hi everybody and welcome to in good company

today we have a very special guest joining us somebody who has basically reshaped how we think about success and achievement

his book range has challenged the conventional wisdom and showing us why generalists often thrive in a specialized World David

Epstein what a pleasure to have you here

the pleasure is mine thanks for having me

I'm just going to start with a kind of a stupid question giving that we are going to talk about generalists and specialists uh for a bit of a time here so what is a generalist in your view

yeah that's a great question

I mean there's some semantic aspect to it right

like when I think about my own career I was I used to be training to be a scientist and then I got off that track and became the science writer at Sports Illustrated magazine

and so when I did that my my science colleagues suddenly thought of me as a generalist whereas my sports writing colleagues suddenly thought of me as a specialist because I had this science background

but I think broadly speaking it's someone that at a at certain points or at a certain point sacrifices increasing depth to to broaden themselves and sort of connect knowledge uh and and broaden their their own toolbox as opposed to just kind of going with what tends to be natural momentum of of getting deeper and deeper and more narrow as as you progress

and why is this a good thing what are the advantages of being a jist

yeah I think the advantages particularly stand out because the the world is getting more specialized

and I think that made kind of a lot of sense for good portion of the 20th century but in fact now what we see is that people are largely working in uh what the psychologist Robin Hogarth called wicked learning environments

so to give just a quick background of that Hogarth kind of reconciled this conundrum in expertise research where some people studying expertise saw that people get better with narrow experience and and others saw that they not only don't get better they they get more confident but not better which can be a really bad kind of scenario

and what hogart said is well it depends on the the type of environment that someone is working in

in a kind learning environment which is next steps and goals are clear uh rules don't change patterns repeat feedback is quick and accurate people get better reliably with narrow experience

on the other end are what he called wicked learning environments where next steps and goals may not just be given to you or rules may change or patterns don't just repeat feedback could be delayed or inaccurate a lots of human dynamics are involved

you basically work next year may not look like work last year

and in those kinds of environments which we're increasingly thrust into in our work because the workplace changes more rapidly than it ever has before it's people that have this sort of broader set of skills that allow them to Pivot and to create kind of generalized flexible skills and mental models who are really able to to adapt over time

and that's the situation more and more people um are in

so why is the world becoming more wicked

I think it's well so there was a period for much of the 20th century at least where we had a model that actually worked quite well where people could have kind of a discreet per perod of training or education and then a discreet period of working based on that training or education

I mean I'm simplifying it but but more or less

and companies didn't go in out of existence as quickly uh technological innovation didn't um change tend to change the workplace quite as rapidly

and so you can see through the 20th century like the number of different jobs that people have starts to increase in the latter half of the 20th century

and even when people are staying in the same jobs the stuff they're actually doing is starting to change at a much faster pace and they're having to learn new tools and all these things if they want to want to kind of stay competent

and so I think it's you know part technological innovation it's part globalization but it's just that for most people that model of period of training followed by period of working has been replaced with relearning and retraining and having to sort of reinvent over and over and over

now in your book you talk about some things um that uh you need to do to get there you need to embrace diverse experience es focus on learning be adaptable um seek out interdisciplinary collaboration and so on what are the most important things you need to do in order to become a really strong jist

one of the things I think is really important is what what scientists tend to call the sampling period

where and I and I don't want this to sound like you only need to have this at the beginning of your career but the sampling period is this idea that we we don't know as much as we could about ourselves our own interests our own abilities our opportunities until we've actually tried some things

and so I think a lot of successful people tend to go through this sampling period where they try some things they dive into it they get sort of feedback and Signal about what their interests and abilities are and then they pivot uh based on that knowledge as opposed to just kind of staying heads down uh and staying on a path just because they started on it

so for example in the book I write about this project at Harvard called the Darkhorse project that was studying people I mean many of them were like very successful in all sorts of tradition metrics you know they had made a lot of money and things but the dependent variable was really their sense of fulfillment

