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

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.

David Epstein is a New York Times best-selling author whose infamous work challenges the conventional wisdom about specialization, productivity, 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?

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

What is that?

So the cycle is flex. 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.

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

Don't start your day with email. It's been shocking to look at the research, how big of an impairment that is. What Why can't notifications? So if you're getting distracted all the time, if you say, Well, now I really have to hunker down, I'm going to get rid of the notifications, you will start self-interrupting to maintain the interruptions to which you have become accustomed. Really? 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 see something like this, that has an enormous influence in your productivity.

Interesting. The third thing I found, which was pretty shocking, was when you start talking about some of the dangers of specialism.

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

Gosh, that's terrifying.

The conclusion was that's because...

This is a sentence I never thought I'd say in my life. We've just hit seven million subscribers on YouTube, and I want to say a huge thank you to all of you that show up here every Monday and Thursday to watch our conversations. 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 dire of a CEO that work to put this together. So from all of us, thank you so much. We did a raffle last month, and we gave away prizes for people that subscribe to the show up until seven million subscribers. And you guys love that raffle so much that we're going to continue it. So every single month, we're giving away money can't buy prizes, including meetings with me, invites to our events, and a thousand pound gift vouchers to anyone that subscribers 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. Yes. How do you summarize the work that you do and why you do it? 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. 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 realms of self-improvement that you have focused on thus far in your career?

Well, earlier on, I was focused on 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 long lens. 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, stick with it. Don't switch things because then you've lost time. Focus very narrowly. Do so-called deliberate practice. That's not playing around. That's not experimenting. That's effortful, cognitively engaged, and do a error correction, and do as much of it as you possibly can to the exclusion of other things. That's such an obvious way. You jump out to a lead. 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 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. So it appears to be a fade Okay.

So if you take more time to get a broader understanding of something, whether it's in sports, if you're 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 really deliberate practice obsessively, and he's going to have a... It's like the Tortoise and the Hair analogy where the Tortoise eventually wins the race.

Yeah. I mean, there's a big body of research in psychology It 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. You transfer it to a new situation. What predicts your ability to do that is the breadth of problems you've been exposed to in practice. If you're exposed to a broader set of problems, you're forced to build these generalisable, 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 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. 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. And eventually, obviously, we'll get them to a higher level. And so I think, really, this is for people who are interested in how do I get off my plateaus going forward and viewing it as a lifelong journey as opposed to trying to peak when they're 12. 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 a a tie in here with the subject of just happiness and how to live a happy life?

Fulfillment, for sure. Those aren't exactly the same, but they're important. To think about this in a career development perspective, 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 an orientation in this study, they would say things to the researchers like, I started off doing this one thing. I was in medical school Well, whatever, didn't really fit me. So I went over to this other thing, and I learned I was good at something I didn't expect. So then I went this other direction. Don't tell people to do what I did because 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 zigzagging path where they would learn, maybe I'm good at something or bad at something that I didn't expect.

Maybe interested in something I didn't expect. And they would keep pivoting. And they'd say, instead of saying, 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. 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. It turns out to be extremely important for both your performance and sense of fulfill 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 monetary way, but also maintaining fulfill throughout their life?

I think there are two main things to take away from that. One is to not not over-focus on long-term planning. 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. When I think about myself, when I was a competitive 800-metre runner, I could have a time goal for the end of the race, but that didn't help me actually do anything. 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 football, done in the Netherlands, where this woman named Mariah L. Frank-gemser was following kids from the age of 12 up through... Some of them went on to teams that 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. 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. 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, go into the trainer like, Why are we doing this drill? I think I can do this already. I think I need to work on this other thing. Sometimes a trainer might be like, Oh, man, just get back in line. But these are the kids that are thinking about what 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 it's 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 will 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.

If I'm When I say I'm in my early 20s in 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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 scientist of your own development, I think 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 living up in the Arctic, studying the carbon cycle in a tent. And I had been a competitive runner. I had a training partner who was one of the top-rank guys in the 800 meters in his age group in the country. Family of Jamaican immigrants was going to be the first one to graduate college, dropped dead a few steps after a race. Our hometown paper said, Well, he had a heart attack. I don't even know what that means for someone of that age and health, right? And I got curious. And eventually, I 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 a textbook case of this disease caused by a single genetic mutation. It's almost always the cause of young athletes dropping dead. I said, We can save some people from this with more awareness. I decided to merge my interests in sports and science. I said, I want to 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. Weaved my way to Sports Illustrated. I got in there as a temp, pitch this story about sudden cardiac death in athletes. They're like, Temp, sit down, right? And then the Olympic marathon trials for a 2008 US team. I came to Central Park, and the guy ranked fifth in the country dropped dead 10 blocks from our office. And then they said, Don't you know something about this? And so in a week, I was able to write a cover story making it look like we had done two years of research in a week, and I became the science writer at Sports Illustrated. It was interesting. I came in there as a temp six, seven years behind people who were younger than me doing 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 the sports magazine, it's like a Nobel Laureate. 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.

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 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. I said, Well, I want to write about it. 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 these things 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 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, not just swatting balls at the driving range, you're focusing on correcting errors practice, and that there is no such thing as talent differences. It's really just the manifestation of 10,000 hours 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 a colloquially 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 was told that if you do 10,000 hours in anything, you become a master in it. That's the narrative, right?

Well, to take some chess research, for example, 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 grand master. 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 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 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. Because your insight into yourself is really limited by your roster of experiences. You 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. I think this idea of just head down doing the same thing. Should we go back all and talk about the research underlying the 10,000-hour rule? Please. 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-metre 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.

Yeah, 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. 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 preselected. Preselected 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 of what causes basketball skill. And I used it as my subjects 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-Guard score more points or less points? They score more points, and they're shorter.

Okay.

So if you don't look at the whole population and you just look at people who are so highly prescreened, they're already at the top. You can end up with these backward advice. The other issue that caught my eye when I first read the study was that they only reported the average. 10,000 hours was the average number of hours of deliberate practice by the 10 best violinists by the age of 20. Then there was a second group and a lower group, and they said there was complete correspondence, meaning nobody who had practiced a few 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 I contacted the Anders Erichson, a wonderful guy who was the father of the 10,000-hour rule, though he hated that moniker, actually. And I said, Can I see the data or the measures of variance to know how much variation there was between individuals? And he said, Well, people were inconsistent on the 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 the 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. I like to call it the 625,000 Hours of Sleep Study because the top-tier group got a lot more sleep. 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, 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 had practiced more. So there were all... One problem after another. I just said, I'm getting youth I'm getting investment pitches, like sighting 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's sampling to try to figure out where you have your best shot is worthless, and that's wrong. And so I became 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 It was quite varied of different industries, everything from 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 a 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.

There was research a few years ago from MIT IT in Northwestern and the US 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. Twenty-five? Forty-five. And a 50-year-old had a better chance than a 30-year-old. But we never Just like we never hear the story of these zigzagers, we only hear the Tiger Woods story. We only hear 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 we 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 measure by market cap, 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.

So the average, 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, 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, a Mark Zuckerberg at 22, messing around in his dorm room with computers and the Internet.

Yeah, I think that's fair. But technology touches There's a lot of other areas of the... It's like yesterday on the way here, I was learning about a software that I had never heard of because all the computers were down in the airport. Technology is in all these places that we... That are not as... Don't have this figurehead that's publicly profiled the same way.

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. It 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 this podcast means a lot to me. So I I want to be more productive when it comes to figuring out how to move this podcast forward, 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 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. 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 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. How can you set up some low-stakes practice for what might be a worthwhile larger experiment. I think that's the same for individuals progressing in their career.

I love this phrase. My absolute favorite phrase in range is a paraphrase from this woman named Hermeneya 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 a phone booth and ripping off and 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 that you're better at that you did, what's something that you're good at that you realized you're not using? And then you make your next step based on that. I think when you're so competent and successful in getting 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, you want to be in your zone of optimal push.

So for anything you're doing, if you're doing practicing whatever, physical skills, anything, if you're not, at least 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.

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, is 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 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 There's 40 odd people in this company called the Diary of a CEO. There is a production team, there is the social media team, there's the commercial team, for example, and there's the guest booking and logistics team. I felt we're actually in LA driving down the road, and I'll speaking to Jemimah, who's the head of the guest booking and research team, and I was saying, the most important thing now, now that we're number one, is that we keep disrupting ourselves because there's going to be some kid, like we were three years ago, that because of their naivety, that they're not encumbered by all of this convention and all this success.

So I hired a head of failure and experimentation who's in our team and has been working. And now in the last couple of days, we're running an experiment where every single one of those departments has essentially a failure assistant in it. Because you know what happens with people? They get busy doing their job. And experimentation and failure is always secondary to their job. So if we put failure people into 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 David has ever made, they also benefited from just the discovery of that button. Because instead of When you're going to scroll through the entire TikTok, they can press one button and see your most popular videos.

So there's this real one plus one equals three and getting the teams to share their failures and experiments so they don't have to fail in the same ways. So what did you just write down?

This brings up so much stuff because the fundamental problem you're getting at here is the one called the Explore-Exploit trade-off. Right. And so Explore is what it sounds like, looking for new knowledge or new things that you can do that will add value. Explore is taking stuff you're already good at that you already know and drilling down on it. And this is the fundamental challenge challenge for people in organizations that are good is once they find something they're really good at and they drill down in it, they tend to ditch explore mode. And balancing that, explore, exploit. And there's always, of course, these famous business cases like Kodak invents a 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 Dashan Wang at Northwestern who does... People will do career development studies looking at 20 people, and he'll look at 20,000 people. So his work is just fascinating. And 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 will only have one.

