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David Epstein: The 10,000-Hour Rule Is A Productivity Lie

Epstein argues breadth and late starts beat the famous 10,000-hour rule: generalists trained across domains outpace specialists in messy real work.

Steven BartletthostDavid Epsteinguest
Sep 2, 20242h 6mWatch on YouTube ↗

EVERY SPOKEN WORD

  1. 0:00 – 2:31

    Intro

    1. SB

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

    2. DE

      Well, that's wrong. This idea undermines this broader toolbox that you need for long-term development. If you're doing that, then you're missing opportunities.

    3. SB

      David Epstein is a New York Times best-selling author- Whose infamous work challenges the conventional wisdom about specialization...

    4. DE

      Productivity...

    5. SB

      And what it takes to become successful. What advice would you give to a person that's thinking about how to navigate their way to being really good at something?

    6. DE

      First of all, being a scientist of your own development and creating what's called a self-regulatory practice.

    7. SB

      What is that?

    8. DE

      So the cycle is reflect, what do you need to work on? Plan, come up with an experiment for how you can work on that. Is that getting a job? Is it taking a class? Monitor and then evaluate. And people who do that repeatedly, they just keep improving. Two, so for anything you're doing, if you're not 15, 20% of the time, failing, then you're not in your zone of optimal push, where you're getting as much better as you possibly can.

    9. SB

      What about focus? I get distracted easily, and I wanna be more productive in the time that I spend working.

    10. DE

      Don't start your day with email. It's been shocking to look at the research of how big of an impairment that is.

    11. SB

      What about notifications?

    12. DE

      So if you're getting distracted all the time, if you say, "Well, now I really have to hunker down. I'm gonna get rid of the notifications," you will start self-interrupting to maintain the interruptions to which you have become accustomed.

    13. SB

      Really?

    14. DE

      Yeah. That will go away, but not immediately. But there's a lot of things that you can do for a productive day. For example, if you sub-... that has a enormous influence in your productivity.

    15. SB

      Interesting. The other thing I found which was pretty shocking was where you started talking about some of the dangers of specialism.

    16. DE

      Yes. Harvard-led studies found if you're in a hospital with certain cardiac conditions when the most esteemed specialists are away, you're less likely to die.

    17. SB

      Gosh, that's terrifying.

    18. DE

      The conclusion was that's because...

    19. SB

      This is a sentence I never thought I'd say in my life, um, we've just hit seven million subscribers on YouTube, and I wanna say a huge thank you to all of you that show up here every Monday and Thursday to watch our conversations. Um, from the bottom of my heart, but also on behalf of my team, who you don't always get to meet, there's almost 50 people now behind the Diary of a CEO that worked to put this together. So, from all of us, thank you so much. Um, we did a raffle last month, and we gave away prizes for people that subscribed to the show up until seven million subscribers, and you guys loved that raffle so much that we're gonna continue it. So every single month, we're giving away money can't buy prizes, including meetings with me, invites to our events, and £1,000 gift vouchers to anyone that subscribes to the Diary of a CEO. There's now more than seven million of you, so if you make the decision to subscribe today, you can be one of those lucky people. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. Let's get to the conversation. David.

    20. DE

      Yes?

  2. 2:31 – 3:04

    Why Do You Do What You Do?

    1. DE

    2. SB

      How would you summarize the work that you do and why you do it? And who are you really doing it for?

    3. DE

      I am obsessed with correcting what I view as mistranslations of scientific research about human development, and so that is the core of my work, and I think I'm doing it for everyone who is curious, but either doesn't have a scientific background or doesn't have that particular scientific background. Curious, but interested in self-improvement, but doesn't either have the time or, or the means to, to go sifting through this evidence themself.

  3. 3:04 – 5:33

    What Areas Of Self-Improvement Do You Focus On?

    1. DE

    2. SB

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

    3. DE

      Well, earlier on, I was focused on physical skill acquisition, like in, in athletics, but increasingly, uh, I've moved into career and personal development, generally, and looking at that with a very, very kind of long lens, right? So one of the most important things to me, one of the most important messages that I've been working on the last few years, is the fact that sometimes optimizing for short-term development will undermine your long-term development. So let's say if we're thinking about sports or music or something like that, the obvious thing to do is to get a head start in whatever you're doing, pick something-

    4. SB

      Mm-hmm.

    5. DE

      ... stick with it, don't, don't switch things, 'cause then you've lost time, focus very na- very narrowly, and do as much of it as you possibly can to the exclusion of other things. That's such an obvious way, right? And you will jump out to, to a lead, right? We see that in sports and music. We see that in school, with certain head start programs that give people an advantage in some academic skills. The problem is, that kind of narrow focus creates short-term results, but undermines this broader toolbox that you need for long-term development, and so you'll see what scientists call fade out in these advantages, which isn't, isn't necessarily actually anything going away. It's the fact that people with this broader base will catch up and surpass, so it appears to be a fade out.

    6. SB

      Ah, okay. So if you take more time to get a broader understanding of something, whether it's in sports, if you're sort of a child prodigy, um, over the long term, that's gonna 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, uh, you know, really deliberate practice obsessively, and he's gonna have a... It's kind of like the, the tortoise and the hare-

    7. DE

      Yeah.

    8. SB

      ... analogy, where, you know, the tortoise, uh, eventually wins the race.

    9. DE

      Yeah. I mean, the- there's a, there's a, a big body of research in psychology that can be summarized with the phrase, "Breadth of training predicts breadth of transfer." Okay? Transfer is the ability of someone to take skills and knowledge and use it to solve a problem they haven't seen before, right? You transfer it to a new situation. And what predicts your ability to do that is the breadth of problems you've been exposed to in practice. If you're exposed to like a broader set of problems, you're forced to build these generalizable, flexible models that you'll be able to apply to new things going forward.

    10. SB

      Across all of your work, at the very heart of what people are trying to achieve in their lives, what is that, at the very, very heart of what they're trying to achieve, that you're speaking to?

    11. DE

      Getting better. Getting better at

  4. 5:33 – 6:16

    How Can People Get Better

    1. DE

      things, right? Obviously, people want success, but I think there's pretty significant research showing that people are often actually reacting to their trajectory as much as their act- actual absolute performance level. That the feeling of improvement, the feeling of moving on, it gives them some sense of fulfillment, right?

    2. SB

      Mm-hmm.

    3. DE

      And eventually, obviously, will get them to a, to a higher level. And so I think really this is for people who are interested in, "How do I get off sort of my plateaus going forward?" And viewing it as, as a lifelong journey, as opposed to trying to peak when they're...... 12, right? It turns out that the way to make the best 20-year-old, 30-year-old, 40-year-old is not the same as the way to make, make the best 10-year-old.

    4. SB

      Is, is there a sort of a tie-in here with the subjects of just happiness and how to live a happy life?

    5. DE

      Fulfillment, for sure.

    6. SB

      Yeah.

    7. DE

      Those aren't

  5. 6:16 – 8:06

    The Connection Between Fulfillment And Growth

    1. DE

      exactly the same-

    2. SB

      Mm-hmm.

    3. DE

      ... but they're important. So, so to think about this in a career development perspective, right? I think m- 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 l- a lot of these people were very financially successful and all that stuff, but the dependent variable was fulfillment.

    4. SB

      Okay.