actually the reason it's called the Darkhorse project actually is because when they brought in these subjects just for sort of to orient them to the study that people would say well you know don't tell people to do what I did because you know I came through this I started on this one thing and then I pivoted and and so I was and Dark Horse means like someone who came out of expression that means someone who came out of nowhere

and that turned out to be the norm

it wasn't everyone but it was the very large majority had sort of followed this path where they started down one route and said okay you know this actually doesn't quite fit me the way I thought but I'm going to take what I learned and hear my kind of interest and opportunities right now I'm going to do this one for and maybe a year from now I'll change because I will have learned something about myself and they keep doing this pivoting until they get to better what a conom is called match quality which is a degree of fit between one's interests abilities and the work that one does

and so not only are they kind of triangulating a better fit in their work which turns out to be really important for your sense of fulfillment and for your performance but they get there with this broad kind of array of background experiences that they bring with them in this broad toolbox

and so I think having that habit of Mind where you're always kind of what did I learn from this what can I take to the next experience and continually triangulating better match quality through the course of your career um is a really important kind of habit of mind for someone who wants to be a so-called good generalist

now you um also do a lot of work on on Sports um what are some of the examples where people have tried different type of Sports and ended up in a better place

yeah you know let me tell you one that I that really surprised me because at one point when I was doing some of this I used to be the science writer at Sports Illustrated and when I was talking about some of this just giving a short you know 15-minute talk about some of the sports data in an A Crowd that included Serena Williams in the audience and she sits in the second row and I'm kind of freaking out because you know I'm going to talk about the benefits of diversity and as far as I know she's like the opposite story of that and you can Marshal all the scientific data you want right but if if if the goat stands up and says you're an idiot it's going to be a bad day for you I think

so it perhaps would have been worse if you had to play against her in tennis but yeah that's the that you know what but I I I I would have rather been a that would have been acceptable embarrassment on the tennis court whereas this was like I was the one on stage so this would have been worse embarrassment for me um

but she stands up afterward and says like to raise her hand for the first question I'm like oh man man and she says I think my father was ahead of his time he had me do track and field Taekwondo gymnastics ballet learn to throw uh a football for the overhand motion for a serve um and and took me and my sister off the traveling tour when he thought it was getting too intense so we could also focus on school and family um

and I was a senior writer at Sports Illustrated and I had never heard that story right even though that is what a now mountain of scientific research suggests that this diversity early actually sets people up to have these generalized skills what some people call physical literacy these generalized skills that then scaffold later technical knowledge

where the the opposite path the one that I thought you know that Serena didn't do I didn't know that she had done all these other things there's actually a fundamental trade-off this gets at what I think is kind of the underlying theme on every page of range there is this trade-off between optimizing for short-term performance and long-term development

and so there are now these just tremendous number of studies in sports that show that the way you make the best 10-year-old performer is not the same way as you make the best 20-year-old performance

there's actually an inverse relationship when when like National development pipelines are studied um between between Maxim optimizing Junior performance and optimizing senior performance

if you want to optimize senior performance you want this kind of sampling period where people do a variety of things it causes them to build these generalized models and generalized skills skills that are then flexible and they they then more rapidly uh learn new skills going forward

it's kind of like people who grow up with multiple languages they actually have a little bit of a delay but that delay doesn't last and they then are advantaged for um learning any subsequent languages it's actually like the same exact mechanism really

it's interesting in um in Scandinavia there is a great belief in U play in sport early on and you know avoid or delay uh serious competitive pressure

yeah well I me I would say to me without a doubt the the best sports country in the world I think right now is is Norway um

I mean more medals than the United States and China combined I think in the last two Winter Olympics