Some people will have more than one if they're lucky. And reliably, what proceeds a hot streak, he was looking at, I think it was like 26,000, like film directors, artists, scientists. Reliably, what proceeds a hot streak is a period of exploration where they're trying these different styles. They're going broad. They're keeping a smaller team so they can be nimble. They're moving between teams, and then they find something and they drill into it. If they're going to 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 into exploit at a middling level, then you're sacrificing your hot streak. So that was one of the things that came up for me. The other thing was this, 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 you'll have the... Adam Grant, who I think we both know, he mentioned me once something called the HIPAA effect, where it's like the opinion of the highest paid person in the room, I think is the acronym, where their signaling is really important for everyone else.

So if you're not just giving lip service like, yeah, failure is good, but actually giving people that title, I think that's a great signal You're underwriting risk. You're underwriting risk for people, psychologically. And you're creating what scientists who study networks, like groups of teams, call an import-export business of ideas. And this is one of the hallmarks of organizations and ecosystems that learn and adapt to a changing world. The import-export business of ideas means 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. I always think of the engineer Bill Gore, who founded the company that created GORE-TX. 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 and working together? Or as he like 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.

Okay, so what about then on an individual level? How do I As an individual, I've got lots of things I'm doing. I'm writing some books at the moment. 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. I get distracted easily, I think, because I end up watching a video about AI on YouTube or about Rockets or something. I want to get more done. Really, I want to be more productive in the time that I spend working.

This is when you know what you should be doing.

When I know what I should be doing, yeah.

There's nothing wrong with sometimes watching YouTube and Rockets. You get ideas from doing this stuff. Yeah, I do. That's what I tell myself. But 10 to-do lists is a lot of to-do lists. Do you get most of the stuff done on those to-do lists?

It's more... Each team, 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 how it works.

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 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 It's fine. 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. One important step for me was realizing that only the A-list is the stuff that's going to 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 where they can lose some of the aspect of prioritization, 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 suggest something like not starting your day with email or messaging because we were talking a little bit before about this thing called the Zagarnic effect, which is this idea that an unfinished task leaves a residue in your brain, basically, and 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? If you start the day with that, no matter what you do, the residue is going to 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. The day before, what is the thing that if I get done tomorrow, it's going to be a good day? And start with that before you do the things that might leave residue on your brain and start multitasking.

How do they know that's true? Have they done studies on this organic effect?

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, increased switching when there's a residue in their brain, so their rate of switching will go up, 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 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?

I want to close off on that point of just team culture then, how to get a team people to do really exceptional innovative work and to fail faster. Is there anything else that's pertinent to you? 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.

I don't lionize failure for its own sake. I think it's inevitable if you're experimenting enough that you'll have some failure. But I think one useful thing to do, a guy I love who's made a big impression on me named Ed Hoffman 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? And people always have an answer for that. And that leads to, well, 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 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 in an experiment because that's going to set the agenda, right? But you would actually have to fail. This can't be you go for a jog and you trip on the curve or something. You have to fail with something of consequence. And then your reaction to that can set a tone.

What are you good at that we are not using? That's a really interesting question. That's actually quite an interesting question just to ask yourself on a personal level.

Absolutely.

Because so much of the, I guess, fulfill, but also just the untapped potential lies in the things that we are probably quite good at, but we've just maybe avoided because there's been an opportunity that's taken us away from it. I might be really good at, I don't know. I might be really good with people, for example, or empathy, but I'm My career or my job has taken me in a different direction. That also might be the thing that fulfills me the most. I see that a lot, actually, this particular point about people. People go off and do jobs in finance at, I don't know, J. P. Morgan, and then they have a big career switch where they had it being like a head of culture and people and mental health or well-being. That was always the thing they were good at, but their competence took them in another direction.

What's something you think you're good at that you're not using?Me?Yeah.

Oh, gosh. I think that I am I think I've got a... That I'm not using. Interesting. Because I think I was going to give you an answer, and the answer I was going to give you is something that I've thought about quite a lot is Music and creativity and those kinds of things. My background is in marketing, so I'm quite good at constructing a story arc of things. Even this conversation, much of what I'm trying to do is create a story arc of the journey, and I'm constantly self-editing But I also really love music, and I've not really used the musical side of me or trained it. I think I'm quite good at understanding how music fits into story and narrative. I think I could probably spend more time tapping into the music part that I just love. I'm obsessed with music. And so there's been a moment in my career where I did. I did this theatrical musical in it, toured the UK and stuff. We did a couple of nights at the Palladium and then went around. That was me dipping my toe in, but it doesn't pay necessarily very well, and there's not necessarily a very clear reason to do it.

Not necessarily a very clear reason. Sounds like you want to do it.

I want to do it, but there's other things that- That seems like a pretty clear reason. Do you know what it is? There's other things that I enjoy as well that pay and that can keep the lights on. So I tend to focus on those things. That's a better answer. That's a better answer.

That's a better answer. Well, if you want, you could use a commitment device, which is where you could commit to an experiment on camera here, and then you'll be accountable for running some experiment you might fail at. Just saying if you want to. What? I'll do it if you do it.

Okay, so what are you good at that you're not using?

I think I am, even though my academic background and my work is in the sciences, I view myself... A big difference between how the world probably views me and I view myself is I view myself as much more of a creatively, artistically inclined person. So I'll come up with an experiment if you want to commit to experiments here on camera. Okay.

What's your experiment you're committing to?

Hold on, give me 10 seconds.

I thought you came with it in your pocket. You do have a book, don't you? Where you write these things that you're going to try.

My Book of Small Experiments. Yeah. Dan Pink actually gave it that name when he saw it, yeah. But I think of it the same way that I had a book when I was a science grad student. What's my hypothesis for what I'm trying to learn? How am I going to test that? And what did I learn from that test? Okay. I'm working on a book right now. After I finish that one, I'll write a fiction book, which I've never done before. Interesting. For my next book.

Did you have that in your mind before you came in here?

No. I love fiction writing. I took a fiction writing class years ago that I think really improved my non-fiction writing. Got me out of a rut. But no, that's a It's a big lift for me. I'm not sure I actually want to do that. But if I said something that was of no stakes, then it wouldn't be any fun.

Okay, my commitment is this. It's been many, many years since I did that musical show with the 30 house gospel choir people, and we toured the UK. I will, in 2025, in Q4, do a musical show called The Diary of a CEO Live at one venue in London for at least 10 nights in a row, and it will be the musical illusion, magical show that I've had in my mind for the longest time that I just haven't pulled the trigger on.

Okay, so we're going to have to check back in and see.

Yeah, I'll send you a video. I'll invite you. You can come. I'll fly you out. If you want to come to the show. Yeah, You're going to have to credit me for the creation of your fiction book. We will do. That's on the team level. I want to really think about how on an individual level, I can become a better learner. Because one of the 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. 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 know so many things about so many things. And also my audience, 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.

Oh, to retain information. Okay. For retaining information, one, repetition and familiarity is important. 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. To put this in a simple way, there's research where you look at school kids, and if they're given an essay about baseball, say, the kids that are deemed really good readers, and there are kids who are deemed poor readers, and the kids 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 when you have conversations, you probably have a better tendency to remember things where you say, That reminds me of some other guest that either agrees or disagrees with something that some other guests said, and you've attached it. 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 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.

Can I use that to fit it into an example? So I'm thinking of you, you said something about 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 brings it into their...

Absolutely. Okay. Absolutely. Use it as quickly as you can, again, repetition, but fit it into your network of ideas. Stop if you have to, because you can read a ton, but if you're not... I think reading even things that you don't retain still change your sensibility at some level, even if you can't pull up all of the ideas and statistics and so on. But for things that you really want to be able to access, connect it to other things that you already know, and someone's called spaced repetition. If you can have a way where you come back to it at intervals, that'll be much better. I use this read-wise as a programming. I'm not affiliated with them in any way. It's just a thing that I use where if I have highlights in Kindle books or ebooks, 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 repetition, where if 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 learning anything, spaced repetition, language learning, all this 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 space it out. And quizz yourself is a great way to retain. So there's something called the generation effect, which is if you have to do highlighting versus flashcards, flashcard quizz is much better. The generation effect is being forced to come up with an answer, in fact, sometimes, especially if it's wrong, primes your brain to then retain the right answer. It's actually 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 it doesn't matter. You'll better retain it when you see the right answer.

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

It's salient. This is one of this quizz where it feels hard because you should do it before you know the answer. It's something I wrote about in range called desirable difficulty. Difficulties. These are things that make learning feel less fluent. They are unpleasant. They may slow you down. Much better for long-term retention.

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

Often. 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... One of the most famous ones is called interliving or mixed practice. And this is if When you're training at something, you want to vary the types of... Let's give an example. Djing. Djing?

I'm DJing at the moment.

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 to, instead of doing the same skills still over and over and over again. Well, let me give you a research example, and then you can port it into DJing. So in a recent study, there were dozens of middle school math classrooms, middle school, a sixth grade, that were assigned to different types of math learning. Some of them, assigned. Some of them got what's called blocked practice. You give problem type A, A, A, B, B, B, B, et cetera. Kids make progress fast, they're happy, rate their teachers highly, et cetera. 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. When the test came along where everyone has to transfer to new problems, the interleave 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.

What's going on there?