    5. DE

      A sense of fulfillment. And when people would come in for sort of an orientation in this study, they would say things to the researchers like, uh, you know, "I started off doing this one thing when I was in medical school," whatever, "Didn't really fit me, so I went over to this other thing, and I, I learned I was good at something I didn't expect, so then I went this other direction. And, you know, I can't... Don't tell people to do what I did, 'cause 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 horse is this expression that means coming out of nowhere, and that the norm, in this day and age was that people who found fulfillment would travel this kind of zigzagging path where they would learn, "Maybe I'm good at something or bad at something that I didn't expect. Maybe I'm interested in something I didn't expect," and they would keep pivoting. And they'd say... Instead of saying, you know, "Here's this person younger than me who has more than me," they'd say, "Here's where I am right now. Here are my skills and interests. Here are the opportunities in front of me. Uh, I'm gonna try this one and maybe I'll change a year from now, 'cause I will have learned something about myself." And they keep doing those pivots, until they-

    6. SB

      Throughout their career?

    7. DE

      ... 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, uh, and your apparent grit, if you wanna talk about that.

    8. SB

      So, so just on that note, uh, before we move on to grit. The... Just what advice does that then mean you would give to a young person at the start of their

  6. 8:06 – 12:18

    How To Be Successful And Fulfilled

    1. SB

      career that's thinking about how to navigate their w- way to being both really competent, really good at something, and s- successful in any sort of, uh, monetary way, but also maintaining fulfillment, um, throughout their life?

    2. DE

      I think there are two, two main things I take away from that. One is to not over-focus on long-term planning. Like I think we, we lionize having long-term goals. And that's okay. There's nothing wrong with having long-term goals, but those aren't necessarily always so useful for you in the moment, right? When I think about myself when I was a competitive 800 meter runner, I could have a time goal for the end of the race, but that didn't help me actually do anything. That just... You see the clock when you're done, and you're either happy or sad. Having goals that are, "Let me try, let me try moving with 300 meters to go," that gives you an actionable experiment. So short-term planning, I think is, is one of the takeaways, uh, and, and creating what's called a self-regulatory practice. So self-regulatory learning is, means basically thinking about your own thinking, taking accountability for your, for your own learning. And some of the, some of the coolest studies in self-regulatory learning actually came out of soccer, football. Done in the Netherlands, where this woman named Marja Elferink-Gemser was following kids from the age of 12, right, up through some of them went on to teams that, um, you know, were runners-up in the World Cup. And what she'd see in the kids who got off performance plateaus, s- t- there were certain physiological measures someone had to have. Like if a kid couldn't s- hit at least 7 meters a second sprinting, which isn't that fast, but if they couldn't hit it, they weren't making it to the top. That's... So there were physiological parameters. But also, the kids who would get off performance plateaus were the ones where, if you look at them in video when they're, they're younger, they're saying, going to the trainer like, "Why are we doing this drill? I, I think I can do this already. Like I think I need to work on this other thing." And, and, you know, sometimes the 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, but they're making this cycle, the, the self-regulatory cycle is reflect, what are you good or bad at, what do you need to work on, how do you need to do that; plan, come up with an experiment for how you can work on that; monitor, a way to try to measure whether objectively or subjectively; and then evaluate, did that experiment that I ran work 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 fit me. I monitor it, maybe subjectively, maybe objectively. And then I evaluate what that tells me to do for the next step," and you just get better and better and better over time.

    3. SB

      So if I'm... Say I'm in my early 20s in my career, how do I take that and then implemat- implement that in a, within my life to make sure that I'm gonna get to the World Cup, metaphorically speaking?

    4. DE

      Yeah. So... And there's something interesting about the 20s that I think is worth saying, which is, uh, there's, there's a 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 wanna spend our time, what we prioritize in friends, et cetera.

    5. SB

      Mm-hmm.

    6. DE

      And ev- at every step in life, people underestimate how much they'll change in the future. Change continues for your whole life. It does slow down, so we're constantly works in progress claiming to be finished, constantly through life. The fastest time of personality change is about 18 to about 28-

    7. SB

      Ah.

    8. DE

      ... when you're tell- but it never stops, but that's the, about the fastest time, when you were telling people, "Hey, now you have to have it figured out," right? And that's when they're changing like crazy. And so, I think it's even more important to have this self-regulatory practice, in a journal, I would say. I mean, I do it. These questions can be basic. What am I trying to do? Why? What do I need to learn to do it? Who do I need to help me learn that? How am I gonna make sure that person is there to help me? What experiment can I set up to try it? And then come back and evaluate the experiment and pick a next one. Be a, being a scientist of your own development, I think is inc- it, it's, it's counterintuitive, because you would think that we would just internalize this stuff just from doing things-

    9. SB

      Mm-hmm.

    10. DE

      ... but the science is pretty clear that we, we don't get everything we can out of our experiences from a learning perspective unless we're doing it more explicitly. So I would recommend for someone in their 20s to start this self-regulatory practice.

    11. SB

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

    12. DE

      Okay. So I, in my past life, I was training to be a scientist-...

  7. 12:18 – 14:34

    How David Found His Purpose

    1. DE

      environmental scientist that was, like, living up in the Arctic, studying the carbon cycle, like, in a tent. Um, and I had been a competitive runner. I had a training partner who was one of the top-ranked guys in the 800 meters in his age group in the country. Uh, first g- Uh, family of Jamaican immigrants. Was gonna be the first one to graduate college. Dropped dead a few steps after a race. Uh, and our sort of hometown paper said, "Well, he had a heart attack." Well, I don't even know what that means for someone of that age and health, right? And I got curious. And eventually, I kind of worked up the courage or whatever... that sounds silly to say it that way, but, um, was nervous about it... to ask his family to sign a waiver allowing me to gather up his medical records. Did that. Turned out he had, like, a textbook case of this disease caused by a single genetic mutation that's almost always the cause of young athletes dropping dead. And I said, "We can save some people from this with more awareness." And I wanted... I decided to merge my interests in sports and science. Said, "I wanna 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. Uh, kind of weaved my way to Sports Illustrated. I got in there as a temp. Pitched this story about sudden cardiac death in athletes. They were like, "Temp. Sit down," right? And then the Olympic marathon trials for 2008, US team, uh, came to Central Park, and the guy ranked fifth in the country dropped dead, like, ten blocks from our office. And then they said, "Don't you know something about this?" And so, you know, in a week, I was able to write a cover story making it look like we had done, like, two years of research in a week, and I became the science writer at Sports Illustrated. It was an interesting... You know, I came in there as a temp six, seven years behind people who were younger than me-

    2. SB

      Mm-hmm.

    3. DE

      ... doing sort of more remedial work for them. But I realized pretty soon that my oddball background, right? I, I think I was shaping up to be, like, a typical, average scientist. But you take those average science skills and you bring them to sports magazines, like, (imitates explosion) like a Nobel laureate, you know?

    4. SB

      (laughs)

    5. DE

      Um, and so I realized I, I could just make my own ground instead of having to compete with anybody. But the initial impetus for getting into this merger of sports and science was, was a personal tragedy.

    6. SB

      And how do you define yourself from a career perspective? Are you a writer? Are you a scientist? Are you... How do you...

    7. DE

      I, I view myself as this merger between a science

  8. 14:34 – 22:20

    What Is The 10,000-Hour Rule?

