David Epstein – Wide or Deep?

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:04)
Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, methods, stories, and of strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. You can learn more and stay up to date at investorfieldguide.com.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:24)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
Clients of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:49)
My guest this week is David Epstein. David is a writer and researcher extraordinaire and the author of two great books.
His second, Range, is out today and I highly recommend it. We discuss the pros and cons of both the generalist and specialist mindsets in detail and go down many interesting trails along the way. Please enjoy our conversation.
So David, thanks for being here with me. We've got a whole ton to discuss covering your two books, a lot of your other writing. I know you're interested in a million things. We're going to go all over the place. Since the antecedents for your latest book, Range, really are buried in your first book, The Sports Gene, I thought it'd be fun to start there and really focus on what you discovered in the first book's research that led you to get so interested in this idea of specialization versus kind of broader set of interests. So maybe talk about that, what you uncovered, the kernel that you uncovered in the sports gene that's led to this later research.

**David Epstein** (1:42)
First of all, it was, I noticed that some countries that were sort of turning around their national sports programs, like at the Olympics, had embraced what they called talent transfer programs, which was taking adults who had been practicing, who had a history of, broad history of sports participation, a bunch of different sports, were trying to make national teams, weren't making it in whatever they were training in and said, hey, why don't we let you try these other sports before we kick you out of the developmental pipeline? And all the countries that were doing that, like Australia, the UK, not only gold medalists, but world record holders out of adults who had never participated in their sport at the Olympics prior to when they won the gold medal. And this sort of went so contrary to the 10,000-hour rule thinking, right? Where you have to, you'll get behind if you switch. That I started thinking more deeply about that. And eventually, when the book came out, obviously I critiqued the 10,000-hour rule in the sports gene.
And I got invited to the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference to debate Malcolm Gladwell, 10,000-hours versus the sports gene. It's on YouTube even though we have some common ground for sure.
And I'd never met him before. Very clever and I didn't want to get embarrassed. And so fear-motivated researching. I anticipated what I thought he would argue. One of his arguments I figured would be that head start in deliberate practice or highly technical focused practice. And whatever you're going to do is like an insurmountable advantage. And so I said, OK, if that's the hypothesis, let me go look in the research and see what we know about the development of athletes who go on to become elite from childhood. And it turned out to be very much the opposite. So the athletes who go on to become elite have early on what's called a sampling period. They do a wide range of sports. They gain a breadth of general skills. They learn about their own abilities, their own interests, and they systematically delay specialization later than their peers. So I go to this debate with Malcolm and I frame this as the Roger versus Tiger problem. Tiger Woods is the most famous, maybe ever, developmental story. Walking at six months, golfing at ten months.
And Roger Federer, where we don't really know that story so much, played like a dozen different sports as a kid. Mother was a tennis coach, refused to coach him, forced him to continue playing badminton, basketball, soccer, long after his peers had specialized.
And he turned out okay. And so my question was, which one of these is the typical developmental model? And it turns out that in almost all sports, it's the Roger model, not the Tiger model.
And so that became the afterword of the sports gene. And furthermore, golf is a really bad model of almost all things that humans want to learn. And so it sort of grew out of the sports gene and then out of this debate that I prepped for with Malcolm.