I think it seems to be, and this works for physical learning as well. I think this is one of the reasons why, in this, if you want, why futsal is, why nine 80% of the best footballers grow up on futsal instead of playing on full-size pitch, 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 mental template instead of just an ability to execute this flexible template that can be applied going forward.

So you're getting a broader context of the challenge versus a very narrow solution perspective to how the challenge is solved. You're understanding it from a deeper level from different sides.

And you're building this generalizable model in your head of how to approach it. 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 grading and everything. Then they are re-randomised the next year and re-randomised 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, 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 poorly because they thought it was hard, don't do as well on the test the first year, overperform in subsequent classes. And the difference is the way to get someone to do really well in 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.

The tricky thing with that, as you say, is I think about all the areas and industries that I'm playing in now. So I go, Do I have the time to go broad? I'm learning to DJ at the moment, and at the moment, I'm just trying to figure out what these fucking buttons do. You know what I mean? There's all these buttons. 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 understanding the beats of music and maybe spend some time making music myself. Because right now I'm just trying to smash two songs together at the right time.

I think this gets at a fundamental issue that maybe I should have brought up earlier, actually. It has to do with how you characterize the different tasks that you're trying to learn. There was a period where I was really confused about the research I was reading in building expertise because there were two camps of researchers, both led by eminent scientists, one that would study people doing more 10,000-hoursy approach same thing over and 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. Why are they finding such different results? Again, I'm looking through for all these signs of bad data, not finding it. And fortunately, I gave a talk 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 he asked someone for my email address, and 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 interested in my critique of some of the research. I was saying, I'm really confused. What are you working on now? I'm working through my confusion about this, why do people sometimes get better with narrowly focused practice and 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 wicked learning environments. These are terms coined by a psychologist named Robin Hogarth. Kind is like next steps and goals are clear, Rules repeat. It's based on patterns, repetitive patterns. Rules never change.

Give me an example.

Chess, golf. 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 your chance reaching grandmaster drops from about one in four to about one in 55. Also why it's relatively so easy to automate. Feedback is quick and accurate. 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. Work next year may not look like work last year. And so whether or not people get better in a predictable way with this very narrow practice depends a lot on where on that kind to wicked spectrum the task happens to be.

What's an example of a wicked learning environment?

So let's say one of the examples that I love that he turned me to was in medicine. There's a lot There are areas in medicine where something is done and the person making the decision actually never learns of the consequence of the decision. Or I would say judges in some cases in the criminal justice system are set up to have maybe the worst judgment they could have in some ways because they almost never get feedback. They have very little... They can do whatever they want, and they almost never get any feedback. But so in medicine, there was this one example in one of the studies that I thought was just interesting and illustrative where this physician became famous for being able to diagnose typhoid as a New York physician by feeling around palpating people's tongues, feeling around their tongues with his hand. And you could tell a week or two before they would even get it, this person is going to get typhoid. And as one of his colleagues later observed, he 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. With the feedback he's getting is reinforcing the exact wrong lesson. 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 and I see if it hooks or slices, and then I change the clubface and try it again. And so what most of us are involved in, increasingly, work next year doesn't look like work last year for most of us anymore. And in fact, Andrew Zarexon, again, the guy who did the research underlying the 10,000-hour rule, when he eventually wrote a book, he made this caveat in the book that said, The 10,000-hours framework, it applies to things where we know exactly how to be good, and a coach Each 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? In those areas, you want this much broader toolbox.

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 very broad... I've wrote down the quote, a lateral thinking with withered technology.

Yeah, that I 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 at a company in Kyoto that made playing cards with flowers on them, whereas his more prestigious peers went to big companies in Tokyo. The company was in huge trouble, had to diversify if he was going to survive. 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 a technology that's already well understood and combine it in ways that 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 a hit. That's what made Nintendo, which was found in a wooden storefront in the 19th century, that's what turned it into a toy and game operation. So he moved from machine maintenance to developing toys and games. And his magnum opus was the Game Boy, where it was a technological joke in every way.

It's like the processor was a decade old, the screen looks like rotting alfalfa or something. 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 set this philosophy 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 later in the 20th century forward. Before that, it wasn't necessarily the case. 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 information age period, 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 for invention.

So how important is focus in this equation, focusing on one thing? Because you're talking for much of this conversation about being broad, and people will associate that with unfocused.

Yeah. I think the difference is between doing a bunch of things over your career, over your life or a span, and attempting to do a bunch of things at once. We can't technically do a bunch of things at once. We don't really multitask. We don't have the capacity to do it. We're actually just toggling between things really quickly. It's been shocking to me to look at the research how big of an impairment that is for people's performance, particularly because because it takes time to switch. And so you're not... Again, the scientist Gloria Mark, who I think has been at the forefront of study of attention, describes your brain as 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 going to be there when you move to the new thing for a while. And so you can't totally get into the next thing if you're interrupted. And it impairs your performance, and it's stressful. That's been the most surprising to me is that when people are heart rate variability is measured in some immune parameters, that when people switch a lot, if you just saw how many times people switched their task, 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.

Really? Yeah.

They've done studies on this.

She has done that. She's hooked people up at big organizations, too, like inside Microsoft and places like that, where people are wearing heart rate variability monitors. Everything they're doing is being tracked. In the old days, she was sitting behind people with a stopwatch, but technology obviously progressed from then. I think that's a surprising aspect of it. One of the reasons that email makes people so stressed is because it leads them to do this. I think in one of her studies, People are 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 switching actually takes place in two phases where the first phase is shutting down what you are doing, and the next phase is activating the rules for the next task. So even if you 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 comes with a switching cost.

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

I would, again, not start your day with something that is inherently a multitask. 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, never feel like it's finished. 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 because there's something called the planning fallacy. We always overestimate how much we can get done in a given amount 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 was a good productive day, focus on that thing. Pay yourself first, do the important thing first, and really try to have some... When you're trying to be focused, it's important to mingle with people and exchange ideas when that's what you want to 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 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 because you are paying attention to it to some degree.

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

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

How do they know it takes up brain space?

You can see how people perform on tasks when the music is on and when the music is off. It's not as big a deal if the music is very familiar where you're like... It's not novel, so you're not attending to it the same But when I'm trying to be super focused now, I'll turn the music off. But if I feel my motivation waning, then maybe I'll tune it back on. But I want to use it deliberately instead of just having it in the background all the time because it takes up a little space. If it's real noise, like decibels is a logarithmic scale, so small differences are actually a big deal. But if you go from, I think it's maybe 70 to 80 decibels, that's the difference of going from a washing machine to a vacuum cleaner thereabouts in your background noise. That's It has an enormous influence on your cognitive ability and your productivity, like a 15% decrement in your performance. Just because of sound? Yeah.volume, sorry. Because you attend to it. I mean, that's how our brain... Focus is a challenge because this is not the situation that we evolved in. 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 people.

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. 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. And I thought, you got to turn because you're not reading. I turned it off and I really made progress. But sometimes when I write books and stuff like that, I put instrumentals on. There's actually some apps in the app store now that are called Focus Music, and they're Lyric Free Music.

Maybe not lots of tonal changes or not very complex. Very simple. Melodies, maybe.

Repeating.

I think that's going to be better. The less novelty there is for you to attend to, that's better. But I think it's also worth trying it with nothing. It depends how much you're pushing yourself. Like a tiny improvement of motivation or your or feeling good might be worth it if you're not all the way at the edge pushing yourself. I don't know if you've ever been on a... There was a time where I was trying to do some foreign language lessons that I was listening to while I would be running. If I started hitting it hard while I was running, I couldn't even remember what was said because you switch into being really focused. I think it depends. If you're pushing yourself all the way, you need everything. 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. And if I'm in that phase, I want every advantage I can have, so I push the distractions out. But there's also times to be pleasant. I think part of what's sensible is working in intervals, planning to work in intervals, focus hard for a little while, do the Maya Angelou, then switch to your little mind where we're doing something that's more fun and refreshing, and maybe lets you incubate for a few minutes also.

Take a shower, take a walk.

What about notifications? Because I have a lot of notifications. I try to turn them all off, but they're still there in the background. And you was talking before we got going about this internal barometer of distraction that we all have.

Yeah. So this is another aspect of Dr. Mark's work, where she found that we have this 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 going to get rid of the notifications or whatever this stuff is, you will start self-interrupting to maintain the cadence of interruptions to which you have become accustomed. As if we have some internal like, distractometer that is saying, this is your normal cadence of interruption. I'm going to continue it by popping into your brain, Oh, here's this thing I need to check. Oh, here's this person I didn't respond to. 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 build by getting rid of those external interruptions, know that you're going to 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 uninterruptible.

Okay, so just want to make sure I'm clear on this. So say that I get a notification 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 for a while because that's what I'm used to. We get comfortable with a certain level of interruption at a certain cadence. Even if we remove the thing that's interrupting us, we'll just replace it with something else that interrupts us that amount at that cadence. Yeah.

So you can see in studies where people are taking cognitive tests, if they have their phone, invisible, even if it's off, the people who are more phone dependent or more used to interruptions, they'll have a bigger impairment on the test if the phone is even visible or around them because Yeah, and so it's, 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 what you forgot to do or who you forgot to respond to, write it down. So at least maybe that helps it not stick in your mind where you're 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.

It makes me think a lot about people that struggle with sleep and just sleep hygiene, generally, because 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. It's probably going to have quite a big impact on our ability to sleep.

Yeah. 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 because you don't really want to be 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.

What do you do?

I leave it in a different floor and airplane mode.

Have you always done that? No. When did you start doing that?