    1. DE

      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 tha- that's, that's what led to Range. I mean, I was at Sports Illustrated. The 10,000 hours rule work was the most famous science in human development perhaps ever, in terms of popular consumption. And I said, "Well, I wanna write about it." And then I started reading the research and saying, "This is wrong. It's the most popular finding in our field. It's maybe the most popular skill acquisition human development research ever done, and it is not right." And so those... You know, these things kind of stick in my brain, and I, I have to do something about it.

    2. SB

      10,000 hours. What is that, for someone that's never heard about it before?

    3. DE

      Yeah. 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 framework. But it's this idea that the only route to true expertise is through 10,000 hours of so-called deliberate practice, which is this effortful, cognitively engaged, like, not just swatting balls at the driving range, you're-focusing-on-correction-errors kind of practice. And that there is no such thing as talent differences. It's really just a manifestation, uh, of 10,000 hours of, you know, 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 is a little nerdy but, called the monotonic benefits assumption. Uh, I know scientist is not gonna win, uh, 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.

    4. SB

      Mm-hmm.

    5. DE

      Also false. And it's one of the underlying premises of the 10,000 hour rule.

    6. SB

      Yeah, 'cause I've always, I've always heard that. I mean, it's become a bit of a colloquial phrase to say you've not put your 10,000 hours in, which means you've not put in enough practice to become a master.

    7. DE

      Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

    8. SB

      I, I, I mean, I was told that if you do 10,000 hours in anything, you become a master in it. That's the kind of narrative, right?

    9. DE

      Well, to take some chess research, for example, there's, uh... People have been tracked, and it takes about 11,053 hours on average to reach international master status in chess. So that's one level down from grandmaster.

    10. SB

      Mm-hmm.

    11. DE

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

    12. SB

      Mm-hmm.

    13. DE

      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.

    14. SB

      So why, why is that so important for me to understand? How does that liberate me from, from wasting my time or aiming at the wrong thing?

    15. DE

      Well, fit turns out to be really important. So people learn at different rates in 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, 'cause y- your insight into yourself is really, like, limited by your roster of experiences, right? Um, and so-

    16. SB

      Mm-hmm.

    17. DE

      ... you kind of need to figure out where you have comparative advantages. But for a lot of people, that's s- so-called skill stacking, where instead of doing the one thing for 10,000 hours, you get proficient at a number of things and overlap them in a way that makes you very unique. And so I think this idea of just head down, doing the same thing... I mean, we can... Should we go back all the way and talk about the, the research underlying the 10,000 hour rule?

    18. SB

      Please.

    19. DE

      Because that's where I first got onto this. I wanted to... So I was a walk-on, meaning I wasn't good enough to get recruited as an 800-meter runner in college, and I ended up being part of a university record holding relay. So I went from being a, you know, a nobody to being quite good. And so I was inclined to believe this 10,000 hours. Like, "Yeah, just, you know, just my hard work." And then when I started reading the research, and I'm looking through the original paper written in 1993... And the original paper was done on 30.... violinists, 3-0, violinists at a world-class music academy. Okay? So let's, let's start dissecting the, the problems here. The first problem was what's called a restriction of range. These people were already in a world-class music academy, already highly pre-selected. Pre-selected for something, again, for the stat-heads here, that is correlated with your dependent variable, which is skill. That's a problem if you're trying to develop a general skill development framework. That would be like, to give an analogy, if I did a study of what causes basketball skill, and I used i- as my subjects only centers in the NBA-

    20. SB

      Mm-hmm.

    21. DE

      ... 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."

    22. SB

      Mm-hmm.

    23. DE

      So in, 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 the 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-

    24. SB

      Mm-hmm.

    25. DE

      ... 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-

    26. SB

      Mm-hmm.

    27. DE

      ... to have them score more points in the NBA. So when you don't bring some sense of what's going on to your research and you restrict range that way, you can end up with the wrong message. Aside from that-

    28. SB

      Guards score more points or less points?

    29. DE

      They score more points, and they're shorter.

    30. SB

      Ah, okay.

  9. 22:20 – 24:46

    Why People Focus On Exceptions Rather Than The Norm

    1. SB

      or starting businesses. My business portfolio is quite varied of sort of different industries from everything from sort of psychedelics to, um, SpaceX to whatever it might be. And so when I was, you know, thinking about sitting down with you today, I thought, "Maybe I'll just tell him where I'm trying to get to in my life." I'm a, I'm a 30-year-old man, so, you know, I'm, I'm not in the early phases of my career. Does that mean, for example, that I can't make ground now?

    2. DE

      What phase of your career are you in?

    3. SB

      I don't know, because I had this 18 to 28 thing, so I thought maybe I'm a little bit more rigid and-

    4. DE

      You know, there was research a few years ago from MIT and Northwestern and the US Census Bureau that found the average age of a founder of a fast-growing tech startup, top 1 in 10,000. Guess what the average age was on the day of founding? Guess.

    5. SB

      25?

    6. DE

      45. And a 50-year-old had a better chance than a 30-year-old. But we never hear... Just like we never hear the story of these like zigzaggers. 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... We never... We, we, we like valorize precocity. So I would not say that you're not in the early stages of your career. You're certainly not by, by that metric. And that's not to say that there aren't tremendous companies or if, you know, measured by market cap that some of... That there are these amazing young founders. But they get outsized attention compared to what's the norm. That, that's another thing that's really important to me, is not to say there aren't 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.

    7. SB

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

    8. DE

      Tech startups, but tech in, tech in this context also included things in agriculture, right?

    9. SB

      Yeah, yeah, yeah.

    10. DE

      It's not just photo sharing apps, like tech-

    11. SB

      Yeah.

    12. DE

      ... broadly speaking.

    13. SB

      Which I think is important because it... I think it's fair to say that it's less likely a 55-year-old would understand some of the more emerging platforms that are native to say, you know, like a Mark Zuckerberg at 22-

    14. DE

      I think that-

    15. SB

      ... mess messing around in his dorm room with, with computers and the internet.

    16. DE

      Yeah, I think that's fair, but technology touches a lot of other areas of the... You know, it's like...... yesterday on the way here, there was a, I was learning about a software that I had never heard of because all of the computers were down in the airport, right? Technology's in all these places that we, that are not as, kind of, uh, don't have the sort of figurehead that's publicly profiled the same way.

    17. SB

      So if I, if I do wanna 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. It doesn't mean I'm gonna

  10. 24:46 – 27:34

    How To Boost Productivity

    1. SB

      be good at it. But if I just wanna be more productive in the goals that I am aiming at. So say I, you know, this podcast means a lot to me, so I wanna be more productive when it comes to figuring out how to move this podcast forward, how to innovate, um, how to solve some of the problems and challenges that we face. What are the first things that spring to mind when I start speaking about productivity w- with a very focused task?

