The best way to become good at something might surprise you - David Epstein — Transcript

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1. 0:07Many of you here have probably heard of the 10,000 hours rule.
2. 0:10It’s the idea that to become great in anything takes
3. 0:1310,000 hours of focused practice.
4. 0:15So you’d better get started as early as possible.
5. 0:18The poster child for this story is Tiger Woods.
6. 0:22His father famously gave him a putter when he was seven months old.
7. 0:25Fast forward to the age of 21— he’s the greatest golfer in the world.
8. 0:29Quintessential 10,000 hours story.
9. 0:31Another is that of the three Polgar sisters,
10. 0:33whose father decided to teach them chess in a very technical manner
11. 0:36from a very early age.
12. 0:38Two of his daughters went on to become grandmaster chess players
13. 0:41I got curious: if this 10,000 hours rule is correct,
14. 0:43then we should see that elite athletes get a head start
15. 0:46in so-called deliberate practice.
16. 0:48And in fact, when scientists study elite athletes,
17. 0:50they see that they spend more time in deliberate practice.
18. 0:53Not a big surprise.
19. 0:55When they actually track athletes over the course of their development,
20. 0:58the pattern looks like this:
21. 0:59the future elites tend to have what scientists call a sampling period,
22. 1:03where they try a variety of physical activities.
23. 1:05They gain broad general skills and delay specializing
24. 1:09until later than peers who plateau at lower levels.
25. 1:11That doesn’t really comport with the 10,000 hours rule, does it?
26. 1:15So I started to wonder about other domains that we associate
27. 1:17with obligatory early specialization, like music.
28. 1:21Turns out the pattern is often similar.
29. 1:23The exceptional musicians didn’t start spending more time in deliberate practice
30. 1:26than the average musicians until their third instrument.
31. 1:29They too tended to have a sampling period.
32. 1:31Even musicians we think of as famously precocious, like Yo-Yo Ma.
33. 1:35So this got me interested in exploring the developmental backgrounds
34. 1:38of people whose work I had long admired.
35. 1:40Duke Ellington shunned music lessons as a kid
36. 1:42to focus on baseball and painting and drawing.
37. 1:45Mariam Mirzakhani wasn’t interested in math as a girl,
38. 1:47dreamed of becoming a novelist,
39. 1:49and went on to become the first and so far only woman to win the Fields Medal,
40. 1:53the most prestigious prize in the world in math.
41. 1:55Vincent van Gogh had five different careers before flaming out spectacularly,
42. 1:59and, in his late 20s,
43. 2:00picked up a book called “The Guide to the ABCs of Drawing.”
44. 2:04Claude Shannon was an electrical engineer at the University of Michigan
45. 2:07who took a philosophy course just to fulfill a requirement.
46. 2:10And in it he learned about a near century-old system of logic
47. 2:13by which true and false statements could be coded as ones and zeros
48. 2:16and solved like math problems.
49. 2:18This led to the development of binary code,
50. 2:20which underlies all of our digital computers today.
51. 2:23Frances Hesselbein took her first professional job at the age of 54,
52. 2:27and went on to become the CEO of the Girl Scouts.
53. 2:30Here’s an athlete I’ve followed.
54. 2:32He tried some tennis, some skiing, wrestling.
55. 2:34His mother was actually a tennis coach,
56. 2:36but she declined to coach him because he wouldn’t return balls normally.
57. 2:39And he kept trying more sports:
58. 2:41handball, volleyball, soccer, badminton, skateboarding.
59. 2:44So who is this dabbler?
60. 2:46This is Roger Federer.
61. 2:47Every bit as famous as an adult as Tiger Woods.
62. 2:50And yet even tennis enthusiasts don't usually know anything
63. 2:54about his developmental story.
64. 2:55Why is that?
65. 2:56I think it’s partly because the Tiger story is very dramatic,
66. 2:59but also because it seems like this tidy narrative
67. 3:02that we can extrapolate to anything that we want to be good at in our own lives.
68. 3:05But it turns out that in many ways, golf is a uniquely horrible model
69. 3:09of almost everything that humans want to learn.
70. 3:11Golf is the epitome of what the psychologist Robin Hogarth
71. 3:14called a kind learning environment.
72. 3:15Next steps and goals are clear; rules that are clear and never change.
73. 3:20When you do something, you get feedback that is quick and accurate.
74. 3:24Chess, also a kind learning environment.
75. 3:26On the other end of the spectrum are wicked learning environments
76. 3:29where next steps and goals may not be clear— rules may change.
77. 3:33You may or may not get feedback when you do something,
78. 3:36it may be delayed, it may be inaccurate.
79. 3:38Which one of these sounds like the world we're increasingly living in?
80. 3:41So if hyper-specialization isn’t always the trick in a wicked world, what is?
81. 3:45That can be difficult to talk about,
82. 3:47because sometimes it looks like meandering or zigzagging or keeping a broader view.
83. 3:51It can look like getting behind.
84. 3:52But if we look at research on technological innovation,
85. 3:55it shows that increasingly the most impactful patents are authored
86. 3:58by teams that include individuals
87. 4:01who have worked across a large number of different technology classes
88. 4:04and often merge things from different domains.
89. 4:06Someone whose work I've admired, who was sort of on the forefront of this,
90. 4:09is a Japanese man named Junpei Yokoi.
91. 4:11Yokoi didn't score well in his electronics exams at school,
92. 4:14so he had to settle for a low-tier job as a machine maintenance worker
93. 4:17at a playing card company in Kyoto.
94. 4:19He combined some well-known technology from the calculator industry,
95. 4:22with some well-known technology from the credit card industry,
96. 4:25and made handheld games.
97. 4:26And it turned this playing card company,
98. 4:29which was founded in a wooden storefront in the 19th century,
99. 4:32into a toy and game operation.
100. 4:33You may have heard of it, it’s called Nintendo.
101. 4:36His magnum opus was the Game Boy.
102. 4:38We probably don't make as many of those people as we could,
103. 4:41because we don't tend to incentivize anything that doesn't
104. 4:43look like a head start or specialization.
105. 4:46And naturally, I think there are as many ways to succeed as there are people,
106. 4:50but I think we tend only to incentivize and encourage the Tiger path,
107. 4:53when increasingly, in a wicked world, we need people
108. 4:56who travel the Roger path as well.
109. 4:58Or as the eminent physicist and mathematician and writer
110. 5:01Freeman Dyson put it:
111. 5:02“For a healthy ecosystem, we need both birds and frogs.
112. 5:06Frogs are down in the mud seeing all the granular details.
113. 5:09The birds are soaring up above, not seeing those details,
114. 5:12but integrating the knowledge of the frogs.”
115. 5:14And we need both.
116. 5:15The problem, Dyson said, is that we’re telling everyone to become frogs.
117. 5:20And I think in a wicked world, that's increasingly shortsighted.