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 got to lock in and be better. I have a five-year-old son, and I was more of a night person who would work at night. I would do a lot of my writing in the wee hours, and he's getting up early, no 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. 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 I think I became a lot better about it when my son came around.

It's funny you mentioned 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. I think as a big football fan and a big Manchester United fan, I always thought, When my kid comes out, if my wife someday, the first thing I'm going to 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 seems to suggest that if I want him to become a Manchester star, maybe I shouldn't do that.

I'm not convinced that you are going to be a vicarious living dad. Maybe you'll turn out to be, but I'm not convinced. But let me tell you, you just remind 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 paths, but they tend to follow the Roger path, not the Tiger path. Tiger Woods, we know, are very early specialization, famously. Roger Federer played a whole bunch of different sports, didn't specialize until later than some of his peers.

Tiger was playing golf since he was...

He was His father gave him a putter when he was 10 months old, when he was two. It just was a toy. He wasn't trying to teach him to be a golfer. He gave him a toy. As Tiger himself said, My father never wants to ask me to play. It was always me asking him to let me play. But that's ignored. But at two, he was on national television. You can go on YouTube, see him on national TV showing off his swing. And then by three, he's saying, I'm going to be the world's next great golfer. 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, rugby, skateboarding, soccer. Mother was a tennis coach but declined to coach him because he wouldn't return balls normally. I guess didn't like deliberate practice. Kept doing, let's see, he did handball, he did some rugby, 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 agaced, didn't She thought this was like, go, sure. And so she asks the reporter to hear the interview recording. Turns out he just said Mercedes in Swiss German. He just wanted more CDs, not a Mercedes. She was fine with that. So he went on to be Every bit as famous as Tiger Woods. But even tennis enthusiasts don't usually know anything about his developmental story, even though it's the norm, according to the science. We only tell the Tiger stories, even though that one's the exception. And this is Why do we only tell the Tiger story? This is part of the debate I've had with Malcolm Gladwell when we're running together, and he said, Well, he told me, It's a human cat video. You go on YouTube and see him at two years old, and you got to share it. I think that's true. But I think it's also because it feels like this tidy narrative narrative that we can extrapolate to anything we want to be good at in our own lives.

The problem is, as we talked about, golf is almost a uniquely horrible model of almost everything else that humans want to learn. It's like the epitome of a kind learning environment where the situation isn't changing you're not having to react. So I think it's a bad model. And we underplay, even for famous people, the normal developmental trajectory. I once gave a talk to a small group of people about some of this research in sports, showing that the typical path to becoming elite is with a sampling period. You learn a broad range of skills, learn about your own interests and abilities, delay specializing to later than peers. And Serena Williams sat in the second row, and I'm freaking out because you can present all the data you want, but if the goat stands up and says you're an idiot, It's going to be a bad day, right? And I'm like, Please don't let her ask a question. Of course, she raises her hand for the first thing, and she goes, I think my father was ahead of his time. He had me do ballet, track and field, gymnastics, taekwondo, learn to throw a football for the overhand snapping motion of a serve.

When there was too much travel on a youth tour, he took me off so I could focus on school. I'd been a senior writer at Sports Illustrated, and I had never heard that. I assumed that she was this quintessential Tiger story. So I think even those stories, when you look more deeply, they're not as clear-cut as we tend to think.

Well, I learned this myself I didn't know this as the rule, but I found the story of Lomachenko because my friend of mine brought me ringside to a fight in New York City, and I sat at the side of the ring watching this guy called Vassil Lomachenko that I'd never seen in my life. I just couldn't believe his footwork. I'd never seen anything like it in my life. Then after the fight, he won the fight, of course. After the fight, I looked into his win record, and it was something like he'd won 300 of his amateur fights and only ever lost one. Then he'd gone back and beat the guy that he had lost against. And in my mind, I'd never seen a boxer like ever. And then when I read into your work, you've mentioned him as well as being one of these examples that had a really varied early upbringing, didn't just focus on boxing. And that's ultimately what made his skills stack so unusual, and therefore, probably what made him the best.

His story surprised even me where he took several years off to learn dance. I wouldn't usually expect someone to take years off. It's just do things in those same years. So that was amazing.

His father's called Anatoly, and I think it was his father that took him off into dance classes or something, and then let him go back to boxing.

For your prospective child, I wouldn't say, Don't expose them to soccer. Because I think a lot of this is... I think there's a few things going... There are three buckets of things going on with why this delayed specialization works in sports. One is match quality. Again, the degree of fit between who you are and what you do.

Is that about passion, like what you're passionate about?

Ability and interests, both. And the earlier you force selection, the more likely you put the wrong person in the wrong spot. So especially when selection is way pre-puberty, you're probably putting people in the wrong spot.

My kid might want to be a boxer, but I'm forcing him to be a soccer player, and he might miss his potential with boxing.

Premature optimization, yeah. Okay. And that's also why we often see on junior teams, the relative age effect, where kids born earlier in their birth cohort are way overrepresented on junior and youth national teams, because when they're eight or whatever and selected, if they're eight and 10 months versus just turned eight, that's a huge difference of development in that age. And coaches mistake that biological maturation for talent. And so youth teams are overloaded with kids born early in their youth cohort. And also in school, especially boys, if They're younger in their age cohort are much more likely to get diagnosed with ADHD, but they're just acting like the younger boys that they are. And then that disappears at the top level. So it's not a good thing. So there's the relative age effect. That's one. Or premature choosing. There's injury, which is we now see a lot of adult style overuse injuries in kids, and the main predictor of that is nine months a year of one sport and one sport only. So this isn't about less sports. There seems to be a protective effect of diversifying that is separate from just doing less, but actually balancing yourself out in some way.

But then there's a skill learning advantage where it's similar to language, where kids who grew up with multiple languages, they will often show a little delay in some of their language skills, but that delay is totally wiped out in the long run, and they have an advantage for subsequently learning other languages. It looks very similar in a lot of these skills where if you're diversifying, there may be some delay, but you have an advantage for picking up other skills later on. And I don't think this is about whether you're putting on a basketball jersey or a football jersey. I think it's about variability in your problem solving, which is why I think so many of the great footballers grew up on futsal, where-What's futsal? It's futsal with a small ball, soccer-like game with a small ball I think the the Brazilian name is like, football de silo, which it means like football in a room. Small ball stays on the ground, played in a small space, and kids will be playing on cobblestone one day and concrete the next day. And it's like in a phone booth at hyperspeed. And so no one's drifting down the field and everyone's having to judge, even if you don't have the ball, pick up on body movements to try to anticipate what's coming next.

The touches are about six times as frequent as is in full-scale football. And so I think it engenders a lot more of this variability than does just the full-scale game.

It makes your reactions a lot faster as well. You have to make decisions faster with the ball because you have enough space. Be cool under pressure. It's funny. When you're talking When you think about the Tiger example and why people broadcast that story more than they broadcast what you consider to be the average, which is just people having this varied upbringing and then eventually finding one thing and taking it forward. It made me think that from my experience, people They basically broadcast anything that's the exception because it's the exception. The story of Tiger Woods is one example, but on the other side, with someone like Anthony Joshua who started boxing at, I'm going to butcher this, but let's say, 24, I hear that all the time because it's so unusual that he would become world champion but start at 24. The other story that you hear all the time is the child prodigy story of, I don't know, a Michael Jackson or a Tiger Woods that started when they were two. You don't hear about the person that starts at 15 because it's not interesting, because it's the norm.

Or who ramps up in a normal way. In a normal way, yeah. Because early exposure is great. Early exposure is good. But yeah, and It's a little more equivocal. It's less of a prescription also. When someone starts late, we think they defied the odds. This is amazing. And when someone starts early, that's a very easy example to emulate. And so I think a lot of it is about that ease.

We reference the word match quality, but also we talked about passion a little bit, which is one factor of match quality. A lot of people are trying to figure out what they should be aiming at in their life. And one of the most popular questions I get from young people is, how do I find my passion? How do I know what it is? Or at least, what's the process to finding it? And they refer to it as if it's this Easter egg, and there's one of them, and they have to go find it. There's not one. And it's singular because passion is a singular word.

Yeah. No, first of all, I think losing the idea that I mean, that's the idea that there's a single soulmate out there for you. And I mean, obviously, I found my single soulmate, but for most of the rest of you, there's a lot of things you might be interested in. In fact, the more things you try, you'll probably figure out the more things that you're interested in. I was just last week spending a little time. I was at the Pentagon spending some time with a lieutenant general who helped with a program they call talent-based branching there, where they were losing a lot of the people they identified as the highest potential were leaving the army. And they started this pilot program called talent-based branching, where instead of saying, Here's your path, here's your career path, get up or out, they'd pair them with a coach-like figure, and they'd have them dabble in five different career paths a little bit, reflect on it with their coach, take some tests, how did this fit you? They have to keep track of the reflections in an online portal. Again, self-regulatory learning. Got to do it explicitly. And in that process, not 90% of the army cadets who went through that process changed their career preference.

This is just from a little bit of dabbling because you don't know what's out there. You don't know what the opportunities are. It helped retention, so people were more likely to stay if they find better fit. This is, I think, actually one of the really important things about, and I'll circle back to passion a little bit there. But when we think about grit, which everyone thinks of as I think about this, and the reason that the army made me think about it, my semantic network, is that the most famous grit research was done at West Point at the United States Military Academy by Angela Duckworth and her colleagues. And it found that the grit survey, the grit survey is a 12-question survey. Half the points are awarded for consistency of interests, not changing what you're interested in, and half the points for persistence of effort or perseverance. It turns out to be a good predictor of who would get through this very rigorous orientation at West Point called beast. Also has some predictive value for who would graduate.