    2. DE

      I mean, I think your, a challenge for you is gonna be that this podcast has gotten so big and you've gotten so competent at it, that you're gonna be in what, uh, a rut of competence, or what a- economist Russ Roberts told me, a hammock of competence. You're in an area where you're so comfortable and so successful that getting better is going to be harder because there's disincentive from changing anything that you're doing, right? That you have to take some risk. I mean, you know that. You're an entrepreneur. If you're gonna wanna get better, you're gonna have to take some risk. I think that's gonna be a difficult thing to do because, you know, there are people in this room that depend on you. Uh, risk for you is risk for them too. And so I think you have to start thinking about what would be some smart risks if you want to innovate with the podcast, what might that look like? And finding ways to run small experiments. I'm a huge fan of low-stakes practice. Right? How can you set up some low-stakes practice for what might be a worthwhile larger experiment? And I think that's the same for individuals progressing in their career. Like, I love this phra- my favorite, my absolute favorite phrase in range was, is a paraphrase from this woman named Herminia Ibarra, who's a professor at the London Business School, and she studies how people make work transitions. So her phrase was, "We learn who we are in practice, not in theory." So the thesis of her work is that w- there's this idea that you can just introspect and go forth and know what you should be doing. You know, like, like Clark Kent running into a phone booth and ripping off his, becoming, comes out as Superman. But work is part of identity, and it doesn't change like that from introspect. You actually have to go try something, see how it went, what was unexpected? What did you learn that you might be interested in or, or that you're better at that you didn't? What's something that you're good at that you realize you're not using? And then you make your next step based on that, right? And I think when you're so competent and successful and getting only, you know, tons of positive feedback for something, uh, it becomes hard to take risk. And so I think that'll be a challenge for you because if you take a sufficient amount of risk, right, you wanna 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 to 20% of the time failing, then you're not in your zone of optimal push, where you're getting as much better as you possibly can. And I think when you have something that's very successful, that's hard. And so I would start thinking about what risks you're willing to take, and it doesn't mean it's a failure if something goes backward, right? If the views go down or whatever metric you're, you're measuring on.

    3. SB

      It's interesting. It's obviously something... it's one of my great obsessions in life, and it's also one of the things that keeps me up at night, bugs me in the shower,

  11. 27:34 – 33:11

    The Explore/Exploit Tradeoff

    1. SB

      is, um, how to keep a team conducting experiments and failing more when they are successful. So when this podcast went to number one in Europe, I hired a head of failure, and her sole responsibility is to inc- increase the rate of failure and experimentation in our team, which means just get all of our different departments. We've got different departments in this particular business. So there's 40, 40-odd people in this company called The Diary of a CEO, and there is a production team, there is the social media team, there's the commercial team, for example, um, there's the guest booking and logistics team. And I, I felt... we're actually in LA driving down the road and I was speaking to Jemima, who's the head of their guest booking, uh, and research team, and I was saying like, one of the... the most important thing now, now that we're number one, is that we keep, like, disrupting ourselves because there's gonna be some kid, like we were three day- three years ago, that because of their naivety, that they're not encumbered by all of this-

    2. DE

      Right. Right.

    3. SB

      ... sort of, like, convention and all of this success.

    4. DE

      Yeah.

    5. SB

      So hired a head of failure and experimentation who's in our team and's been working. And now in, in the last couple of days, we're running an experiment where every single one of those departments has essentially, like, a failure assistant in it.

    6. DE

      (laughs) .

    7. SB

      Who is, who's... 'cause you know what happens with people?

    8. DE

      I know. It's great. Yeah.

    9. SB

      They get busy doing their job.

    10. DE

      Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

    11. SB

      And experimentation and failure is always secondary to their job.

    12. DE

      Yeah.

    13. SB

      So if we put failure people into the each team and they drive the experiments, they understand the team, they drive the experiments, they measure them, and most importantly, they report their failures and experiments back to the whole team because there's really transferable learnings. For example, there was one the other day where the social media team discovered this thing on TikTok which allows us to look at a guest like you and find your most popular videos ever on TikTok with a click. And the social media team had figured that out, which was really useful for them, but then the research team over here that are booking guests, who are trying to find the best videos that a David has ever made, they also benefited from just the discovery of that button, 'cause instead of having to scroll through the entire TikTok, they can press one button and see your most popular videos. So it's all... the, there's this real one plus one equals three in getting the teams to share their fai- fails- failures and experiments so they don't have to fail in the same ways. So what did you just write down 'cause-

    14. DE

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

    15. SB

      Right.

    16. DE

      Um, and so explore is what it sounds like, looking for new knowledge or new things that you can do that'll add value. Exploit is taking stuff you're already good at, that you already know, and drilling down on it. And this is, like, the fundamental challenge for people in organizations that did good is once they find something they're really good at and they drill down in it, they tend to ditch explore mode.

    17. SB

      Yeah.

    18. DE

      Right? And balancing that explore/exploit, and there's all these, of course, you know, these, like, famous business cases like Kodak invents the digital camera and scuttles it because they're like, "Why would we disrupt our own business?" But there was this fascinating work led by a guy named Daosheng Wang in Northwestern, uh, who does like... people will do career development studies looking at 20 people, and he'll look at 20,000 people, you know, so his work's just fascinating. And he... what he saw in this work with his colleagues was that people tend to have hot streaks in their careers. Their best work tends to come in clusters. Most people only have one.Some people will have more than one, if they're lucky. And reliably, 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 going broad, they're- they're keeping a smaller team so they can be nimble. They're moving between teams, and then they find something and they- they drill into it. And if 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 exploration precedes a hot streak, and if you don't do the exploration, you just settle in to exploit at sort of a middling level, then you're- you're kind of sacrificing your- your hot streak. So that- that was one of the things that came up for me. The other thing was this- y- 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 Failure, right? Because-

    19. SB

      Mm-hmm.

    20. DE

      ... you'll have the, uh, you know Adam Grant, who I think we both know is, he- he- he mentioned to me someon- something called the hippo effect, where it's, like, the opinion of the highest paid person in the room, I think the- is the acronym, where their- their signaling is really important for everyone else. So if you're not just giving lip service, like, "Yeah, failure's good," but actually giving people that title, I think that's a great signal for- you're underwriting risk. You're underwriting risk for people, psychologically. And you're creating what- what scientists who study sort of networks, like groups of teams, call an import-export business of ideas. And this is one of the hallmarks of organizations and- and ecosystems that learn and adapt to- to a changing world. And the import-export business of ideas means y- you need to have information flowing through an organization. You need to have people doing different things, maybe people even moving teams here and there. So I always think of the engineer, uh, Bill Gore, who created the company- or founded the company that created Gore-Tex, and he fashioned the company based on his observation that organizations often do their most impactful work in times of crisis, because the disciplinary boundaries go out the window and people start, "What can I learn from my neighbor," you know, and working together. Or as he liked to say, "Real communication happens in the carpool," which I think is a funny saying, but I worry about that with more hybrid and remote work, where you can't necessarily just rely on serendipity for people to be sharing these ideas in this informal way. And so I actually think we have to be a lot more thoughtful about setting up our own import-export business of ideas internally, and it sounds to me like that's what you're doing.

    21. SB

      Okay, so what about then on- in an individual level? How do I, as an individual, I've got, you know, lots of things I'm doing. I've- I'm writing some books at the moment,

  12. 33:11 – 36:27

    How To Increase Productivity At An Individual Level

    1. SB

      I do the podcast, lots of other things. How do I become more productive within an organization? Because there's my to-do lists. I've got 10 to-do lists from all of my different team members who can put things on there. Um, I get distracted easily, I think, because I end up watching a video about AI on YouTube or about rockets or something, and I wanna- I wanna get more done. Really, I wanna be more productive in the time that I spend working.

    2. DE

      So this is when you know what you should be doing, but you're-

    3. SB

      When I know what I should be doing.

    4. DE

      ... trying to do it.

