Most Replayed Moment: You’re Supposed to Feel Lost! The Truth About Career & ‘Success’ - David Epstein

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

And who are you really doing it for?

I am obsessed with correcting what I view as 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 the means to go sifting through this evidence themselves.

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

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

But increasingly, 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 and whatever you're doing.

Pick something, stick with it, don't switch things, because then you've lost time.

Focus

very narrowly and do as much of it as you possibly can to the exclusion of other things.

That's such an obvious way.

And you will jump out to a lead, 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 necessarily actually anything going away.

It's the fact that people with this broader base will catch up and surpass what appears to be a fade-out.

Okay.

So if you take more time to get a broader understanding of something, whether it's in sports, if you're a sort of a child prodigy,

over the long term, that's going to benefit you better and help sustain your development.

But in the short term, you might lose out because there's some kid who is doing,

you know, really deliberate practice obsessively, and he's going to have a, it's kind of like the tortoise and the hare analogy where the tortoise

eventually wins the race.

Yeah.

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

Transfer is the ability of someone to take skills and knowledge and use 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.

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

Getting better, getting better at things, right?

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

And eventually, obviously, will get them 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 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 the best 10-year-old.

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

Fulfillment, for sure.

Yeah.

Those aren't exactly the same, but they're important.

So to think about this in a career development.

perspective, right?

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

And this was looking at how do people find, a lot of these people were very financially successful and all that stuff, but the dependent variable was fulfillment, a 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,

you know, I started off doing this one thing,

medical school, whatever, didn't really fit me.

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

So then I went this other direction.

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

And the large majority of people,

that was their story.

That's why I 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 would say, instead of saying,

you know, here's this person younger than me who has more than me, they'd say, here's who I am right now.

Here are my skills and interests.

Here are the opportunities in front of me.

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

And they keep doing those pivots

throughout their career until they achieve what economists call better match quality.

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

Turns out to be extremely important for both your performance and sense of fulfillment and your apparent grit, if you want to talk about that.

So just on that, before we move on to grit,

what advice does that then mean you would give to a young person at the start of their career that's thinking about how to navigate their way to being both really competent, really good at something and successful in any sort of monetary way, but also maintaining fulfillment

throughout their life?

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

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

Like I think 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 moving with 300 meters to go, that gives you an actionable experiment.

So, short-term planning, I think, is one of the takeaways.

And creating what's called a self-regulatory practice.

So self-regulatory learning

means basically thinking about your own thinking, taking accountability for your own learning.

And some of the coolest studies in self-regulatory learning actually came out of soccer, football, done in the Netherlands, where this woman named Mariah Elfring Gemser was following kids from the age of 12, right, up through some of them went on to teams that, you know, were runners up in the World Cup.

And what she'd see in the kids who got off performance plateaus, there were certain physiological measures someone had to have.

Like, if a kid couldn't hit at least seven meters a second sprinting, which isn't that fast, but 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 younger, they're saying, going to the trainer, like,

why are we doing this drill?

I think I can do this already.

Like, I think I need to work on this other thing.

And, you know, sometimes a trainer might be like, oh man, just get back in line, you know?

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

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

What are you good or bad at?

What do you need to work on?

How do you need to do that?

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.

So if I'm, say, I'm in my early 20s of my career, how do I take that and then

implement that

within my life to make sure that I'm going to get to the World Cup, metaphorically speaking?

Yeah.

So,

and there's something interesting about the 20s.

that I think is worth saying, which is there's this finding in psychology called the end of history illusion.

And this is the finding that we always underestimate how much we will change, what we think we're good at, what we think we're bad at, how we want to spend our time, what we prioritize in friends, et cetera.

And

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.

When you're telling, but it never stops, but that's about the fastest time when we're telling people, hey, now you have to have it figured out, 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 going to make sure that person is there to help me?

What experiment can I set up to try it?

And then come back and evaluate the experiment and pick a next one.

Being a scientist of your own development, I think is incredible.

It's counterintuitive because you would think that we would just internalize this stuff just from doing things.

But the science is pretty clear that we don't get everything we can out of our experiences from a learning perspective unless we're doing it more explicitly.

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

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

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

I was like living up in the Arctic studying the carbon cycle like in a tent.

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.

First

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

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 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 decided to merge my interests in sports and science.

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

So I got off the science track.

I left after my master's.

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're like, temp, sit down, right?

And then the Olympic Marathon trials for a 2008 U.S.

team came to Central Park, and the guy ranked fifth in the country dropped dead like 10 blocks from our office.

And then they said, don't you know something about this?

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

doing sort of more remedial work for them.

But I realized pretty soon that my oddball background, right, 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 a Nobel laureate, you know?

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

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

Aaron Powell, Jr.: And how do you define yourself from a career perspective?

Are you a writer?

Are you a scientist?

How do you...

I view myself as this merger between a science writer and an investigative reporter because what really fires me up is when I view that there's a really popular misconception about something really important to human development.

And that's what led to range.

I 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 want to write about it.

And then I started reading the research and saying,

this is wrong.

It's the most popular finding in our field.

It's maybe the most popular skill acquisition, human development research ever done, and it is not right.

And so those,

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

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

Yeah.

And what people think about it probably depends where they have heard of it, if they've heard of it.

But it's the idea, and scientists really call it a 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 correcting errors kind of practice.

And that there is no such thing as talent differences.

It's really just the manifestation

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.