So just to give you some context for the One of the listeners there from the way that I understood this is that Angela Duckworth did this study to basically figure out what it was that made people more likely to get through this very rigorous selection process at an army barracks or something. She determined that this grit, as she called it, was the thing that allowed people to be successful. From that study, I've heard this all over the place, that actually what makes people successful, even in my team, is grit. Yeah.

That survey turned out to be a better predictor than were some traditional metrics of who would get through beast like test scores stuff like that. It also had some value for who would get through the military academy, as did some of those traditional metrics. But tons of those, since about the mid-1990s, those very gritty cadets at West Point, almost half of them have been quitting, almost on the day that they are allowed. They have a five-year active duty service commitment after they graduate, and almost half of them have been quitting. And so the army at a certain point said, We've got a millennial grit problem, too much avocado toast, not enough mortgages, or whatever. And then some scientists who are also officers, decided to study the problem, and they said, We haven't gotten a grit problem overnight. We've got a match quality problem. When the army looked like the rest of the economy, where it was more up or out and you faced the same problems year over year, and you could have a period of training, followed by a period of working, doing similar things. Ladder mobility was limited. That was fine. It just mimicked the rest of the economy.

Then you move into this, whatever you want to call it, knowledge, creativity, information economy. And people who can engage in creative problem solving and knowledge creation have tremendous ladder mobility.

They have lots of opportunities.

These young people are learning things about themselves in their early 20s, and they have no agency over career switching to match it, so they were just quitting. When the army first didn't realize this, so they threw attention bonuses at people. And the ones who are going to stay took it, the ones who are going to leave left anyway, half a billion dollars. Taxpayer money didn't fix the problem. But what I think it shows is that how limited your insight into what you might want to do is based on the things that you've tried. Again, Hermene Ibarra, as we learn who are in practice, not in theory. And so I think the biggest problem for young people is if they're sitting around introspecting to try to figure out what their passion is. Go and try something. It's almost certainly not going to be the first thing. It may be. You may get lucky, but it's probably not going to be the first thing. So you should get going on that experiment process and start building a model of the world so that you can understand what your options are. Because I also think the issue with passion and happiness is, again, I was talking about, I think it was before.

I can't remember everything that was before the recording started and after. But when I used to run the 800 meters or now when I write books, if you ask me at any given moment, am I enjoying this? Am I happy about it? Am I passionate about it? Sometimes like, no, I want to throw my computer out the window. Are you crazy? But it's so engaging. It's so compelling, and it pushes me in a way to learn that I can't do just on my free time. And so I don't think we have to think about just passion. Find something that is so incredibly engaging to you and then go from there.

And engaging really is how do you know that it's engaged? It's when you drop into that flow state where nothing else seems to matter or- Flow is a tricky one because it's a lot easier.

It shows up a lot more in people that are surfing or painting than it does in some knowledge work. But I think when you get really engaged in something, you have a curiosity about how you can get better at it, what else you can learn next. So I think it stimulates this curiosity that you don't see in people when they're just in something where they're going through the motions. So you start to understand. I remember when my then-girlfriend, now-wife, it was important to me for health that both of us be lifelong exercises, for example. And the first time we moved in together and I'm saying, All right, we got to identify something that works for you. And I take her to a gym and drop her off. And not realizing I have decades of learning how to do stuff in a gym that I take for granted. And then I realized, okay, I need to walk this walk with her. And so we would try different things, like running. She wasn't as into that. So then try some other thing, et cetera. And finally, she found one class, and she comes home this day. We did this, and then we did this.

It was so hard. Let me show you this other thing we did. I'm like, You found your thing. The one problem was then when we were looking at moving states, we had to be within 15 minutes of that class walking distance for any house that we were going to buy. But it's like you can see this curiosity develop when someone hits something. It's so engaging that they want to understand how to be better. They want to talk to other people doing it. They get so curious about it.

But you have to experiment.

You have to experiment. I wish there were a way out of that. I wish you could say this is the thing that's going to work for you. Maybe someday...

With AI.

Maybe, but...

Highly unlikely.

Highly unlikely. And AI just changes the feel that you're playing in. And so I think experimentation, I think it's going to be even more important as people can't expect to be doing the same thing their whole careers anymore. I mean, there are threads that they can expect to carry through, but not the same exact thing.

When I I saw your video called Why Divergent Thinkers Beat Geniuses in the Real World, I thought you were going to talk about neurodivergence in the video. So someone that was diagnosed with ADHD, maybe when I was about 30 years old, I thought, Oh, he's going to explain why neurodivergence, things like ADHD and autism, result in better outcomes in the real world. Has your work ever had any crossovers with neurodivergence?

Not a lot, but I have read some of that work, and I do think something that's really important is the more different types of thinking we can get into a stew, the better off I think we all are. I mean, there are reasons why ADHD, it's not a big body of work, but I think it's relevant where you can look at nomadic populations that then settled and you can see certain genes that are associated with, and these are small effects, but you can see certain genes that are associated with, like novelty seeking with ADHD, will apparently start to be selected out once they settle. It's more common when they're nomadic. What that suggests to me is that these are things, this attentiveness to lots of different stimuli that are really important, have been important for us ancestrally and are still important, and so they're still here. They may be maladaptive if you're telling someone they have to sit still in a classroom for 10 hours a day, which I think is a difficult environment for anyone to adjust to. But I think to some extent, and I think this has happened sometimes in some There's a lot of companies that look for opportunities for people with autism where you say, Okay, where is this adaptive?

Where is this type of thinking adaptive instead of maladaptive?

So useful instead of unproductive.

I think if we're not doing that, then you're missing opportunities to really use people who think differently from you.

Yeah. I mean, it's interesting because your work does... Whether it is endeavoring to intentionally or not, it really does make a great case for diversity in the workplace. Yeah.

You want to do a quiz?

Sure.

Pretend you're a doctor, okay?

And I'm your- Let me just put my white coat in my head with a little stethoscope around my neck. Yeah. Okay.

Because that's what all doctors look like. And I'm your patient, okay? And I've got a malignant stomach tumor. And there's a new type of ray or focused radiation that can destroy the tumor if it's at sufficient intensity. The problem is at that intensity, it will also destroy healthy tissue in my stomach. So how can you save me? Okay, while you're thinking of that, tell your story. There was once this general, I had to capture a fortress to liberate a country from brutal dictator. He had plenty enough troops to do it. And there were roads radiating out like wheel-spokes from the fortress, but they were strewn with landmines. So if he marched all his troops down any one road, he'd suffer a lot of casualties. So he had the idea, let's split up in a single file lines We'll go to the different spoke-like paths, and we'll synchronize our watches, and they converge there at the same time, and they liberate the fortress. Or they capture the fortress, liberate the country. One more story. She wants a fire in a small town in danger of spreading to neighboring structures. Fortunately, it was near a lake, so neighbors are coming and they're filling pails and bailing water on it.

Not working. Fire chief shows up. She says, Stop what you're doing. Everyone, get in a circle. Fill up your buckets, get in a circle around the fire. On the count of three, one, two, three, dampens the fire. And They put it out. Fire chief gets a raise. Can you save me now? It doesn't matter. I'm giving you a very quick version, but the answer is you can arrange multiple low-intensity rays around me so that they converge at the focal point. So they go through my torso without damaging me because they're intensity, but they converge at the right spot making high intensity. This is a very truncated version. If you were getting the real test, you would have had a lot more time, and still most people don't solve it, so don't worry. It's called the Dunker Radiation Problem. This is a very truncated version of a large body of research that shows that when you're facing a novel problem, the number of solutions and the chance of coming up with a good solution are predicted by the number and breadth of analogies that your group can come up with. What predicts that is the breadth of experience of the people in the group.

If you're facing a novel problem and you have only people with the same expertise, it's not much better than having one brain. What you want to do is come up with what's called a reference class where you sit down, you come up with as many structurally similar analogies from all sorts of different areas. This sounds like this and this other thing. And they don't have to be as far flung as what I just did. But in the studies where people have more time, with each successive story, you tell them more people will start solving the original one, even though they don't know that they're related. And so you want to get people together who are really different, come up with a whole bunch of these like, this feels like this. Look for which ones are structurally similar, and you'll start thinking of possible solutions.

Yeah, I mean, that's just such a brilliant case for diversity in thinking and experience when you're building a team, when you're co-founding a team, when you're coming at a problem. I was thinking actually yesterday about microphones. So this is the first podcast we've ever recorded. If people are watching, they might notice this all of a sudden. It'd be interesting to know if you noticed this before I I mentioned it, but there's no microphone here. This is the first podcast we've ever recorded where there isn't a microphone here. I was thinking, as you were speaking then, about how when we had the debate about how to solve this problem, and the problem that we're trying to solve for is that there's a guest bang on the table and it comes through the microphone. People send me messages on LinkedIn saying, Hey, it's so annoying that people bang, and then whatever. The microphone is now above us and coming down. As we sat around the three of us yesterday, it's a little analogy for what you were describing. You've got Will, who's got his experience in audio. You've got Jack, who's got his experience. Then you've got me, who's got basically no experience, but I do do a TV show called Dragons Den, where we wear a different type of microphone.