    5. SB

      Yeah.

    6. DE

      And, uh, you know, there's nothing wrong with sometimes, like, watching YouTube and rocket, like that's- you get ideas from-

    7. SB

      Yeah, yeah, I do, yeah.

    8. DE

      ... this kind of stuff.

    9. SB

      That's what I tell myself.

    10. DE

      But 10 to-do lists is a lot of to-do lists.

    11. SB

      Yeah.

    12. DE

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

    13. SB

      It's more, uh, so each team, s- 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.

    14. DE

      I, at one point, had, when I was getting overwhelmed with some stuff, I had a virtual assistant for a little while, and we would categorize, like, emails into list A priority, B, C, D, all this stuff, and eventually I realized that was empowering me to do a lot of low value things. I became efficient at doing things that I shouldn't be doing. So I was seeing this public email address of mine, that when I was oblivious to it, I wasn't answering it, and that was fine, and- but once I knew it was there, I'm like, "Oh, I have to answer this, I have to answer this, I have to answer this." And so one important step for me was realizing that only the A list is the stuff that's gonna get done, because I'm a limited person with a limited life. So one, I think it's maybe you do need to do all that stuff, or you just need to be aware of it. But some of it is just, I think there can be a danger in someone who has a lot of support resources, uh, where they can lose some of the aspect of prioritization-

    15. SB

      Yeah.

    16. DE

      ... where you just need to say, "This is the list that's important. Other things I might not get to." But for someone like you, I would- I would suggest something like not starting your day with email or messaging, because, you know, we were talking a little bit before about this thing called the Zeigarnik effect, which is this idea that an unfinished task leaves, like, a residue in your brain, basically, and makes you ha- it makes it harder for you to fully transition to doing something else. And because, I expect, your various inboxes will always be an unfinished task, right?

    17. SB

      Yeah.

    18. DE

      If you start the day with that, no matter what you do, the residue is gonna be there for what you try to switch to next. So I'm not saying don't address your email, but I wouldn't start with it. I would, the day before, what is the thing that if I get done tomorrow, it's gonna be a good day? And start with that before you do the things that might leave residue on your brain and start multitasking.

    19. SB

      How do they know that's true? Have they done studies on the Zeigarnik effect?

    20. DE

      Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. I mean, you can see, you can give people, one, you can do it in a workplace environment, where researchers like Gloria Mark, for example, will be tracking everything from someone's vision to what they're doing on their computer to their heart rate variability, and seeing how long it takes them to get back to a task. Um, increased switching when there's, like, a residue in their brain, so their rate of switching will go up. Uh, you know, some of their indicators of stress response will go up. Or in a cognitive task, they'll perform more poorly if there's something still stuck in their brain. So there's also sort of laboratory experiments where you give somebody something, don't let them finish it, give them a cognitive task, and you see does it impair their performance if they weren't allowed to finish the thing that started before.

    21. SB

      I wanna 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?

  13. 36:27 – 38:00

    Experiments You Should Be Running For Success

    1. SB

      And I'm saying this purely selfishly, because it's one of the things I think a lot about even with this podcast, is how to get our teams failing more often, if that's even the right thing to be aiming at, the type of experiments we should be running, how we should be running them. Anything else at all?

    2. DE

      Yeah, I mean, I don't think- I don't- I don't lionize failure for its own sake, right? (laughs)

    3. SB

      Mm-hmm.

    4. DE

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

    5. SB

      Mm-hmm.

    6. DE

      But I think one useful thing to do, like, a- a guy I love who's made a big impression on me named Ed Hoffman, was, uh, used to be the 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 an experiment that we can run to try to use that thing that you're good at that we're not using?" So I think that can be kind of a foundational question to help people set up some of those experiments. But also a big impact would be, and this is a tough one, you going ahead and failing at an experiment, because that's going to set the agenda, right? But you would actually have to fail. Like this can't be-

    7. SB

      No, I'm not doing that.

    8. DE

      ... you go out for a jog and you trip on the curb or something. Like you have to fail something of consequence, uh, and, and then your reaction to that can set a tone.

    9. SB

      Um, so that's on the, the team level. So I just... W- when I really think about how on an individual level I can become

  14. 38:00 – 42:23

    How To Become A Better Learner

    1. SB

      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 changed my life, but I feel like I forget them five minutes later often.

    2. DE

      Mm-hmm.

    3. SB

      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 must, you must know so many things about so many things." And also my audience, they, they tune in every week. They listen to these incredible people. How can we become better learners? What is it we can do to retain information better, and then also bring it into practice in our lives?

    4. DE

      Oh, to retain informa- Okay. Well-

    5. SB

      Both.

    6. DE

      ... for retaining information, one, repetition and familiarity is important, right? So if there's something that's really important to you, you should reread it, because the first time you go through, if you're hearing new things, new terms, you're using your working memory just to keep up basically. So, so to, to put this in kind of a simple way, like there's research where you look at school kids and if they're given, um, like an essay about baseball, say. The kids that are deemed really good readers, and there are kids who are deemed poor readers, and the, the kids who will do the worst on comprehension are the poor readers who don't know anything about baseball, but the kids who know about baseball but are not as good readers will still have better comprehension than the kids who are good readers but don't know anything about baseball, if they only get to go through once, because having some knowledge helps you fit it into what's called your semantic network, the 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, connect it back to something you already know. So like when you have these conversations, you probably have a better tendency to remember things where you say, "You know, that reminds me of some other guest that either agrees or disagrees with something that some other guest said," and you've attached it. Because if, 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 in- into your brain. So when you're learning something new, stop and try to fit it into your existing base of knowledge if you want to return better, return-

    7. SB

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

    8. DE

      Sure.

    9. SB

      So I'm thinking of you, you said something about, um, what is something I don't use but I'm good at, would the listener that's listening to this now, in order to embed that, think of something that they are not using that they're good at, because then it kind of brings it into their...

    10. DE

      Absolutely.

    11. SB

      Okay.

    12. DE

      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, and I think, I think reading even things that you don't retain still change your sensibility at some level, even if you can't consciously pull up all of the ideas and statistics and so on.

    13. SB

      Mm-hmm.

    14. DE

      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 I use this, um, like Readwise is a program. I'm not, like, affiliated with them in any way. It's just a thing that I use where if I have highlights in Kindle books or e-books, it will feed me back my highlights at intervals, things that I thought were important regularly, and that's taking advantage of what's called spaced, spaced repetition, where if you, you want to actually leave a space almost to the point of forgetting something, and then if it's brought up again, you're embedding it better in long-term memory. So this is for, for learning anything, spaced repetition. Language learning, all these kinds 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, to space it out, and quizzing yourself is a great way to retain. So there's something called the generation effect, which is if... Like if you have to do highlighting versus, uh, flashcards, flashcard quizzing is much better. The generation effect is being forced to come up with an answer primes... Even if it's wrong, in fact sometimes especially if it's wrong, primes your brain to then retain the right answer. There's actually called, something called the hypercorrection effect, where if you're really wrong about an answer, you're much more likely to remember the right answer once it's given to you. So if you're looking up a piece of information, I suggest you guess what it's going to be before you get the answer. It doesn't matter if you're right or wrong. Might feel bad to be wrong, but doesn't matter. You'll better retain it when you see the right answer.