I think in one of those Winter Olympics might have even outdone the US China and Germany combined winning things in summer games that we don't usually associate with Scandinavia you know all you you may exaggerate a Tony bit but uh I think uh the general Gest of it is uh is is correct

but David how does this um stack up against uh the 10,000 hour rule and and the concept of deliberate practice which some people is advocating

my first book which criticized some of the research underlying the 10,000 hour rule because the the original research came out of a study that was done on 30 violin students at a world-class Music Academy um the top 10 of whom uh had been found to have practiced spent 10,000 hours by the age of 20 on average in deliberate practice which is this effortful cognitively engaged focused on correcting errors practice you know not playing around not experimenting um

and there were a lot of flaws in that study one of which is that that nobody actually did 10,000 hours there was like some who did way less and some who did way more in that tiny group um and uh it it averaged a 10,000 hours

but I think the issue with the 10,000 hours rule which and I can tell you about after I criticized it Malcolm Gladwell and I became running buddies so we have these arguments on our on our own time but we've come to pretty much the same ground

the idea was that this is the only thing that matters your accumulated deliberate practice and so you should start as early as possible in as narrowly technical practice as you possibly can

and except for certain very uh simple activities uh there's a mountain of evidence that suggests this this just isn't right like there's there's almost nothing that actually works in favor of it

you really want again if you're trying to optimize for the short term sometimes that might make sense but if you want to build both physical and cognitive models that can be flexible for future problem solving a a better rule to think of than the 10,000 hours rule which is very splashy uh is this classic finding that comes out of cognitive psych psychology that can be summarized as breadth of training predicts breadth of transfer

so transfer is a term psychologists use to mean taking your skills and applying them to a problem that's not exactly the same as the last one like your ability to to adapt to New Challenges and new tasks

and what predicts your ability to do that which is what we in modern work rely on every day what predicts your ability to do that is the is the breadth of problems youve faced in training

so when you face a really broad uh sampling of problems in training or lots of different activities it forces you to build these generalized models that you can then kind of slot in to whatever the new challenge is as opposed to just being the opposite where the 10,000 hours approach off leads to what psychologists call the einstellung effect which is where you've solved a problem a certain way so many times you'll continue doing that even if it's no longer the solution

so when is it good to be a specialist I mean clearly you don't want to have a a generalist brain surgeon operating on you would you

no absolutely not I mean so so okay so I I gave a talk a little while ago to a group of Surgeons that were like so specialized and you know I wanted to be a little provocative um but also I'd written quite a bit about uh uh poor medical practices when I was in investigative reporter and so I brought up some of the data that showed that specialized surgeons have fewer complications in their procedures not only even if you control for the number of times that a surgeon has done a procedure still the surgeons who identify as more specialized still have fewer comp complications so there's something above and beyond even just the number of repetitions they've had about being specialized

but the data also show that they are much more likely to do those procedures when they're unwarranted and to continue to do them even if data has shown unequivocally that they they aren't right that they don't actually work or they can even be harmful

so it's sort of this this double-edged sword it's not that we don't need those people who have such great motor memory that they've like automated the important parts of the task in their brain essentially but it's but it's really a double-edged sword

so I think the challeng is in places where you have you know areas where you just need skills that are so thoroughly automated in the brain that someone really you know has perfected them a pilot a surgeon how do we balance that need uh with the Ein effect basically where the the inability to see that this isn't the right solution anymore

now um let's move on to the educational system and um how that promotes or hinders generalism

so um wait by the way can I make one one more just funny point about those surgeons I talked to

when I talked to them and I was expecting them to lambas me right and they they loved it but they all said like we know this is a problem that we're overdoing these procedures and it's my colleagues really need to get it together so it's interesting to hear them explain they all felt this was a problem and they all felt it wasn't them uh so it's an interesting kind of conundrum a tricky problem to solve yeah

yeah of course it's never my problem um talk about education

education I mean obviously a broad uh a broad remit but I think again is is um there's an analogy to the research we see in sports here again

so again to give a concrete example just because I think it's easier to to think about concrete examples take a study that was done again um you know more in in tune with the literature in the United States so this was done in the United States in California where uh Middle School um you know this would be like very early teenagers basically um uh classrooms were randomized to different types of math instruction

some of them got what's called blocked practice which is like if you took problem type A A A AA practice practice practice then bbbbb practice practice practice

others were and and the students they make progress fast they like it it feels good great rate their teacher great everything

