on feedback you've gotten or just based on something that you thought of that fascinated you and that you think also is applicable to its ideas?
David Epstein: Yeah, a few things come to mind, but one that's really top of mind is something called self-regulatory learning or self-regulatory behavior self-regulatory learning is this huge body of research that essentially amounts to thinking about your own thinking or reflection.
And it turns out that we don't spend enough time doing this, we're not being as good experimenters as we could or we're doing stuff. But the assumption that we're getting the maximum amount of learning from it is not correct, except at the very early part of the learning curve that we actually need to stop and say, you know, what went well?
What went poorly? What didn't meet my expectations? What do I wanna learn next? Why do I wanna learn it? Who do I need to help me learn that? And answering questions like that over and over, setting up purposeful experiments for yourself and answering those questions, and I, and I do this in a journal repeatedly, actually increases the amount that you learn from all these experiences.
And this also turns out, by the way, to be the habit of mind, of people that I wrote about in the book, in the so-called Dark Horse Project, which was about who find fulfilling careers. They basically have this habit of mind where they say, here's who I am right now.
Here are my skills and interests. Here are the opportunities in front of me. I'm gonna take this one and then maybe a year from now I'll change cause I will have learned something about myself. And they just keep doing that kind of triangulating better and better fit. Each place they go. And if they take a wrong step, they reflect on that and move.
And so I think the work world is changing rapidly enough and people are changing jobs rapidly enough that if you're not having this self-regulatory behavior, then you are just not going to learn as quickly as you can and you're not gonna find as good a match, as quickly as you can. So I think that I would've harped more on that behavior and talked about sort of how I do it with something I call a book of small experiments where I put down a hypothesis and I find a way to make sure that I test it at least every, at least every other month.
So that, or one more comes to mind. Can I give you one more?
Cardiff Garcia: Yes, please.
David Epstein: Because this has to do with some of the changes too. I did write in one of the chapters about differentiating the chain of communication from the chain of command, right? The need to, kind of diversify, the way that information travels in organizations.
So it's not only going up and down the chain of command, And I wrote a little bit about that with respect to NASA, where Wernher von Braun, who was heading the development of the Saturn five rocket that first put humans on the moon, started what he called Monday notes, where he'd have his engineering team leads put on one sheet of paper and one sheet only their problems, unexpected findings, whatever. Cuz he knew all these teams, the Saturn Five Rocket is 60 feet longer than the Statue of Liberty, pedestal included. So even if teams were working on it at the same time, they're effectively remote from one another. So he'd have them put that on one sheet only and he'd put handwritten notes in the margin and recirculate them all to everyone.
So people could see other teams' questions, concerns, they could see his reactions. He would sometimes congratulate people for finding problems because he wanted people to be aware of them before they had to go up the chain of command. I think he did this in handwriting cuz he wanted it to create this informal culture of information sharing.
And that was a form of differentiating the chain of communication and chain of command. And when he went away, Monday notes actually became a form letter only for upward communication. And that was cited in, well in the Challenger investigation, then again in the Columbia investigation as a major cultural failing where NASA was not a deemed a learning organization because the chain of command and the chain of communication became the same. And I think that's something we really have to worry about with more remote work.
There's some great advantages to remote and hybrid work, but there's also some danger there. There's also some work showing that the main benefit of mentoring comes from implicit knowledge, meaning the mentee, seeing the mentor, how they hold themselves, how they behave, as opposed to the stuff the mentor is actually telling them.
I think we have tech tools that can do obviously unprecedented things, but I think we have to be a whole lot more thoughtful about how we create the import export business of ideas within an organization because it's crucial to mentoring, it's crucial to learning.
It's how ideas spread. You know, I think there's a reason why even Silicon Valley, like the most tech connected people in the world, and yet they all cluster together in a small space.
So because that feels so topical and kind of concerning to me, I think we need to be more thoughtful than ever in the past about capturing benefits that we didn't really have to think about because they were inherent to more traditional forms of work.
Cardiff Garcia: “Don't feel behind” is what you like to tell people when they ask you. Sum up your thoughts on Range in one sentence, and I wanna talk about this for a second, because who doesn't feel behind in this hurried world that we live in, right?
David Epstein: Don't feel more behind than the next person, I guess. yeah, right?
Cardiff Garcia: But still that is a logical conclusion to take from the ideas that you communicate in Range.
So yeah, back it up. You know, when you tell somebody don't feel behind and they say, why not? I feel behind all the time and, and it just seems like I am behind. And you say, well, maybe you're not as behind as, as you think you are.
David Epstein: Yeah, I think, I think because it can, one, it can just produce anxiety, but also sort of damage people's decision making where you want them to be aggressively approaching something that they think is good or that they want, but, that doesn't have anything to do with just the sort of regret of not having done something already in the past.