    15. SB

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

  15. 42:23 – 47:35

    The Hypercorrection Effect

    1. SB

    2. DE

      It's salient. It, I mean this is, this is what, this is... So this is one of... This kind of quizzing where it feels hard because you should do it before you know the answer, 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.

    3. SB

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

    4. DE

      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 these desirable difficulties are... Like one of the most famous ones is called interleaving or mixed practice.And this is if you're training at something, y- you wanna vary the types of pro- so, d- let's give an example.

    5. SB

      DJing.

    6. DE

      DJing?

    7. SB

      I'm, I'm DJing at the moment.

    8. DE

      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 it instead of doing the same skill over and over and over again. Well, let me give you, let me give you a research example, and then you can port it into DJing. So, in a recent study, there were dozens of, uh, middle school math classrooms, middle school like sixth grade, that were assigned to different types of math learning, some of them... Randomly assigned. Some of them got what's called blocked practice. That's you give, like, problem type A, A, A, A, B, B, B, B, et cetera. Kids make progress fast, they're happy, rate their teachers highly, et cetera. Other, other classrooms got what's called interleaved or mixed practice, where instead of doing A followed by B, it's like you took all the problem types, threw them in a hat, and drew them out at random. Progress is slower, they might be less happy, because they don't feel like they're getting it, but instead of having to just execute a procedure, they're having to match a strategy to a type of problem. And when the test came along, where everyone has to transfer to new problems, the interleaved group blew the block practice group away. It was like, the effect size was like taking a kid from the 50th percentile and moving them to the 80th, just by arranging the practice in a way that made it more difficult.

    9. SB

      What's going on there?

    10. DE

      I think, I mean, it seems to be... And this, but this works for physical learning as well. I think this is one of the reasons why, we can get into this if you want, why futsal is, like, why, like, 90% of the best footballers grew up on futsal instead of, like, playing on full-sized pitch, um, is that it forces you to instead of doing using procedures knowledge, which is you learn how to execute this procedure over and over, you're doing making connections knowledge, which is identifying the structure of a problem and figuring out how to match a strategy to it. And so you're building this, like, mental template instead of just an ability to execute, this, like, flexible template that can be applied going forward.

    11. SB

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

    12. DE

      Right.

    13. SB

      ... the challenge is solved.

    14. DE

      Right.

    15. SB

      You're kind of understanding it from a deeper level-

    16. DE

      Right.

    17. SB

      ... from different sides.

    18. DE

      And, and you're building this generalizable model in your head-

    19. SB

      Mm-hmm.

    20. DE

      ... of how to approach it. I mean, my, my favorite, and I'd be the only person to say this, but my favorite study that went into Range was this one, the one that surprised me the most, I guess, was this one that was done at the United States Air Force Academy, which is this amazing place for experiments because they get a thousand new students every year. Those students are randomized to math classes that all have the same test and same grade and everything. Then they are re-randomized the next year and re-randomized again. So you can get these huge experiments randomizing people to math classes. And they looked at 10,000 students and found that the teachers who were the best at getting students to do well on the test in their own class, in their own intro class, right? So teacher year one has students who score highly on their test. Those students go on to underperform in the subsequent classes. And teachers whose students sometimes rated them lowly because they- poorly because they thought it was hard, don't do as well on the test the first year, over-perform in subsequent classes. And the difference is the way to get someone to do really well on the test is to teach this very narrow body of knowledge that they'll have to execute at the test. The best way to prepare them for math learning is to give them this much broader connection of ideas that will serve them later on. So again, this is like, to me, the theme on every page of Range that would have made a crappy subtitle is, sometimes what seems the best in the short term will undermine long-term development.

    21. SB

      The tricky thing with that, as you say, is I, I think about all the areas and industries that I'm playing in now. So I go, "Uh, do I have the time to go broad?" Like, if... I'm learning to DJ at the moment, and at th- at the moment, I'm just trying to figure out what these fucking buttons do.

    22. DE

      Yeah. (laughs)

    23. SB

      You know what I mean? Like, there's all these buttons. I'm, I'm trying to press them in the right order. But you're telling me that the thing that's better for my long-term development might be just to spend some time understanding music and how it's made, and how... and understanding, like, the, the beats of music and h- m- maybe spend some time making music myself. Because right now, I'm just trying to smash two songs together at the right time.

    24. DE

      I think this gets at a fundamental issue that, that, that maybe I should have brought up earlier, actually. So... And it has to do with how you characterize the different tasks that you're trying to learn. So, there was a period where I was really confused about the research I was reading in, in building expertise, because there were two camps of researchers, both led by eminent scientists. One that would study people doing sort of more 10,000 hours-y kind of approach, same thing over and

  16. 47:35 – 54:06

    Building Connections Through Knowledge

    1. DE

      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. Like, why are they finding such different results? Again, I'm looking through for all these signs of, you know, bad data, not, not finding it. (laughs) And fortunately, um, I, I gave a talk, uh, where I was doing some of the critiquing of the science underlying the 10,000 hours rule, and the Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, who wrote Thinking Fast and Slow, was there. And someone asked... He asked someone for my email address, and, like, months later, he followed up and invited me to lunch. And we go and have lunch, and I'm like, "I'm..." And he was, he was interested in my critique of some of the research, and I was saying, "I'm really confused. You know, what are you working on now? I'm working through my confusion about this. Why do people sometimes get better with f- narrowly focused practice and w- why sometimes don't they?" He said, "Oh, I've done... I've got the paper for you." And basically, he referred me to this body of research about kind versus l- wicked learning environments. These are terms coined by a psychologist named Robin Hogarth. Uh, kind is like next steps and goals are clear, rules repeat. Uh, it's based on patterns, repetitive patterns. Rules never change.

    2. SB

      Give me an example.

    3. DE

      Chess, golf. Uh, in chess, the grandmaster's advantage is largely based on knowledge of occurring patterns, so you better have started studying those by age 12, or you're-... chance of reaching grandmaster drops from about one in four to about one in 55, also why it's relatively so easy to automate. Uh, feedback is quick and accurate. Uh, not a lot of human behavior involved. Work next year will look like work last year. On the other end of the spectrum are wicked learning environments, where patterns don't just repeat, they might fool you. Rules may change, if there are any. Feedback could be delayed or inaccurate. Um, work next year may not look like work last year. And so whether or not people get better with this very nar- in a predictable way with this very narrow practice depends a lot on where on that kind to wicked spectrum the, the task happens to be.

    4. SB

      What's an example of a wicked learning environment?

    5. DE

      So let's say, one, one of the examples, uh, that I loved that he turned me to was, uh, in medicine, because there's a lot of areas in medicine where something is done and the person making the decision actually never learns of the consequence of the decision. Um, or I'd say, I would say, like, judges in some cases in, like, the criminal justice system m- are set up to have maybe the worst judgment they could have in some ways because they almost never get feedback. They have, like, very little... They can do whatever they want and they almost never get any, any feedback. But so in, in medicine, there was this one example in one of the studies that I thought was just interesting and illustrative where, um, this, this physician became famous for being able to diagnose typhoid, this New York physician, by feeling around, palpating people's tongues, feeling around their tongues with his hand, and he could tell, you know, a week or two before they would even get it, "This person's gonna get typhoid." And as one of his colleagues later observed, he was a more prolific spreader of typhoid than even Typhoid Mary. He was spreading it with his hands by touching their tongue, making the prediction they would get typhoid, which would turn out to be correct, so 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 lesson, right? But I would say most of the things that most of us are doing have feedback that tends to be delayed, sometimes it's accurate and sometimes it's not. It's never as accurate as, like, I hit that golf shot and I see if it hooks or slices and then I change the, the club face and, and try it again. And so most of what most of us are involved in, increasingly, right? Like, work doesn't, next year doesn't look like work last year for most of us anymore, and in fact, Anders Ericsson, again, the guy who did the research underlying the 10,000 Hour Rule, when he eventually wrote a book, he, he, he made this caveat in the book that said the 10,000 hours framework, uh, it applies to things where we know exactly how to be good and a coach can watch you do it and correct everything that you do wrong. So it doesn't apply to most of these other things that most of us do, like computer programming and managing and entrepreneurship and all these other... Pretty big loophole, right?