We were all chucking in our solutions to this problem based on our own perspectives of audio recording. Jack's solution one. But my solution before that was, while on Dragons Den, we have one glued to our chest, so why can't we just glue it to the guest chest? It was interesting watching us all iterate through these different solutions that come from different places. Doing this cost-benefit analysis on each of the solutions. Obviously, one of the problems with my solution is guests will touch their chest, and then that will fuck that up. Yeah, they touch themselves. Then also, we have to grope them when they arrive, which we didn't like. But it's the same thing. You need a really diverse set of experiences to hone in on the winning solution. But in most pursuits, what we do is we collect people who have done it before.

Collect people who have done it before. It's not that you don't want those people. You just don't want only those people. And the tendency also is often to use the first analogy that comes up. You don't want to do that either. You want to have a menu of possible solutions to look at because there's this thing called the creative cliff illusion. People think their best ideas and most creative ideas will come either quickly or not at all. And in fact, they tend to come later as you're trying to come up with ideas.

Interesting.

Yeah. But our inclination is that it's this flash of lightning, and either it comes or it doesn't.

Shit, that's made me question a lot of things I do because sometimes I get an idea and I write it down and I share it straight away.

Oh, there's nothing wrong with sharing the idea, right? But if you're trying to solve a real problem, I wouldn't stop at your first idea.

Throw it out for discussion and then allow it to- And then stay open to it.

And don't assume that if something didn't come to you with a flash of insight, that you should just stop thinking.

You're writing a book about constraints. Yeah. I'm not going to give away all of the things in the book because you need to sell it.

Especially since half of it isn't written, so I can't even give away half of the stuff.

But I found this story about Apple really important because it's helped me think about some of the things doing in business, but also in my life. Are you able to share that story of Apple, what you've discovered in terms of focus and constraints? Sure.

Not Apple so much as another company called General Magic that was A lot of the team that designed the original Mac came to this company, and it was the hottest thing in Silicon Valley, and they were going to build the iPhone. They had the idea. They had the vision. The drawings they have look like the iPhone. They had the team from the Mac. They had this incredible talent. They went public in a so-called concept IPO. They didn't have a product yet, but the idea was so hot that they were taken public. And long story short, it turned into a disaster because they had no boundaries. They had as much money as they wanted. They didn't have any customer in mind. Anything they thought was cool, they built it. And so the project just grew and grew and grew and grew and never found the focus to turn into anything usable. But a lot of the alumni that came out of there realized that that was a problem. And so going forward, they would have lessons like, you're better off envisioning a customer, even if it's the wrong person, than none at all in just building something that's cool.

Because even if it's wrong, you can learn that you were wrong by trying something. Whereas if you don't have one, you don't even have a feedback mechanism for learning. And so it was spending some time with some of those alumni got me really interested in constraints. And I'm still putting together some of that writing, so I don't know that I can do it justice at the depth that I could if I'd already written it.

It's interesting with the words you use because there appears to be a bit of a paradox or contradiction in this idea of like, breadth and then constraints and focus. And it's this interest that you know.

I mean, that's part of the reason I got interested in it because a question after range that people had for me was, how do you know when to focus? So it really very much came out of this question because eventually you get this broad toolbox. You have to focus it into achievement at some point. You don't want to just pinball forever.

Which is what you said as your Hot Streaks.

Hot Streaks, right? You want to focus into a hot streak eventually. And it also came out of this aspect of me-search, all research as me-search, where my own biggest challenge, the bigger my projects are and the books being big projects for me, the harder it is for me to draw the boundaries of what is inbound... Because the topics I take on in my books are, by definition, can't be perfectly answered. Balance of nature and nurture in developing a skill, how broad or specialized to be and when. I've had so much trouble saying, this is the boundary for what fits in here. And so I myself wanted to get better at learning how to use constraints in my own work. So for the first time with this book, for the first time I said... Because for both of my previous books, I've written 150 % the length of a book and then had to cut back because I just shove in everything I think is interesting. This time I said, I'm going to have an architecture ahead of time, force myself to adhere to that. And one of the first things I noticed was I usually just don't write the chapters in order.

I started with this book with my normal process of I'm going to jump in with chapter five because I just did the research. And I realized because I was starting to see this is going to break some of the structure up and downstream, I'm leaving all these blanks because I don't know what I will have already said. So I actually have to go back and start an order. So now, after being in writing for whatever, almost 20 years, suddenly I have a totally new work process and I'm writing an order for the first time, which is interesting and a bit scary. But I'm writing at length, too. I'm I'm actually going to turn in a book at the length of a book for the first time.

Are you not at all concerned about AI as a writer? Because these models are getting smarter and smarter every single week. And just generally, how do you look at the future of work in a world of AI? It feels like it's going to be such a disruptive force in career planning and what do I do with my future.

I mean, it might touch everything, but one, I love playing with it. I have these competing forces of maybe it'll... I'm a very curious person. Ai. I play with probably about four different AI programs a day. But the one that's the most useful to me is called site. Ai. Again, I don't have any affiliation with any of these things. I'm just a subscriber. S-c-i-t-e. Ai, where I can put in a scientific paper and it'll make a map showing all the other papers that cite it, and it'll try to automatically sort them into those that agree and disagree. And it really, helpfully, will show the snippet of how the target paper was cited in these other ones. I used to have to go sit in a research library and be doing that by scanning down a paper to find that. So it's like a day now is an hour. And I love that. If that means my books don't sell as well, but I get to learn 10 times as much science, that's a trade-off I'm definitely willing to make, personally. I'm not saying everyone should be willing to make that, but I'm willing to make that trade-off.

But in terms of work, generally, being disrupted, yeah, I think the model that I think of for... There's no singular model, but for how technological innovation has disrupted work in the past, a model that I like that I can tell quickly is the introduction of the ATM in the United States. It happened around 1970. So cash machine. And I went back and looked at news coverage, and it says every 300,000 bank tellers are going to go out of business overnight. And instead, what happened over the next 40 years, as there were more ATMs, there were more bank tellers, not fewer, because ATMs made bank branches cheaper to operate. So there were fewer branches overall, a few tellers per branch, but more branches overall, sorry. But it fundamentally changed the job from someone who's doing these repetitive transactions, repetitive cash transaction, to someone who's a marketing professional and a customer service representative and maybe a financial advisor. It shifted them to these strategic goals, where it's much broader mix of strategic skills. So if we can outsource some of that kinder learning environment, repetitive stuff to shift humans to being more strategic, I think that's a good thing.

I know radiologists have been some of the people who deal with medical imaging have been some of the people who have often in these reports by banks that say who's going to be replaced. They're often high on the list because they say the technology can read these pictures very easily.

Radiologist looks at a scan and tells you if you've got a cancer or something.

Yeah, but first of all, I have yet to hear the problem of like, wow, too many people are having too easy access to radiology. I think we want more of this service. But I think most doctors are not doing Dr. House. Most of the stuff they're seeing is something they've seen a million times. I think a really important role for them is strategic of, well, what should this mean to the person? How should I deal with them and what's reasonable to implement in their life and what's feasible for them to do to make a change. And so I think it'd be great if we could shift. I don't think it will replace those doctors. I think it might shift them to a more strategic role where they don't have to spend time doing the more tactical stuff and could do the more strategic stuff. So that's been even in chess, when IBM's Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov in chess in 1997, and he noticed that it beat Garry Kasparov. He was so much better when he was the best in the world at the time. Now, a free app on your phone would beat Garry Kasparov.

Stuff. And he noticed the computer was so much better at tactics. These are these small patterns of moves that he had spent his life memorizing. But he noticed it wasn't as good as strategy, which is how to arrange the battles to wage the war. So he promoted what he called freestyle chess tournaments, where humans and computers could play in any combination. And the winners were neither supercomputers nor grandmasters, nor grandmasters with supercomunters. Two amateur chess players with three laptops. They knew something about chess. They knew something about algorithmic search, and they could coach the computers where to look. They couldn't even analyze their own games in the Winners' Press conference at a deep level because they didn't know enough about chess. But I think the lesson there is when the tactical part was outsourced, it, first of all, changed the people who were the best at the task like this, and it shifted the humans to the more strategic level. And so I think that's what we need to be ready to think about. What can we hand off so that we shift to a more strategic level?

How might you be wrong?

Maybe the strategic level, maybe these tools will be better at the strategic level than we would ever be. I still think there'll be a role for us in determining what their goals should be. That's a whole other level of strategy is like, what world do we want to live in? I don't think in the near term that we're going to be taking our cues from them in that role. But I think even the people... Last year, I was sitting around a camp wire with one guy who's running a generative AI company and another guy who was his first investor and who himself had worked in AI. They were both technologically adept. Incentives aligned. And one guy was saying, saying, We'll have artificial general intelligence within three years for sure. And the other guy was saying, I think this is a glorified toy. I still use Google more. And these were two people with similar expertise with incentives aligned, which to me suggests the degree to which even the people working on this stuff don't totally understand what its capabilities are or what it's doing. And so I think there's a lot that's unknown.

Someone made the case to me that they said, Think about it like this, Steve. You've got this, Steve, here. Say my IQ is 100. And there's another Steve through that war whose IQ is a thousand, what would you give me to do as a task versus what would you give him to do as a task? Who would you want to drive your kids to school? Who would you want to, I don't know, answer- You're saying we give everything to that person. Well, this is the analogy he gave me. He was like, What are you left with?

