Specialisation Is For Insects | David Epstein

Yeah, it's really interesting, and that's not to- that is absolutely not to say that specialists aren't important, right? Absolutely not. In fact, I like to highlight the NPR, you know, our public radio did a review of Range, and they- they say that I spend a lot of time giving credit to dissenters, which- which I like because not even dissenters, like I agree we need specialists also. I- I like the way that- that the physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson, uh, and- and great writer, uh, framed it. He said, "We need frogs and birds. Frogs are down in the mud looking at all the little details. Birds are up above, they can't see those details, but they can integrate the information of frogs." And he said, "The problem is we're telling everybody to become frogs." And- and when the- when, you know, when disciplines and science changes that- that becomes a big problem. And that's sort of how I- I think of it. And so- so I think you need... Like, these problems that stumped the people at Lilly, obviously they were solving a lot of problems on their own, they were posting the ones that they got stuck. So, I think with the combination of that, of the indocentive approach and those specialists, that's where you get the best of both worlds, and you have this healthy problem-solving ecosystem.

I am joined by David Epstein all the way from the opposite side of the Atlantic, and we're talking about Range today. How are you, David?

I'm well. Thanks for having me.

You're, uh, all over the place at the moment, right? You're a busy guy.

Yes. Uh, uh, quite honestly, I'm getting sick a little bit of my own voice. (laughs)

Oh. (laughs) Yeah, yeah. Well, I, uh, thankfully for the listeners, I don't think that they will be. So, we're gonna, uh-

(laughs)

... we're gonna dig into your new book today, Range, right? Talking about generalists and specialists.

Yeah, absolutely.

Why, uh, why did you write the book, first off?

Y- you know, it- it sort of- it sort of came- the genesis of it came in sort of two parts, one of which was, uh, I wrote a book before this called The Sports Gene, um, about genetics and athleticism. And I, as- well, as Malcolm Gladwell would say, I devoted several pages to criticizing his work. That's how he puts it, to basically criticizing the science underlying the 10,000 hour rule. And so we got invited to this conference here called the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. It's founded by the general manager of the Houston Rockets. Um, and we were invited there to debate, 10,000 hours versus The Sports Gene. And it- so it's on YouTube, you can see it.

Oh, wow.

And he's- he's very clever and I didn't want to get embarrassed (laughs) . So- so I did my homework, tried to anticipate what he would argue, you know, and thinking, all right, well, he's got to argue for early specialization. It's- it's kind of implicit in some of the things he's written. Um, and so I went and looked at- at science of athletic development and saw that, in fact, in most sports and in most places of the world, athletes who go on to become elite have a so-called sampling period where they play a variety of sports, they gain these broad general skills, they, uh, learn about their interests and abilities, and they actually delay specializing until later than peers who plateau at lower levels. And I sort of brought that up in the debate and he said, "Ah, you know what you-" later, "You know what you kind of got me on was that thing. You should- you should write more about that." And I sort of filed it away in the back of my head, um, and didn't think about it much more for, you know, more than a year. And then I was doing some work with a foundation here in the- I was giving a talk to some military veterans who'd been given scholarships by this foundation called the Pat Tillman Foundation to aid them in new career trajectories, and I talked a little bit about late specialization in sports. And since they weren't athletes, I sort of tacked on a little bit of research about the work world. And they were so enthusiastic about it because they were all career changing and they'd been told they were behind and all these things, um, that it was like, you know, they just wanted more and more and more, and they all wanted to follow up and keep in touch. And I sort of said, these people have had these incredible experiences, you know, some of them are former Navy SEALs and all this kind of stuff, and they're being told like that they're behind, you know, instead of how they can wield those experiences. And so I sort of thought, all right, there's- there's something worth doing here.