    6. SB

      Mm-hmm.

    7. DE

      In those areas, you want this much broader toolbox.

    8. SB

      Hmm. I am, I was really compelled by something I saw you talking about, which was the story of Nintendo and why they were so successful in the early days, because they have a, a very broad, they take, uh, I wrote down the quote, um, "a lateral thinking with, withered technology."

    9. DE

      Yeah, yeah. That started with a guy named Gunpei Yokoi, who was... He scored poorly on electronics exams in university, and so he had to settle for a low-tier job as a machine maintenance worker, uh, at a, at a company in Kyoto that made playing cards with flowers on them, whereas, like, his more prestigious peers went to big companies in Tokyo, and the company was in huge trouble. Uh, it had to diversify if it was gonna 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 his more specialized peers couldn't see. And so he went and he took some well-known technology from the calculator industry, some well-known technology from the credit card industry, and combined them and made handheld games, and those were, those were a hit, right? That's what made Nintendo, which was a, found in a wooden storefront in 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, um... It was a technological joke in every way. It's like the processor was a decade old. The screen looks like, you know, rotting alfalfa or something. It's like... And it came out at the same time as color competitors and it blew them out of the water, because he knew what customers cared about wasn't color as much as it was durability, affordability, portability, battery life, game selection. By using well-known technology, people could make games quickly. And so he kind of set this philosophy, this lateral thinking with withered technology. That was his phrase, which means taking things that are already well-understood and moving them somewhere where they're seen as invention, and that actually turns out to be more the norm than the exception in terms of technological innovation, particularly sort of later in the 20th century forward. Before that, it wasn't necessarily the case. M- much of the 20th century, actually, the most impactful patents, if you look at patent research, were authored by teams and individuals that dove deeper and deeper into one area of technology as classified by the US Patent Office. But starting in this sort of information age

  17. 54:06 – 56:11

    What Is A Wicked Learning Environment?

    1. DE

      period, um, you know, particularly 80s and accelerating forward, suddenly it becomes a lot easier to access information more broadly, and the most impactful patents started to be authored by teams that include individuals who have worked in a whole number of different classes and they're often merging things from different areas, uh, for invention.

    2. SB

      So how important is focus i- in this, this equation, focusing on one thing? Because you're talking for much of this conversation about being broad.

    3. DE

      Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

    4. SB

      And people will associate that with being unfocused.

    5. DE

      Mm-hmm. 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 do a bunch of things at once. Like, we, we don't really multitask. We don't have the capacity to do it. We're actually just toggling between things really quickly. Um, and it's, it's been shocking to me to look at the research how, how big of an impairment that is for people's performance, particularly because it takes time to switch, and so you're not...... again, it, it's, it- the, the scientist Gloria Mark, who, who I think has been at the forefront of study of attention, describes your brain as like a whiteboard where you're doing something, and to do something else, you have to erase, and that residue is left, and it's still gonna be there when you move to the new thing for a while. And so you, you can't totally get into the next thing if you're interrupted. Um, and, and it impairs your performance, and it's stressful. That's been the most surprising part to me, is that when people are- me- heart rate variability is measured and some immune parameters, um, that when people switch a lot, like if you just saw how many times people switched their task, you know, email to this other thing, to some notification over a day, you'd have a pretty good bet at predicting their stress level and their performance level over the day.

    6. SB

      Really?

    7. DE

      Yeah.

    8. SB

      They've done studies on this?

    9. DE

      She has done that. She's hooked people up, you know, at big organizations too, like inside Microsoft and, and places like that, um, where people are wearing heart rate variability monitors, everything they're doing is being tracked. In the old days, she was like sitting behind people with a stopwatch, but technology obviously progressed from then. Um, and I think that's a surprising aspect of it, that one of the reasons that email

  18. 56:11 – 58:51

    The Secret Behind Nintendo’s Success

    1. DE

      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 an 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, there's- switching actually takes place in two, uh, kind of phases, where you- the first phase is, is shutting down what you were 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.

    2. SB

      So if I can do something about it, what should I do? It- to, to make sure that I'm both happy, um, more productive, and healthier?

    3. DE

      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-

    4. SB

      Mm-hmm.

    5. DE

      ... like, never feel like it's finished. Um, 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, 'cause there's something called the planning fallacy. We always overestimate how much we can get done in a given amount of time, so I'd say fewer things on your to-do list, fewer things, and on the top, maybe even just one thing that's, "If I get this done, this, this was a good, productive day." Focus on that thing. You know, pay yourself first. Do the important thing first. And really try to have some dis- wh- when you're trying to be focused, it's important 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 unfortunately that includes even, you know, turning down or off music, even though it's pleasant and can help your affect and can motivate, but it also does have an impairment on cognitive function 'cause you are paying attention to it to some degree.

    6. SB

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

    7. DE

      I mean, that's hard to say 'cause I do it sometimes too 'cause 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.

    8. SB

      How do they know it takes up brain space?

    9. DE

      You can see how people perform on tasks when the music is on or when the music is off, and it's, it's a l- it's, it's not as big a deal if the music is very familiar where you're kind of like ... it's not novel so you're not attending to it the same way, but, you know, when I'm trying to be super focused now, I'll, I'll turn the music off. But if I feel my sort of motivation waning, then maybe I'll turn it back on. But I wanna use it deliberately instead of just having it in the background all the time 'cause it takes up a little space. If it's- and if it's real noise, like decibels is a logarithmic scale, so small differences are

  19. 58:51 – 1:01:23

    How Important Is Focus For Achieving Success?

    1. DE

      actually a big deal, but if you go from, I think it's like maybe 70 to 80 decibels, that's like the difference of going from a- like a washing machine to a vacuum cleaner, thereabouts, in your background noise. That has a enormous influence on your cognitive ability and your productivity, like, like a 15% decrement in your performance.

    2. SB

      Just because of sound?

    3. DE

      Yeah.

    4. SB

      Volume's right.

    5. DE

      'Cause, 'cause you attend to it. You atten- I mean, our- that's how our brain ... Like, focus is a challenge because this is not the situation that we evolved in, right? We evolved in a situation 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, for people.

    6. SB

      What about instrumental music? Because I tend to find that if I'm listening to music that has lyrics in it, then I find it quite distracting when I'm trying to do some work, specifically writing work or reading work. So when I'm researching guests for the podcast, like I was today in my hotel room, I had a song playing, it was a rap song, and, um, it was- I could, I could feel my brain subtly jumping from the screen that I was reading to the rap lyrics, to the screen, to the rap lyrics, almost like just oscillating between the two.