Even if it comes to that point, they'll still be the issue of comparative advantage, which is that these models are incredibly energy-intensive. And so you'd want to delegate energy to them for the things that you really want them to do. So even if they are, When you end up better than us at everything, because energy is not unlimited, there will still be things that are more valuable to have us doing than to have them doing. That's the case all the time. You may be better at certain things in your business, but you're not doing them because it's a comparative advantage for you to do this instead of those other things. So I think even if they do get to the point where they're better than us at everything, there's still roles for humans, but incredible amount of disruption. What really worries me, I was reading last year technological innovation in history, and we have, to put it in a very coarse nutshell, it's like for 300,000 years, we lived like squirrels, and then for 10,000 years, we lived like farmers. And then in 250 years, it's like everything changed every generation like crazy. So And that's been hard to adapt to.

And I think I thought that the industrial revolution, which ultimately led to pulling billions of people out of poverty, changed everything. I thought that because productivity increased so much that wages and things would have increased right along with them. But it turns out that there's pretty good evidence that there was actually a gap of probably about 40 years between the increase of productivity and the increase of wages. And that's not good. Like a 40-year gap between a huge technological disruption and shared prosperity, that's not something I think we can really afford. What helped solve the problem is that when lots of people got urbanized for the Industrial Revolution and looked around said, Hey, you have the same problem that I have. We need to band together for collective action. I think the challenge now is we're like an invisible factory, so it's harder to get people to collectively act because we're not sitting next to each other dealing with this problem. But I think we need to start thinking as a group of This technology is cool, but identifying problems that we want it to work on, not just building it out for the sake of just it's cool.

What world do we want to live in? I think we need to be asking those questions.

I think it's quite unlikely that we'll be intentional with it in the way that you're hoping. It'd be unfortunate.

I think a good sign, though, I think, is that even the technologists who I think are usually prone to hyperbole and saying, This will be the greatest thing, even when it's obviously not going to be, are sounding some notes of caution with this one in an early stage. And so I think that's attuned other people to some of those notes of caution. I don't think that gets us out of the woods by any stretch.

The notes of caution worry me.

Well, that's the point. They should worry. I think if we were where we are and not worried right now, I think that would be a lot worse.

What is the most important idea in your work that we haven't discussed, in your opinion?

In the sports gene, I think the most important idea that we haven't discussed is that talent at baseline, if you take a test in something, let's say you haven't trained in that thing, we'll call that your talent baseline, is sometimes correlated with your to improve from training. Training looks just like medicine because of differences between us. Some medicine might work for you in a way that it doesn't for me. Training is similar. Two people will get different results from the same exact training. Sometimes how good you are to start is predictive of how rapidly you improve, but very often it is not. That's a huge deal because we usually judge people's potential based on what we see right now or what we see at baseline before they've really had a chance to train. What I think What the science shows is that this talent of trainability is even more important than talent at baseline. And so if you're trying to evaluate people before they've really had a chance to find a training that fits for them, again, it's a messy answer because it means people have to experiment with the training that works for them, and that trainability is the most important talent.

And I think that's a different picture of talent.

Okay, this is very important because immediately as an employer, I thought, when I'm hiring people, if I'm hiring a producer for one of our podcasts, whatever, I shouldn't be focusing so much on... If I'm planning for them to work with me for 10 years, I should be thinking about their trainability.

Yeah, I was going to say it depends how quickly you need them to get going, right? If you need to know what they know today and they need to be using that thing tomorrow, that's one thing. But if it's about how good they're going to get in the long run, you just shouldn't assume that what you're seeing today predicts their ability to improve.

Can you measure someone's trainability?

I mean, you can measure it very easily in things like their aerobic capacity, the amount of oxygen that they can move through their body. Some of the initial studies of this were done in scenarios like that. We had everyone doing the exact same training, and you were literally measuring physiological parameters. You can do it in other types of cognitive testing and ability testing. If you're looking for a specific task, that's a little harder. If you're looking for a task that's customized to something in your business, I think that's more difficult. It's going to be a little more subjective.

I guess you can look at other areas of their life, I guess, in the professional context to see how quickly they developed. One of the things I look at when people apply for jobs to I work in one of my businesses is I look at their LinkedIn resume, but specifically how quickly they got promoted and moved through departments because that's an indicator. It's obviously not the most important thing, but you'll click on someone's LinkedIn and you'll see they joined as an intern. Then a year later, they were a manager of the team. Then a year later, they were the director of the team. Then a year later, they were moved up to a different department. A year later, they became the global head. I'm like, Oh, my God, this person really moves through the system well. That is an indicator of a few things. They get on with people because someone's pulling them up and saying, That person, go up. Their team are are also basically voting that they should be the manager. They have proficiency in learning rapidly, because especially if they jump between departments from HR to culture or whatever. I always think that makes them a bit more adaptable and teachable if they've shown that track record of changing professions and moving up the organization quickly.

Interesting, because that feels a little related to, I think, an important idea that we didn't talk about from Range has to do with so-called serial innovators. These are people who make repeated creative contributions to their organizations no matter where they are, even when they're changing, like I said, changing places. And these people, like a woman named Abby Griffin, a professor and her colleagues who studied these people, some of the descriptions of who they are, these are literal phrases from her work. They are systems thinkers. They read more and more widely than their peers. They have a need to learn outside their domain. They have a need to communicate with people with expertise outside of their own area. They appear to flit among ideas, which doesn't usually sound like a compliment. They repurpose things that are already available in new ways, all these sorts of things. You can feel in her writing, she's almost like talking to HR people saying, Just so you know, when you define a role too narrowly, you're making sure you select these people out or force them to go somewhere else to try to cultivate that breath. I don't think you can create these people from whole cloth, but I think you can absolutely stifle them by not allowing them to do that moving around internally.

I think when you're looking at hiring, I think the organizations that I've been around, at least, that disrupt themselves continually instead of waiting to get disrupted, reserve at least some of their hiring for instead of saying, Here's a square peg for a square hole that we need tomorrow, they say, What is something we want that we would have trouble teaching? Let's go get someone with that and we can coach them up on the stuff we're good at. An extreme example of this was this investment firm in Scotland. I spent some time with Bayly Gifford, this incredibly successful firm. I think this is extreme, but someone there told me they won't hire anybody with an MBA. I don't think you should rule out things like that, but anyway. But what they would go is they'd say, We want someone who has experience in this or that or this thinking. Let's go get them because we can't teach that thing, and then we can coach them up on finance. It's going to take them an extra few months to get going because we're going to have to teach them. But the stuff that... Why should we hire for exactly the stuff that we can most easily teach?

Let's for the stuff we want, but that we would have trouble teaching, and then we can teach them on it. I think the places that are looking to disrupt themselves keep an eye open for that thing. Not for every hire, but for some.

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You remove my health, you remove everything I have. You remove my dog, I still have myself. You remove my girlfriend, I still have myself. But if you remove my health, I lose everything. So it has to be my first priority. It has to be number one. And I've orientated my life around that. One area of my health that people often overlook is my oral health. And a game changer for my routine has been Colgate Total, who are a sponsor of this podcast. Unlike ordinary toothpaste that only clean Colgate Total really does provide superior 24 hour protection for your whole mouth. Colgate is the number one brand recommended by dentists. So join me in prioritizing your oral health. To learn more about Colgate Total's superior science, visit the link in the episode description below. One of the things I really love about your work is you always cite different studies, and they're particularly fascinating. I wrote down tons of different studies from different points that you've made today. But is there a favorite study that surprised you the most or What did your paradigm the most?

Some of the research about forecasting totally shocked me. So the most famous work ever done on forecasting, making predictions, was a 20-year program of research that had people making predictions about geopolitical, social technological events. And they got 83,000 probability predictions because people had to make specific probability predictions of the likelihood of an event by a specific deadline.

So like 20% probability of this happening by this time.

Correct. And it would be very specific. It would be a 20% chance that within the next 12 months, there will be a military confrontation that causes at least five casualties in the South China Sea. It had to be very specific so that they could say if was right or wrong. They needed so many because they had to differentiate good luck and bad luck from skill. The worst forecasters turned out to be the most narrowly specialized people who were... Not that these people are not important for generating knowledge, but who came to see the whole world through one lens or mental model, and they had spent their whole careers studying one problem and would see the whole world around that. They would wrap everything into that story, basically. So In this research, they were called the hedgehogs who knew one big thing, whereas the good forecasters were the foxes who knew many little things. Sometimes they had an area of expertise, and sometimes they didn't. But more important than what they thought was how they thought. They would collect different perspectives. They used social media, anything they had to take their own hypothesis and get other people to falsify it for them.

And those people turned out to be the best forecasters. And when they were put together in groups with one another, they became even better because they had this approach of borrowing from the scientific method to test their own ideas, basically. And it just surprised me that these random people, in many cases, in a tournament where they were pitted against the intelligence community in the United States that had access to classified information that they did not, they beat them handily. I just wouldn't have believed that unless I saw it, that that body of research about forecasting the ability to see around the corner, a big aspect of what made people good at it was... Actually, the research who led this work described those people as having dragonfly eyes. Dragonfly's eyes are made of thousands of different lenses, each one of which takes a separate picture, and they are synthesized in the dragonfly's brain. And so these people are gathering all these different perspectives, and they can seem confused and equivocal. So they might not make for good TV guests they actually found in the research because they don't go on and say, This is how it is.

The housing crash is coming. They're more circumspect in some ways. They might not be as good TV guests, but they're very good forecasters.