I know scientists are not going to win any marketing competitions, but that basically means that the idea that two people at the same level of performance will progress the same amount for the same unit of deliberate practice.

Also false.

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

Yeah, because 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 enough practice to become a master.

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?

Well,

to take some chess research, for example, there's 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.

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

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

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

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

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

So why is that so important for me to understand?

How does that liberate me from

wasting my time or aiming at the wrong thing?

Well, fit turns out to be really important.

So people learn at different rates and different things.

So finding where you learn better.

is really important if you want to maximize your advantages.

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

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

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

But for a lot of people, that's so-called skill stacking, where instead of doing the one thing for 10,000 hours, you get proficient at a number of things and overlap them in a way that makes you very unique.

And so I 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 research underlying the 10,000 hours.

Because that's where I first got onto this.

I wanted to, 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 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, three, zero violinists at a world-class music academy.

Okay,

So let's start dissecting the problems here.

The first problem was what's called a restriction of range.

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

Pre-selected for something, 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 it as my subject's only centers in the NBA.

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

So I've squashed the variation in that variable.

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

As you might imagine, there's a very high positive correlation between 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 than other positions.

So, if you didn't know that, if you just did that study with only NBA players, you would tell parents to have shorter children to have them score more points in the NBA.

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, guards score more points or less points?

They score more points and they're shorter.

Ah, okay.

Right?

So, if you don't look at the whole population and you just look at people who are so highly pre-screened that are already at the top, you can end up with these sort of backward advice the other issue that caught my eye when i first read the study was that there was they only reported the average 10 000 hours was the average number of hours of deliberate practice by the the 10 best violinists by the age of 20.

And then there was a second group and a lower group, and they said there was complete correspondence, meaning nobody who had practiced fewer hours was better than anyone who had practiced more hours.

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

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

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

And so I contacted the, you know, Anders Erickson, a wonderful guy who was the

father of the 10,000 hour rule, although he hated that moniker, actually.

And I said,

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

And he said, well, you know, people were inconsistent on their repeated accounts of their practice, so we don't think that's important.

I said, well, everyone has trouble with getting good data.

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

So after I started criticizing this research, 20 years after this study came out, they did a paper updating it with some of the actual data.

And you could see the original conclusion was wrong.

There was not complete correspondence.

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

Some people had gone way over 10,000 hours.

Some people were way under and had done better.

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

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

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

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

So it could have just been sleep.

Sleep, or but there was just tremendous individual variation.

So this idea of an average completely obscured the real story, which was that there were actually people who were practicing less and doing better than people who'd practiced more.

So they're all one problem after another, I just said, you know, I'm getting youth sports pitches, I'm getting investment pitches, like citing the 10,000 hours rule.

It's not right and it's giving the wrong impression of how humans develop.

And this idea that you need to just pick something and stick with it and that sampling to try to figure out where you have your best shot is worthless and that's wrong.

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

I really want to become.

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

So whether that's podcasting or starting businesses, my business portfolio is quite varied of sort of different industries from everything from sort of psychedelics to

SpaceX to whatever it might be.

And so when I was thinking about sitting down with you today, I thought, maybe I'll just tell him where I'm trying to get to in my life.

I'm a 30-year-old man.

So

I'm not in the early phases of my career.

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

What phase of your career are you in?

I don't know, because I had this 18 to 28 thing.

So I thought maybe I'm a little bit more rigid.

You know, there was research a few years ago from MIT and Northwestern and the U.S.

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

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

Guess

25?

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 like valorize precocity.

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

You're certainly not by that metric.

And that's not to say that there aren't tremendous companies or if you know you measure 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's another thing that's really important to me.

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

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

Aaron Ross Powell, so the average, so the fastest growing, did you say tech founders?

are?

Tech startups.

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

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

Which I think is important because I think it's fair to say that it's less likely

a 55-year-old would understand some of the more emerging platforms that are native to, say, like a Mark Zuckerberg at 22.

I think messing around in his dorm room with computers and the internet.

Yeah, I think that's fair.

But technology touches a lot of other areas of 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 is in all these places that we, that are not as kind of,

don't have the sort of figurehead that's publicly profiled the same way.

So if I, if I do want to become, okay, so I understand that this season of my life, I can do whatever I want in terms of I can aim at whatever I want, doesn't mean I'm going to be good at it.

But if I just want to be more productive in the goals that I am aiming at, so you know, this podcast means a lot to me.

So I want to be more productive when it comes to figuring out how to move this podcast forward, how how to innovate, how to solve some of the problems and challenges that we face.

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

I mean, I think a challenge for you is going to be that this podcast has gotten so big and you've gotten so competent at it that you're going to be in what

a rut of competence or what 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?

And you have to take some risk.

I mean, you know that.

You're an entrepreneur.

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

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

Risk for you is risk for them too.

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

What might that look like?

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 phrase.

My favorite, my absolute favorite phrase in range 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 there's this idea that you can just introspect.

and go forth and know what you should be doing.

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

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

You actually have to go try something, see how it went, what was unexpected, what did you learn that you might be interested in or that you're better at that you did.

What's something that you're good at that you realize you're not using?

And then you make your next step based on that, right?

And I think when you're so competent and successful and getting only, you know, tons of positive feedback for something,

it becomes hard to take risk.

And so I think that'll be a challenge for you because if you take a sufficient amount of risk, right, you want to be in your zone of optimal push.

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

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