Specialisation Is For Insects - David Epstein - #084

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Howdy, friends. Welcome back to the Modern Wisdom Podcast, and welcome to another New York Times bestselling author. I am very happy to welcome to the show David Epstein, talking about his brand new book, Range, Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. Nicheing down early and hard is a tactic which I've been told to do many times, and you may have been as well. The 20th century and the proliferation of scientific management methods from Henry Ford and the like, push people towards believing that specialization was the key towards mastery and professional development and personal development as well, I suppose. Today, David offers us an alternative point of view, which very interestingly aligns with a lot that Naval Ravikant said on the recent Joe Rogan podcast. If you haven't listened to that yet, after you've completed Me and David, I suggest that you go and listen to it. We reference it a lot. It's in the show notes below and it is absolutely fantastic. Probably my favorite podcast of 2019 Obviously, except for the one that I did with Rory Sutherland. But for now, please welcome Mr. David Epstein. Oh yeah, PS. I wanted to say thank you very much to everyone who continues to support us by sharing the episodes. This project literally is just me and a couple of mates and video guy Dean sat in his room editing shit loads of videos. The fact that we are pissing all over big dick UK podcasters with play counts, guests and exposure is a testament to the fact that I send a lot of emails to people and I can slide into DMs pretty well, but also a testament to the fact that you continue to share and support the podcast. So thanks a lot. The sole goal that I have for this podcast is to continue reaching more and more people and getting cooler and cooler guests as the years progress. So anything that you can do to help by sharing or recommending to a friend, giving us a rating on iTunes, whatever it might be, is all that I need. Makes me very happy. Thank you again.
I'm joined by David Epstein, all the way from the opposite side of the Atlantic. And we're talking about Range today. How are you, David?

**David Epstein** (2:31)
I'm well, thanks for having me.

**Chris Williamson** (2:32)
You're all over the place at the moment, right? You're a busy guy.

**David Epstein** (2:36)
Yes, quite honestly, I'm getting sick a little bit of my own voice.

**Chris Williamson** (2:40)
Oh, yeah. Yeah, well, thankfully for the listeners, I don't think that they will be. So we're gonna dig into your new book today, Range, right? Talking about generalists and specialists.

**David Epstein** (2:53)
Yeah, absolutely.

**Chris Williamson** (2:55)
Why did you write the book, first off?

**David Epstein** (2:58)
You know, it sort of came, the genesis of it came in sort of two parts, one of which was, I wrote a book before this called The Sports Gene, about genetics and athleticism. And I, well, as Malcolm Gladwell would say, I devoted several pages to criticizing his work. That's how he puts it, to basically criticizing the science underlying the 10,000 hour rule. And so we got invited to this conference here called the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. It's founded by the general manager of the Houston Rockets.
And we were invited there to debate, 10,000 hours versus the sports gene. And so it's on YouTube, you can see it.

**Chris Williamson** (3:33)
Oh, wow.

**David Epstein** (3:34)
And he's very clever and I didn't want to get embarrassed. So I did my homework, tried to anticipate what he would argue, you know, and thinking, all right, well, he's got to argue for early specialization. It's kind of implicit in some of the things he's written.
And so I went and looked at science of athletic development and saw that, in fact, in most sports and in most places of the world, athletes who go on to become elite have a so-called sampling period where they play a variety of sports, they gain these broad general skills, they learn about their interests and abilities, and they actually delay specializing until later than peers who plateau at lower levels. And I sort of brought that up in the debate. And he said, hi, you know, you know what you later, you know what you kind of got me on was that thing. You should write more about that. And I sort of filed it away in the back of my head and didn't think about it much more for, you know, more than a year. And then I was doing some work with a foundation here in the, giving a talk to some military veterans who'd been given scholarships by this foundation called the Pat Tillman Foundation to aid them in new career trajectories. And I talked a little bit about late specialization in sports. And since they weren't athletes, I sort of tacked on a little bit of research about the work world. And they were so enthusiastic about it because they were all career changing, and they'd been told they were behind in all these things. That it was like, you know, they just wanted more and more and more and they all wanted to follow up and keep in touch. And I sort of said, these people have had these incredible experiences. You know, some of them are former Navy Seals and all this kind of stuff. And they're being told like that they're behind, you know, instead of how they can wield those experiences. And so I sort of thought, all right, there's, there's something worth doing here.