Why Early Specialization doesn't Guarantee Career Success with David Epstein, Global Bestselling Author, Range

Some notable quotables from David:

1. ON DESIRABLE DIFFICULTIES AS A WAY TO GET AHEAD:

“Desirable difficulties are things that people do not like to do because they don’t feel good, but turn out to be really, really good for them. And this, this kind of dovetails with the specialization issue, right?

Once people get really good at doing a certain thing, they do more of that only that thing. And this is akin to cognitively, akin to like if you were going to the gym and lifting the same weights the same number of times every day, you’re not gonna get worse, but you’re also not going to get better. And the way human development tends to work is people do a certain thing over and over and they get better just by doing it some experience, and then they cease to get better because they settle.”

2. ON DOMAIN EXPERTISE VS. GENERALIST INVESTING:

“I think having [deep] knowledge is good.

There’s no question about that. But there is clearly a point at which; and there’s this tremendous body of research on cognitive biases that show that when people become too narrow. That they start falling prey to all sorts of cognitive biases in decision making.”

3. ON THE POWER OF THE CIRCUITOUS JOURNEY BY WOMEN:

“There’s research that shows that women have a greater interest in doing interdisciplinary work earlier in their careers, but are more discouraged from doing it because they’re made to feel that they won’t be taken seriously if they’re interdisciplinary. It leads to the biggest impact work and we know that women are more likely to want to do it: so we need to stop dissuading them from it”

About David Epstein

David Epstein is the author of the #1 New York Times best seller Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, and of the New York Times best seller The Sports Gene, both of which have been translated in more than 30 languages. (To his surprise, the latter was purchased not only by his sister but also by President Barack Obama and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.)

He was previously the host of Slate‘s popular “How To!” podcast, and a science and investigative reporter at ProPublica. Prior to that, he was a senior writer at Sports Illustrated, where he co-authored the story that revealed Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez had used steroids. His writing has been honored by an array of organizations, from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, to the Society of Professional Journalists and the National Center on Disability and Journalism, and has been included in the Best American Science and Nature Writing anthology. His story “Following the Trail of Broken Hearts,” on sudden cardiac death in athletes, was chosen as one of the top 100 stories of the last 100 years by Columbia Journalism alumni.

FOLLOW DAVID:

Get his book, Range

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Website: https://davidepstein.com/

Special thanks to Cortado Ventures for setting this up in the beautiful First National Center in Oklahoma City: https://cortado.ventures/

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