    7. DE

      Yeah.

    8. SB

      And I thought, "You gotta turn that off 'cause you, you're not reading." I turned it off and I really made progress. But I, but I sometimes when I write like books and stuff like that, I put instrumentals on. And there's actually some apps in the App Store now that are called like focus music.

    9. DE

      Mm-hmm.

    10. SB

      And they're lyric-free music.

    11. DE

      And maybe like let- not lots of tonal changes or not very complex melodies, maybe?

    12. SB

      Very simple, re- re- repeating.

    13. DE

      I mean, I think that's gonna be better, right? The less novelty there is for you to attend to, that's better. But I think it's also worth trying it with, with nothing. And it depends how much you're pushing yourself, right? Like a tiny- an improvement of motivation or your affect or feeling good might be worth it if you're not all the way at the edge-

    14. SB

      Yeah.

    15. DE

      ... pushing yourself, right? Like I don't know if you've ever been on a ... There was, there was a time where I was trying to, uh, you know, lo- do some foreign language lessons, uh, that I was listening to while I would be running. And if I started hitting it hard while I was running, I couldn't even remember what was said 'cause it's- you switch into being really focused, right? And so I think it, it depends. If you're pushing yourself all the way and you need everything ... Like there, there are times when I'm writing where I'm trying to balance a lot of ideas in my head and I almost feel like I'm overheating a little bit.

    16. SB

      (laughs) Yeah.

    17. DE

      And when- if I'm in that phase, I, I, I want every advantage I can have, um, so I push the distractions out. But, uh ...But, like, there's also times to be, to be pleasant. I think, I think part of what's sensible is working in intervals, planning to work in intervals. Focus hard for a little while,

  20. 1:01:23 – 1:05:58

    Is Music Hurting Your Concentration?

    1. DE

      do the Maya Angelou, then switch to your, your little mind, where you're, 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 or take a walk, you know?

    2. SB

      What about notifications? Uh, 'cause, you know, I have a lot of notifi- notifications. I try and turn them all off, but they're still there in the background, and, um, y- you was talking before we got going about this sort of internal barometer of distraction that we all have.

    3. DE

      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 gonna get rid of the notifications," or whatever the 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 gonna continue it by popping into your brain, 'Oh, here's this thing I ch- 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 gonna 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, uninterruptable."

    4. SB

      Okay, so just wanna make sure I'm clear on this. So say that I get a notification every mi- every... I get 10 notifications a minute, and that's what I'm used to, right? And then I decide to turn my notifications off. Because I'm used to 10 notifications per minute, you're saying that I will basically think of 10 things per minute to interrupt myself with-

    5. DE

      Yeah.

    6. SB

      ... for a while-

    7. DE

      Yeah.

    8. SB

      ... because that's what I'm used to.

    9. DE

      Yeah.

    10. SB

      So we get comfortable with a certain level of interruption-

    11. DE

      Yeah.

    12. SB

      ... and a certain cadence, and even if you re- we remove the thing that's interrupting us, we'll just replace it with something else that interrupts us that amount at that cadence?

    13. DE

      Yeah. So you can see in studies where people are taking cognitive tests, if they have their phone i- visible, even if it's off, the people who are more phone dependent, or sort of more used to interruptions, they'll have a, a bigger impairment on the test if the phone is even, like, visible or around them, 'cause they'll-

    14. SB

      3D.

    15. DE

      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 thi- of, of what you forgot to do or who you forgot to respond to, write it down so at least it's... maybe that helps it not stick in your m- mind where you're s- trying to hold it in working memory. Like, cognitively outsource it so at least it's not sitting in there, and I think that can help the adjustment.

    16. SB

      It makes me think a lot about people that str- struggle with sleep and just sleep hygiene generally, because if we're... you know, if our phone is this thing of interruption throughout the day, then we go to bed cuddling our phone, which a lot of people do, um, it's probably gonna have quite a big impact on our ability to sleep.

    17. DE

      Yeah, I mean, I wonder if... You know, I think there's some... I think our phones are really useful for certain things, and I think they are disruptive for other things, and I wonder if sleep is one of the most important. 'Cause you don't really wanna be, like, leaving residue on your brain when you're trying to go to sleep, so I would put the phone as far away as possible when you're really trying to sleep, and not at the last minute either, personally.

    18. SB

      What do you do?

    19. DE

      Oh, I leave it in a different, uh, floor and airplane mode.

    20. SB

      Have you always done that?

    21. DE

      No.

    22. SB

      When did you start doing that?

    23. DE

      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 gotta lock in and, and be better." Um, and I have a s- I have a five-year-old son, and I was more of a night person who would work at night. Like, I would do a lot of my writing in the 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 having it be dark, having it be quiet, having it be cool, not having the phone around, um, the last thing I'm reading not being work-related, otherwise I'll be thinking about that and it'll take me longer to go to sleep. So s- I think I became a lot better about it when I, when I had my so- when my son came around.

    24. SB

      It's funny you mention that you've got a son, because much of your work made me think about what I'll do when I'm a parent someday. Because you talk about how these early years where, if a child focuses on being a specialist in something particular or a generalist, they have wildly different outcomes, and I think as a big f- football fan, and a big Manchester United fan, I've always thought, "When my kid comes out of my wife someday, the first thing I'm 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 s- seems

  21. 1:05:58 – 1:09:52

    The Impact Of Notifications On Your Brain

    1. SB

      to suggest that, that if I want him to become a Manchester star, maybe I shouldn't do that. (laughs)

    2. DE

      I- you know, I'm, I'm not convinced that you are going to be, like, a vicarious living kind of dad. Maybe you'll turn out to be.

    3. SB

      (laughs) No.

    4. DE

      But I'm not convinced. Um, but let me tell you, th- this... You just reminded me of an interesting story where I was once giving a talk about some of this research in sports that shows that the people who go on to the highest levels... Again, there are a ton of different, uh, paths, but they tend to follow the Roger path, not the Tiger path. So Tiger Woods we know, uh, very early specialization famously. Roger Federer played a whole bunch of different sports, uh, didn't specialize until later than some of his peers.

    5. SB

      So Tiger was playing golf since he was...

    6. DE

      He was, um, at... His father gave him a putter when he was 10 months old. Uh, when he was two... Just as a toy. He wasn't trying to teach him to be a, a golfer. He gave him a toy. As, as Tiger himself said, "My father never once asked me to play. It was always me asking him to, to let me play." But that's ignored. But at, at two, he was on national television. You know, you can go on YouTube, see him on national TV showing off his swing. And then by three, he's saying, "I'm gonna be the world's next great golfer." Uh, he's world-famous as a teenager. By the age of 21 he's the greatest golfer in the world, right? On the other hand, Roger played a variety of different sports, basketball, uh, rugby, skateboarding, soccer. Mother was a tennis coach but declined to coach him 'cause he wouldn't return balls normally, and I guess didn't like deliberate practice. Kept doing... Let's, let's see, he did handball, uh, he did some rugby.... uh, 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 reporter asked him what he'd buy with his first hypothetical paycheck if he ever became a pro, and he said a Mercedes. His mom was aghast, right? Didn't... she thought this was, like, gauche or... and so she asks the reporter to hear the interview recording. Turns out he just said mer CDs in Swiss German. He just wanted more CDs-

Episode duration: 2:06:16

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