the other groups were randomized to what's called interleaved practice where instead of getting a AAA bbbbb it's as if you took all the problem types threw them in a hat and Drew them out at random

so now the students get more frustrated their progress initial progress is slower sometimes they re rate the teacher uh more poorly um

but instead of learning how to execute procedures they're learning how to match a strategy to a type of problem

and the problem is is if if if you're struggling that's not a sign that you're not learning if you're not struggling that's definitely a sign that you're not learning

and then when the test comes around those inter leave the students who got inter leave practice blew the block Practice Group away it was like on the order of moving the 50th percentile kid to the 80th percentile because in the test everyone has to face new problems so now they have to do that transfer where they take some of those skills and apply it to a new problem and they were much better equipped to do that because again that mixed practice practice forces you to kind of build these generalized models

so in the in the David Epstein super School you just mix and match throughout the whole day all types of things

yeah definitely I would definitely broaden it but I think I would also have a curriculum that was more or sort of more interdisciplinarily cohesive

because we already have we already have curricula that are interdisciplinary in the sense that a kid goes to different subjects all day but there's no cohesion between them

and so I think like some ways to um you know we focus on certain things like uh we like it when kids learn how to read really early and obviously it's important for kids to to learn how to read but there's no there's no evidence that learning something that everyone is going to learn a little bit early really makes a difference

so so we often a lot of our intervention programs focus on what's called closed skills which are things that everyone's going to learn it's like teaching a kid how to walk earlier than others like it might seem impressive but it doesn't matter in the long run

so I think I would I would make uh to make this interdisciplinarity more cohesive I might organize a curriculum around like the progression of human ideas because I've found in my just my own learning you know in in any given era art and chemistry and biology and technology and economics and all these things are interlaced in a given era and I think I would try to have maybe and and and the way that those ideas progress off one another I think is is very useful for kind of getting a grounding in in human progress and and human thought and so I might Orient the curriculum around around that about whatever the discipline is in teaching people that kind of progression of human ideas and how we got to where we are today and that might have sort of some linkage between the disciplin so it's not just like oh I'm done with math class now I go to history class which is a totally different thing in history and math have nothing to do with one another because obviously that's right

disciplines are a necessary evil for making the world comprehensible in giving people career trajectories someone has to put the world back together again at the end of the day to solve problems

well the data seems to support that um boys are scholastically properly ready for school later than than girls um should we should boys start later in school

gosh that's a tough one because you know it's not just boys I mean boy that's true um but there's also the whole relative age effect in general which is the that kids who are and this shows up in in sports also actually I think was discovered first in in sports where kids that are born later in their age cohort in their school cohort um

I think that may have been your friend Gladwell he he's written about that yeah he's written about that in the in the sports area where in yeah and but like in Germany for example they did some research where they saw that kids and especially boys um who were born later in the age cohort so they're effectively 9 10 11 12 months younger than kids that they're in school with were far more likely to get diagnosed with behavior issues or ADHD and medicated and things like that or to get you know put down a level if they're classes tracked

and the problem was just as Sports coaches mistake early maturation kids for potential just because they're bigger because they're 10 months older or whatever in school you know when kids are seven eight or nine or 10 being 10 months younger is actually a big deal and it shows up in their behavior

and so we mistake this sort of talent or potential or whatever for just biological maturation

I do think we should try to do something about that I I don't know how we would fully correct that like kind of one I think and I think there's some countries um particularly like Finland does a great job of making sure that when kids are young they don't get tracked down so there may be a kid who's relatively younger but they put a ton of emphasis they don't they don't put as much emphasis I think as maybe the research would suggest on tracking people up when they're ready for it but they put a lot of emphasis on not letting people get tracked down which then puts them on this trajectory where they're kind of stuck forever

and so I think some of that emphasis more oriented toward not letting those kids and who are often boys get tracked down until they can kind of catch up maturationally would be would be really important

but also we know that like movement has a huge impact kids who have trouble sitting still and especially boys and especially young boys and so I think we only view some of their behaviors as maladaptive when we ask them to sit still for 10 hours in a row

