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

SPEAKER_1 (0:01)

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Steven Bartlett (0:34)

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

David Epstein (0:40)

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

Steven Bartlett (1:07)

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

David Epstein (1:11)

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 the last few years, is the fact that sometimes optimizing for short-term development will undermine your long-term development. So let's say if we're thinking about sports or music or something like that, the obvious thing to do is to get a head start and whatever you're doing, pick something, stick with it, don't switch things because then you've lost time, focus very narrowly and do as much of it as you possibly can to the exclusion of other things. That's such an obvious way, 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.

Steven Bartlett (2:25)

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 kind of like the tortoise and the hare analogy, where the tortoise eventually wins the race.

David Epstein (2:51)

Yeah, I mean, there's a big body of research in psychology that can be summarized with the phrase, breadth of training predicts breadth of transfer. Okay? Transfer is the ability of someone to take skills and knowledge and use it to solve a problem they haven't seen before, right? You transfer it to a new situation. And what predicts your ability to do that is the breadth of problems you've been exposed to in practice. If you're exposed to a broader set of problems, you're forced to build these generalizable, flexible models that you'll be able to apply to new things going forward.

Steven Bartlett (3:25)

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?

David Epstein (3:34)

Getting better. Getting better at things, right? Obviously, people want success. But I think there's pretty significant research showing that people are often actually reacting to their trajectory as much as their actual absolute performance level, that the feeling of improvement, the feeling of moving on, it gives them some sense of fulfillment, right? And eventually, obviously, 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 sort of my plateaus going forward and viewing it as a lifelong journey, as opposed to trying to peak when they're 12, right? It turns out that the way to make the best 20-year-old, 30-year-old, 40-year-old is not the same as the way to make the best 10-year-old.