And our intuition is such that if we see two people separated by X amount in whatever it is, we feel that that's a point on a linear trajectory. And they will always be separated by that amount. But that's not the case. It's just, except for the most basic skills, that's just not what shows up in, in skill learning research, that development is bumpy.
People hit plateaus and then get off those plateaus. So first of all, the idea. That people even know exactly where they are in their trajectory, is not correct. But also so many of the opportunities people get and the things they get interested in are, are opportunistic pivots to something that they didn't see coming.
And so I think trying to make sure you're getting the maximum amount of learning from whatever it is you are doing and, and improving on yourself from one day to the next. And again, having that self-regulatory behavior reflecting on what are you doing and why, and what do you need to learn, is really the productive mindset.
And it's okay to feel bad about things in the past. Dan Pink's done some great writing about this, about how regret people tend to say either, no regrets, which is like, If that, that's true for anybody, then that seems crazy. or to wallow and ruminate and regret. Whereas actually there's a third path, which is what is this feeling teaching me?
And I think that's a much more productive way to say, why did I feel that way? And how can I make it different in the future instead of just, oh, I'm behind. I, I messed it up and kind of ruminating, getting down on yourself is what does this teach you for your next experiment?
Cardiff Garcia: It's interesting because the difference between regret and potentially useful if maybe melancholic reflection is not always obvious. And the reason I like that sentence don't feel behind is because there were a lot of times in my own career and I imagined this applies to a lot of people when I was so frustrated and it felt like I got nothing out of it and like maybe I wasted years of my life doing jobs that I wasn't really meant for.
But, that actually some of the lessons that I absorbed in those jobs may have proven to be fruitful in ways that I didn't even end up recognizing later on when I had a career that was going better. And it just makes me feel better about all that, you know.
David Epstein: Yeah, I mean, and again, like if we can be a little bit smarter about strategic quitting and knowing when it's not a fit, then maybe you waste fewer years doing that. Right? And since we're so bad at that, being even a little bit better can be a big deal cuz you're not gonna be perfect, right?
That's just not life. But that, You know, I guess as I've gotten older, I realize a lot of my projects are more research as opposed to research than I would've expected because I have that same feeling about my own career where when I got off the track, when I thought I was gonna be a scientist at one point and got off that track, initially my thought was, well that was a waste of time, but at least I know, you know, it was useful information.
But that was a waste of time. Cause I think I was shaping up to be, you know, an average, a typical scientist, and then you took those typical science skills and it brought them over to a sports magazine, and it's like, boom, and you're like a Nobel laureate, you know?
And I realized what's worked for me in my career has often been taking skills or experiences that are quite normal in one milieu, and then bringing them somewhere where all of a sudden they're seen as something totally rare. And I didn't do that purposefully initially, but, in more recent years, I've realized how powerful that is of taking something that might feel common and not special and then moving it to somewhere where it feels special.
Cardiff Garcia: Last question. You described the process of writing as torture, kind of like running an 800 meter sprint. It's torture while you're doing it, but you're happy when it's over and you're proud of yourself when it's over. And so my last question is, what is the next torture that you're voluntarily rushing towards?
David Epstein: And, and by the way that, that sounds bad when you say like, I'm saying we need to find work that fits us well. Mine is torture, but I think there's a difference between something that just makes me euphoric and something that I find incredibly compelling. I find the work incredibly compelling, the same way that I found the 800 meter running, the 800 meters and training for the 800 meters, incredibly compelling, even while painful.
And so that's sort of, I guess one of my regnant values is finding something I find compelling, whether or not it's hard. And now what I'm interested in is in large part, based on questions I've gotten about Range.
And one of the reasons why I've gotten so interested in this self-regulatory behavior is, okay, once you build up this broad toolbox and these diverse experiences, how do you channel that into achievement? And what are sort of the productive limitations or the boxes you can draw? That then bring that to bear, in useful projects.
So sort of useful constraints and I'm, I'm diving into research on that, now, so happy to hear from people who have interesting stories.
OUTRO [Theme Music]
Cardiff Garcia: All right, David Epstein, thanks so much for being on the next chapter. Really appreciate it.
David Epstein: Totally. My pleasure.
Cardiff VO: You’ve been listening to The Next Chapter by American Express Business Class. A special thanks to David Epstein for coming on the show today. And please tune in for our next episode where I’ll be speaking with Susan Cain about her book "Quiet" on the overlooked advantages of being an introvert.
Until then, be sure to follow or subscribe, on whatever app you may be using right now. And if you enjoyed today's episode, please leave us a review. Thanks for listening.