and so I think we should kind of reorient uh some of the school environment to to what we know about developmental psychology

moving on to careers and um and jobs what are the your findings what are the implications for how we should structure our working life

we should be expecting change right we want people to figure out um what they want to do and and we're usually pressuring people to do that kind of maybe in their early 20s uh at least in the United States like right when they're getting out of college and I think that's increasingly ill suited I guess to um to the reality of the workplace

so there's this this thing this psychological finding called the end of History illusion that's this idea this finding that when you ask people hey have you learned a lot about yourself you know and and what you're good at and what you want to do and what you're bad at in the past and people say like oh yeah of course and then you ask well will you learn more in the future or people say not so much now I'm pretty much done and at every time point in life people say I learned a lot in the past but now I think I'm now I think I've arrived so we're like Works in progress constantly claiming to be finished and this continues throughout our life

but the fastest time of Personality change which is again what you think your strengths and weaknesses are what your values are what you like in friends Etc is about 18 to the late 20s and that's the time when we're telling people you have to have sort of you know figured out and that's not to say people shouldn't dive into stuff you should dive into stuff because that's how you get a signal about whether you're doing the right thing or not but I think we need to be prepared uh for Change and kind of keep keep dabbling and keep doing some of that experimenting

there there's a fascinating study that came out too recently uh for me to to get into my book was by researchers at Northwestern this guy Dash Wong who just says this incredible it's it's like people will do a study of uh 20 careers and dash Wong will do a study of 20,000 careers like it's just his work is just on another level

and so he and his colleagues did this analysis of I think it was 26,000 career trajectories I think a lot of them were like uh artists film directors scientists and what they found was that there was actually this kind of universal first of all they found that most people do their most impactful work in their life in a so-called hot streak like their best work tends to tends to kind of cluster

now sometimes those clusters can extend for quite a while um but there tends to be tends to be a cluster and that doesn't mean that they aren't doing failures at the same time but the hits tend to be sort of clustered and sometimes people have two sometimes people just have one

but what they found was reliably before a hot streak people spend time in this period of experimentation and it really jives with this big body of literature called on on What's called the explore exploit tradeoff where explore is is searching for new knowledge trying new skills trying new projects trying new collaborators exploit is taking stuff that you already know and people you already know and and digging down on that and and making the most value out of it

and what they found is that this explore phase is it always precedes like a successful exploit

and you know when I've talked to to Dash and I think part of his concern is that in the race to kind of find a specialty because we all we all specialize to one degree or another at some point or another uh unless we just become complete diletant forever what his concern is that people are rushing past pass the explore straight to the exploit which undermines the the chance that they'll ever have

so what does this explore period look like what is it

yeah so let's take for example when he was looking at you know scientists I I read a lot of science about science um and and scientists like to do it because they're interested in themselves um but there will be a scientist who's getting involved in different areas right they're starting little projects and usually with smaller groups or on their own they're trying a bunch of different things and then they'll maybe find one area that seems more fruit and suddenly they'll then start like ramping up you know it's almost like personal R&D would be for a company it's like they're they're sort of like prototyping different different lives that they could have or different careers they could have and then when they find one that seems better then they expand the collaboration Network they put more resources into that and go forward

or for artists sometimes it was it was experimenting with like a a bunch of different styles and then merging something from those different experiments into a new style that they then really drill down on

so I think it's this this sense of as I think of it of sort of prototyping your possible lives and careers and taking a little bit from these little experiments and saying all right now now it's time to kind of drill down put more resources often putting more of a network you know and and in some cases when the careers were uh in business or in science actually then Gathering a much larger group of people uh to to then work on

I mean this is uh really interesting but I mean you have some people of course like Einstein he did his work in a pretty I mean the greatest work in a pretty short period of time you know uh Monk um same kind of things but you got other you got other artists uh you know Beatles went on forever right picazo had one period after the other went on forever Reinventing himself what explains the difference here

