David Epstein: 10,000 Hours Is A Lie! The Morning Habit That’s Secretly Ruining Your Day!

Steven Bartlett (0:00)

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

David Epstein (0:03)

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.

SPEAKER_3 (0:11)

David Epstein is a New York Times bestselling author whose infamous work challenges the conventional wisdom about specialization, productivity, and what it takes to become successful.

Steven Bartlett (0:21)

What advice would you give to a person that's thinking about how to navigate their way to being really good at something?

David Epstein (0:26)

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

Steven Bartlett (0:30)

What is that?

David Epstein (0:31)

So the cycle is, reflect, what do you need to work on, plan, come up with an experiment for how you can work on that. Is that getting a job? Is it taking a class? Monitor and then evaluate. And people who do that repeatedly, they just keep improving. Two, so for anything you're doing, if you're not 15, 20 percent 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.

Steven Bartlett (0:50)

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

David Epstein (0:55)

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

Steven Bartlett (0:59)

What about notifications?

David Epstein (1:00)

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.

Steven Bartlett (1:09)

Really?

David Epstein (1:10)

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... That has an enormous influence in your productivity.

Steven Bartlett (1:20)

Interesting. The other thing I found which was pretty shocking was that you start talking about some of the dangers of specialism. Yes.

David Epstein (1:25)

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.

Steven Bartlett (1:31)

Gosh, that's terrifying.

David Epstein (1:33)

The conclusion was that's because...

Steven Bartlett (1:41)

David, how do you summarize the work that you do and why you do it, and who are you really doing it for?

David Epstein (1:47)

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

Steven Bartlett (2:14)

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

David Epstein (2:19)

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 kind of long lens, right? So one of the most important things to me, one of the most important messages that I've been working on in 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, right? That's not playing around, that's not experimenting, that's effortful, cognitively engaged, that's not doing the error correction, and do as much of it as you possibly can to the exclusion of other things. That's such an obvious way, right? And you will jump out to a lead, right? We see that in sports and music, we see that in school with certain head start programs that give people an advantage in some academic skills. The problem is that kind of narrow focus creates short-term results but undermines this broader toolbox that you need for long-term development. And so you'll see what scientists call fade out in these advantages, which isn't necessarily actually anything going away. It's the fact that people with this broader base will catch up and surpass what appears to be a fade out.