It just made me think that on a personal level, I need to keep pushing myself outside of my zone of comfort more. That's one of the big things I took away from the book Range, but also just much of your work is it's easy to get complacent in what I know, who I am, my identity, what I do. And in fact, that's probably the biggest risk to my future success, but also probably to my fulfillment as well. And it goes against our natural inclination to push into unknown territory. Because the older we get, the more like, they say you can't teach an old dog new tricks. I think it's more like the old dog doesn't really want to learn new tricks. Can't see the point in learning a new trick.

And to that point, of the so-called Big Five personality traits in psychology. One of them is called openness to experience, which is the most predictive of creativity. And in middle age, it reliably goes down. But actually, a study I loved in the book found that if you force older people to do something new, it can be some Sudoku or something, even if they don't get good at that thing, if it's new to them, it will improve their openness to experience. So you can actually stem the decline of openness to experience. It's not inevitable. Just by forcing yourself to do new stuff that you're not competent at is great for brain health. It makes your life feel longer because our memory works in chapters where when you try new stuff, it's like a new chapter. So it'll make your life feel like it's not passing as quickly, and it keeps your openness to experience from declining. Just picking something to do that's new, even if you're not planning getting really good at it, I think is important.

It's funny. I said that thing a second ago about when I look at someone's LinkedIn, and then I looked down and I found this little research piece that LinkedIn did that I pulled out that said, one of the best predictors of who would become an executive in a company was the number of different job functions that individual had worked across an industry. So that's research done by LinkedIn, wasn't it? Yeah.

That was on about a half million members. Yeah. And And the interesting thing about that was when I was in contact with LinkedIn talking about that and trying to get some of that data, I said, I feel like your guy's product might militate against people doing this because you're saying This is who's doing the best, but they might want a much cleaner linear trajectory. So maybe you should build another product where they can build a narrative into it and say, Here's why I switched. Here's what I learned.

What's the actual... Can you recap to me what the actual finding was?

That was pretty much it. Across a half million members, the strongest predictor of who was going to go on to become a future executive was the number of different job functions that they'd worked across in the industry.

In a specificIn industry.In a specific industry?In an industry. So not changing industries?

Not changing industries. Although changing industries, there was a bunch of lower-level stuff, and changing industries was useful at times also. But to be an executive in a particular industry, lots of job functions across an industry.

And does that mean different Different departments within that industry?

They characterize job functions. You have to be doing something fundamentally different.

Okay, so give me an example.

I think one of the easiest one is where you go from being a performer or a good performer to being someone who's managing other performers. That's a classic one. It doesn't have to be progression, though. But that's, I think, a very simple one. Or in my industry, it'd be like going from writing to editing would for sure be one, which is a mix of writing and managing.

But that's a sidestep in your industry.

Sidestep, yeah, for sure. I mean, some people would... Well, I guess it depends. Some people would view that, and in some places it's going up, but I'd view it as a sidestep.

The other thing I found, which was pretty shocking, was in the part of your book where you start talking about some of the dangers of specialism And you reference a study that found cardiac patients were less likely to die if they were admitted to a hospital when the doctors were away.

We can tie in a few of the things we've been talking about to cardiac surgery here. So this was this study. Because I'm conscious when I write about dangers, specialization is hugely important, obviously. And in medicine, it would be crazy to say that specialization in medicine, increasing specialization, hasn't been both inevitable and beneficial in many ways. But the point I was trying to make is that it's also an under-recognized double-edged sword, to the point where these two Harvard-led studies found that if you're checked in to a teaching hospital with certain cardiac conditions on the dates of a National Cardiology Convention, when the most esteemed specialists are away, you're less likely to die.

That makes no sense. Right.

That's suboptimal outcome. And the conclusion was that's because these researchers or these surgeons have done the same procedure so many times that they will continue to do it even if it's not the right solution to the problem or if data shows that it doesn't work anymore. And so it's called the Einstaung effect in psychology, where you've done, you've solved a problem a certain way so many times that you will continue solving problems that way, even if the problem has changed or if new data that shows it's not the right solution. It's not to say those people aren't important, but they are human, and so they fall prey to the Einstaung effect. That's, again, why you want some of this mixture. To tie in surgery, we've also been talking about distraction and focus. One of those same researchers did some work that showed that if you have a surgical procedure, and this research looked at 980,000 procedures, that if you have a procedure on the surgeon's birthday, you're more likely to die within the 30 days after the surgical procedure, and they attribute it to the increased distractions that the surgeon is having on their birthday.

They don't know whether it's external or internal distraction, but you might not want to have your... Again, these are not huge effects, but over a large number of people, it makes a difference.

Yeah, gosh, that's terrifying. So one of the things I've come to learn today really is that knowledge is a double-edged sword. Like deep knowledge on one thing really is a double-edged sword. It will be your making, but in the long term, it might also be your breaking. And that really resonates with me because as we started the conversation with, there's a lot of things that I'm really knowledgeable about and know a lot about. And in fact, that's my biggest curse. And I have to find a way to basically self-disrupt myself continually and always assume that I am wrong. And not I'm not always assume I'm wrong. Always assume that there's a significant possibility that I'm wrong today. And maybe yesterday I was correct, but today I could be entirely wrong.

I mean, I've changed my mind about the fundamental beliefs I had when I was younger, and it's weird to think I mean, I was a grad student in environmental sciences, and I was firmly of the belief that environmental preservation and technological progress were at odds. I feel completely the opposite now. I think there are technological things we can do that ruin the environment, but I actually think the salvation of the environment requires technological progress. It's just like fundamental beliefs about the world. I think we should be open to that updating. And from a career perspective, if artificial superintelligence and some new form of free energy does everything better than us, then it does, and we'll have reorient life in some pretty dramatic ways. But until then, I think we need to dispense with the idea that you can live in a world where you did a period of training for most of us, and then you're just going to benefit off only that training for the rest of your life. You don't have to keep relearning.

We have a closing tradition on this podcast, David, where the last guest- Yeah, I know.

I love this tradition. I want to do it to my friends when they come over.

Interesting. The last guest leaves a question for the next guest. Interesting.

Oh, boy.

It's so funny watching People's Body Language when I open this book, they start to get quite nervous. It's so funny. I've asked, I don't know, a fucking shit, 100 questions today. And it's when I come to this question that people take the longest time to answer. So I'm like, Are these questions just better than my questions? No. For some reason, people get nervous.

Those other questions are things that are so top of mind for me that it's a choice between which of the three things that are in my mind should I spit out? This is like, you know what you have to think.

This is very different. What's your favorite sandwich? I'm joking. I don't know if that was it after.

I'm going to get No, it's much more difficult than that.

The question is, what is your biggest fear and how do you plan to face it?

I have a tendency that I think in some ways is good and fits with some of the things I've said, but in some ways it's bad to want to start things over a lot. Sometimes that means burning them down, even if they're going well. And in the past, I think I had that tendency with some of my personal relationships to I couldn't accept something going well, and it had to change or get better. And that led me to sometimes, I think, burn down some personal relationships in ways that I'm embarrassed of, that I regret. And I see this even in my own work where I actually value it because I end up doing all these new novel things. But it's almost like I can't... And it's good because after my first book, they're like, brand yourself as a sports gene guy. I'm like, no, that's dead to me now. It's dead to me before it's even published. It's dead to me. And that led me to do these other interesting things. But I sometimes worry that I have this pathologic, why can't I just accept this thing is good and let it be good. And it worries me much less in my work life.

It worries me a little in my work life that I'll always want to burn something down and start over. But it does worry me there. But I have more of a fear of it in the context of friendships because I know what I've done in the past. I think I'm better with it now. But thinking about the values I have in my life going forward, I don't want several relationships that were hugely important to me went away for things that were preventable because I was like, If it's not perfect, burn it down. And I think that was a really destructive impulse.

What is that, you? Where does that come from?

I don't know. I think it's this This feeling of always want to be in becoming, this feeling of starting over and improving that I find intoxicating. But I don't think that has to apply to personal relationships. And so a value that I really want to work on, I read this book that influenced me about philosophy, and it's centered what's called narrative values. These values that are objectively across cultures, things that people value. So this could be heroism, loyalty people value in that other country, and that you are subjectively attracted to. And one of the The ones that I think is valued in a lot of cultures that I'm attracted to, but that I've not been good at is forgiveness. And so my project is that's a narrative value I want to start building into my story to be a more forgiving person because I'm not good at it, and I need to get good at it. And I'm afraid that I won't get good at it, but I really want to.

Well, we learn, don't we? And that's much of what is at the very heart of your work, how to become bearer at learning. And you've clearly demonstrated that you're learning in that regard. I think much of the first The first step in learning is figuring out that we have a problem or something to solve, as you said with your experiments book. And your books are so unbelievably wonderful because they present a completely original, challenging, unconventional approach to solving problems. And you do go at a lot of the things that many of us have accepted as narratives in our life. And if we've accepted them as narratives and they're false, then they're probably in some way doing us a disservice in the short or long term. And that's why I find your work so wonderfully important, because in many respects, it is that counter narrative to a lot of the things that we've accepted. And you You do go the extra mile, even though it probably gives you a headache, I'm sure, because a lot of authors that I speak to don't go the extra mile, to figure out if what we're being told is true.

Ultimately, that's a means to an end. The end is to allow all of us to live more optimized, fulfilled and happy and productive lives in whatever domain and whatever definition we class those words. So thank you, David, for doing the work you do. I'm so excited to read whatever you make next. And you're writing a book on constraints. I just already know that if it's anything like these two books, Range and the Sports Gene, it's going to be one of the most important books I've ever read. So thank you.

That was a wonderful compliment. I don't want to add anything to that.

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