I mean those I think first of all those are those are incredible innovators and I think those you know I think looking at the career of Picasso I think he had more hot streaks than the next person bet um but he did continually go through these like he would Contin enforce these constraints on himself right like his red period or blue period or whatever it was or sometimes he would paint the same subject over and over and over and over and over and over but forcing it to be different kind of every time

and so I think he was just this Relentless experimenter um and you know and there is also when I think of Picasso this pretty consistent finding that great creators just create more stuff so they they create a lot of bad stuff too you know it's like the proverbial Thomas Edison thousands of patents most of which are completely useless and some of which are like the mass-produced light bulb you know

and so I think there's not dispositive evidence of this this is me speculating but I think one of the reasons that the creating so much more is is kind of a Hallmark of these great creators is that that's actually really the only way you learn that that introspection I think has been oversold as a method for learning about yourself and doing stuff has been been undersold

is curiosity a choice

wow that's a tough question I mean I think there's you know my first book was about genetics and I think the the so-called first law of behavioral genetics is that every uh personality trait that has ever been studied has a genetic component

so I think there is an innate component to curiosity um that said I think that people are inherently more Curious um if they don't think it's disincentivized right

like I would even talk to some of the the researchers I was interviewing for my book who were dis appointed at their careers in Academia because they felt that they had gotten into this world where it' be the life of the mind and yet then they were told like I remember interviewing this one researcher who she said she felt frustrated that she felt like she was maybe being held back in her career because she wasn't more specialized because she wanted to explore more stuff and I went and looked at her list of papers every single one it was like 48 papers or something every single one had Aristotle in the title like from my perspective she was very specialized every single one um

and so I think I think people want to be curious but they often feel that it's disincentivized and then sometimes people get to a level where they're sort of Executives or in Silicon Valley and then they they get to be free and really curious and I think you see some of the kind of flourishing when people feel like that's incentivized um

but I think I think specific curiosity is is is important and underrated and that we need to encourage people sometimes to dive into problems that interest them or that they think are important that maybe are not exactly in their their view every day

like there's a guy who was the first named ed Hoffman who was a background source for me who was the first Chief knowledge officer at Nasa that's basically when NASA had some accidents they created this position that was for a psychologist to make sure that they had institutional memory make sure that they were learning from their mistakes and that those learnings were spreading across the organization

and now he consults with a lot of organizations and one of the things he does is he goes in and he asks people uh when he's just sort of first doing his listening T her what's something you're good at that we're not using and what he finds is that people will often bring up some problem that's in their office that they basically know how to fix but they don't feel incentivized or or even allowed to to do it

so I think there's like a lot of innate curiosity that if if leaders or managers are willing to underwrite the risk of those curious people in in taking some risk that that would be basically um Unleashed whether or not we can just create a lot more innate curiosity for people I'm not sure but I think there's a lot that is suppressed that we could just kind of liberate

is this something you can work on through mentoring you think

I absolutely do I absolutely do and again I think that that issue of um underwriting risk for people who are lower level or lower status

what does that mean when you say underwrite risk what does that mean in practice

so let's say like having someone do an experiment maybe they're working on a new project or working uh with a new team

so there's some places that do this with their like 3m. or Google with their things like 20% time where they say like no we want you to go do this thing that will probably fail with 20% of your time time like take on this personal project and and like Google's X their their sort of innovation engine area they have these videos called it gets better where people worked on these huge projects and then the projects you know like floating high-speed internet on hot air balloons and and the technology worked but the economics didn't work and so they made a video called it gets better where the people who put their lives into this and then the project gets closed talk about the period of mourning and grieving and then the stuff that they learned that they then took and applied to some new project

so it's this they're almost trying to valorize this idea that hey we took on something that we was worth taking on whether it worked or not like we had to figure this out we had some lessons from it and so you see these examples of people who then uh recover and go into other into other projects

do you think this is why it seems like older um founders of companies actually have a higher probability to succeed

I I do yeah that's and I know that's a for some people a controversial uh uh finding like I know you know Paul Graham who I think obviously is a brilliant uh guy one of founder of why combinator I think was um not so happy that I wrote about that finding

but there's this finding with the you know I think that you're referring to like with MIT and the US Census Bureau in Northwestern that found that the average age of a founder of a fast growing Tech startup uh on the day of founding was 45

right we had Re Hastings on the show he founded Netflix very late I I think we put much more attention to the stories of like Mark Zuckerberg who famously dropped out of Harvard and he he famously said young people are just smarter he was 22 when he said that right you don't hear him saying that anymore surprise surprise um

and and so I think it's sort of counterintuitive you and I we're not saying it either are we no not anymore um and and maybe we did at one point but we weren't recorded like Mark Zuckerberg lucky for us um

but no so I think that's I think that's absolutely the case that a lot of it comes through this pivoting and this sort of opportunistic right

and I think some of this like belies the idea that you can just have this clear life course and execute according to plan and really a lot of this great innovation in people's career moves comes from being opportunistic and see seeing learning something about an area seeing an opportunity and then pivoting to to to take advantage of it you know um as opposed to being part of some like perfect long-term plan

I've yet to meet an entrepreneur who said like yeah things went as planned it never happens they all say they nearly died three times but um what are the when we put all these together what are the implications for how you build and organize a company

you know how what how do you think about range in an organization

yeah I mean I think one thing is getting a little more diversity in in teams right

so there's this like pretty compelling body of work that shows that when a team faces uh a problem particularly an unfamiliar problem you know a difficult problem the their likelihood of solving it and the number of different solutions they come up with is in part predicted by the number and breadth of analogies that they can come up with to structurally similar problems in other areas so saying like is that like this is that like that and what predicts the number and breadth of analogies is the diversity of the people in the group

and so in many cases when you have everyone with a similar specialty it's not that much better than having just one brain with that specialty

and and some of these findings can even be quite like almost absurd So ba based on This research you know there was research looking at teams okay if you throw in someone with a different specialty does that help problem solving okay yes it does what if you throw in someone from a different area who's like not really that competent still helps some

and then it said well let's take it to the farthest extension we'll look at remote teams working on problems and we'll toss in AI Bots programmed to behave randomly you know they don't know our Bots because this is just a remote remote team even that improve problem solving because it apparently gets people to to De anchor right CU usually the first solution that comes to mind is the one that we sort of get stuck on or anchored the first or second and these random Behavior would actually kind of knock people off of uh those those anchored Solutions because it turns out we usually anchor on a first solution and it's usually not our our best one

so this this thing called the creative Cliff illusion that's like we think good ideas come either quickly or not at all when in fact actually they tend to come later in your in your thought process

so I think mixing mixing cross functional teams um and I think saving some room for people that seem a little a little different like some of the I think sort of most kind of progressive companies I've been around in the sense that they disrupt themselves instead of waiting to get disrupted will will put some effort at least into hiring like sometimes they just need to put a square peg in a square hole today but other times they'll save some efforts for like sort of around and saying okay here are things we're really good at that we can teach people how to do there's some other things we want that we're not good at or that we couldn't show people how to do so let's let's go look for people who have those things bring them in and then we'll teach them the stuff that we're good at teaching right

so the I think the farthest extreme of this that I encountered was bayy gford which I think is like the most successful Investment Company in Scotland where they would not hire anyone with an MBA

I think that's a little overboard um but maybe part of their culture but they would say let's just go look for things that we want in here and then we can teach them the finance stuff y um

and so so I think that's kind of extreme but it comports with with like the work of Abby Griffin who studies so-called serial innovators these people who make repeated creative contributions to their organizations she finds these people are you know just to almost directly quote from her work they uh they have a wide range of Interest they read more and more widely than their peers they have a need to communicate with people with expertise outside of their own they connect information from different domains um they repurpose like old things that are already available they systems thinkers all this stuff

and they have more different type of friends they have more different type of friends that's right they use their social networks to diversify the inputs they have uh coming

at one point she says they appear they often appear to flit among ideas which doesn't really sound like a compliment but I think the danger is those people um you know they can just seem like they're scattered

yeah I I talked to Adam Grant I think our mutual uh friend about this a little bit and I think said well can you create these serial innovators and I think the answer is not sure my my intuition is probably not that you can't just create them but I think absolutely you can stifle them from becoming if you don't allow that that sort of broad networking and Broad thinking

what does artificial intelligence uh do to the need to specialize do we need more or less specialization

that's a great question I think a lot of that is is unknown at this point um

but don't we have all information in the world at the tap of our fingers do we really need to study seven years for a PhD

yeah I think there's I think there's truth to that there's more information available than ever um and that people need to we need to start thinking teaching people how to integrate it and how to evaluate evidence and all those sorts of things

so I think first of all everyone should be using these tools right like I use I'm on like Claude perplexity chat gbt every day and one for scientific research called site. um

and so everyone should turn on a little bit of their uh technological Anthropologist brain and be using these tools to figure out where do they go right and where do they go wrong because my experience has been they're very often wrong and yet very useful so it's it's interesting to get used to a tool that's very often wrong but also useful

but in in the larger scheme of things you know I think whether technological innovation of this magnitude leads to Shared Prosperity or increasing misery um has a lot to do with whether people are have opportunities to and are able to adapt to to sort of new roles that that move them to a bigger picture scale

so to give a sense of what I mean like in the when I was looking back I was kind of doing some research on the introduction of the ATM you know the the automat like a cash machine in the US and it first came online in the early 70s and the news coverage at the time was really apocalyptic it's like there were 300,000 bank tellers at the time said they're going to go out of business overnight

and instead over the next 40 years instead of as there were more ATMs there were more bank tellers because they made each branch cheaper to operate so Banks opened more branches so fewer tellers per Branch but more tellers overall

but even more interestingly it fundamentally changed the job of one from someone who's doing repetitive cash transactions to someone who's like a marketing professional or a customer service representative or a financial adviser this much broader mix of more strategic skills

and I think that's kind of emblematic of when technological disruption sort of goes well for Society at large is it moves people back to this more strategic level of thinking and takes over stuff that you know it might be scary that it's taking it over but it's like less of the place where we kind of add value

and so I think you know people need to be experimenting with these tools and starting to think about how it can liberate them to spend more time on the Strategic side the bigger the bird's eye view picture of of their work

so you uh boil this all together uh and translate it into an advice for young people you are 18 20 22 I mean how do you how do you think about your life

first of all I think realize that there's very very little chance that you're headed for a life where you're going to be doing the same thing for for decades over so you should be oriented toward learning growing that means continual experimentation that means broadening your your network

I would I would advise for someone in that age group of there were some cool kind of MIT research on this that because if you just let your social media go on its own kind of you'll end up following people who are all following each other basically so you'll have this real Echo chamber you should be constantly pruning and adding people who are more different from you to diversify the the sources of input

and I think you should be doing purposeful experimentation so I keep something I call a book of small experiments where every you know borrow from the scientific method say here's something I want to learn or here's something I want to learn about here's my hypothesis for how I'm going to do it here's how I'm going to evaluate the outcome and do that over and over and over and over

so you know to give a concrete example of something that's relevant to my life like I felt like I was stuck in a rut with writing I said I need to learn some new ways to structure writing because structuring information is the major challenge for me

so I took a beginners I said well where's their more structure okay fiction so I took a beginner's course in fiction writing and it was a total Revelation for me

like there was one exercise where we had to write stories with only dialogue and with no dialogue and the no dialogue one was so much better and I realized I had been overusing sort of dialogue I went back and changed it you know like basically every page of range

and so I'm constantly doing these experiments where it's make a hypothesis find a way to test it reflect back on what you learned and take that forward

so I think more purposeful experimentation mindset is a really crucial one uh for you know and and may come naturally to some people who are just like incredibly curious but not to not to most people um

but I think it's really crucial in a world where like you should not be uh feeling entitled to stability of the thing that you're doing for years on end

well this has been a truly fantastic dialogue about one of my absolute favorite topics in the world so uh a big thanks for sharing your thoughts and uh all the best with the rest of your research that's an absolute pleasure thanks so much for having me