Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to the Psychology Podcast. Today's episode is
Speaker 1: part of the best of series, where we highlight some
Speaker 1: of the most exciting and enthralling and enlightening episodes from
Speaker 1: the archives of the Psychology Podcast. Enjoy, Hello, and welcome
Speaker 1: to the Psychology Podcast. Today we welcome David Epstein to
Speaker 1: the show. David is the author of the number one
Speaker 1: New York Times bestseller range Why Generalists Triumph in a
Speaker 1: Specialized World, and he also wrote the bestseller of the
Speaker 1: Sports Gene. Both of these books have been translated into
Speaker 1: more than twenty languages. His TED talks on performance science
Speaker 1: have been viewed more than eleven million times. David has
Speaker 1: a master's degree in environmental science and journalism and has
Speaker 1: worked as an investigative reporter for Pro Publica and As.
Speaker 1: He's also a senior writer for Sports Illustrated. In this episode,
Speaker 1: I talked to David about greatness. This is a topic
Speaker 1: of mutual interest of ours. You know, if there's one
Speaker 1: thing we know for shore about greatness that there's no
Speaker 1: linear path to it. David and I discussed the complex
Speaker 1: relationship of talent and hard work in specific domeans. Although
Speaker 1: there is no formula for greatness. We can all agree
Speaker 1: that persistent effort and fierce determination are necessary ingredients, but
Speaker 1: so is talent. In this episode, we have a nuanced
Speaker 1: discussion of that dance between nature and nurture on the
Speaker 1: path of talent. It's a very delicate dance. We also
Speaker 1: touch on the topics of self actualization, creativity, fulfillment, and
Speaker 1: moral greatness. This was a really rich and great chat
Speaker 1: with a good friend and someone who I've talked to
Speaker 1: personally about this topic for a long time, and it's
Speaker 1: great to get a lot of this on the record
Speaker 1: on the podcast as we explore this fascinating topic, which
Speaker 1: I know you will find fascinating as well. So without
Speaker 1: further ado, I bring you David Epstein. Man. It's so
Speaker 1: good to see you, and we have so much to
Speaker 1: catch up on, obviously as at a friend level, which
Speaker 1: we won't do today, but hopefully we can do that
Speaker 1: some other time. But we have so much in common
Speaker 1: in terms of our interest in the determinants of greatness
Speaker 1: is something that I've been a topic I've been obsessed
Speaker 1: with my whole life, and you as well, probably so,
Speaker 1: and you've read a lot about it, and there's there's
Speaker 1: multiple ways to inward in this topic, let's start off
Speaker 1: with the great nature nurtured debate. Let's start off there
Speaker 1: kind of understanding greatness from a developmental perspective, biologically, genetically, culturally,
Speaker 1: how do these things all interact? And you know, I
Speaker 1: suppose the answer to that in one big way is
Speaker 1: it depends on the field, right, I mean, we can't
Speaker 1: come up with a general theory or do you think
Speaker 1: we can come up with a general theory that applies
Speaker 1: to all different demeans?
Speaker 2: You know, in fact, not only do I not think
Speaker 2: we can come up with a general theory that applies
Speaker 2: to all domains, I don't think we can even really
Speaker 2: come up with a general theory, you know, within a
Speaker 2: single domain across people, Like I think there are definitely
Speaker 2: principles though so maybe that's the wrong thing to say,
Speaker 2: because we know we're never explaining all of anything that
Speaker 2: were explaining, right, But but I think human development is
Speaker 2: so incredibly complex, like I sort of think of it.
Speaker 2: This might be a bad analogy. You can tell me, though.
Speaker 2: I hope this is Scott like, because we're friends and
Speaker 2: like I admire your work and brain, I think I'm
Speaker 2: unfortunately like feeling that I'm like free to be a
Speaker 2: little more informal and digress with you, so you should
Speaker 2: tell me if that's not. Of course, of course, so
Speaker 2: I was using this analogy where I was talking to
Speaker 2: someone about nutritional epidemiology. You know, all this research on
Speaker 2: how what you eat impacts all these different things in
Speaker 2: your life, and we know this is important and you
Speaker 2: should eat real food and everything like that, but the
Speaker 2: science of nutritional epidemiology is like a complete mess, and
Speaker 2: it turns out, you know, it's like eggs cause cancer
Speaker 2: one day, eggs prevent cancer the next day. There's actually
Speaker 2: one study that I refer to, I don't care remember
Speaker 2: what the official name is, but as the everything in
Speaker 2: your fridge Causes and Prevents cancer study, where it's like
Speaker 2: plotting all the studies of different foods showing that they've
Speaker 2: all been found to cause and prevent cancer in various studies,
Speaker 2: except for bacon, which unfortunately was only on the causing
Speaker 2: cancer side. But you know, mental health is important too,
Speaker 2: But it's like, I think one of the reasons is
Speaker 2: people underestimated the complexity when you're studying nutrition, Like people
Speaker 2: eat different foods for all sorts of reasons that have
Speaker 2: to do with their culture, with other behaviors that they have.
Speaker 2: There are all sorts of other things they do that
Speaker 2: impact their health. Right, And so basically that whole body
Speaker 2: of work, not all of it, but a lot of
Speaker 2: it has to be thrown out because I think the
Speaker 2: complexity was underestimated. And I would say that's even less
Speaker 2: complex than human development in general, which has just all
Speaker 2: these factors going into it. And I think we often
Speaker 2: underestimate all the factors that go in, so we underestimate
Speaker 2: that complexity. So yeah, I think it's I think it's
Speaker 2: hard to have a general rule, even for a given domain.
Speaker 2: And yet I still think we can take out sort
Speaker 2: of principles and useful frames that are there are sort
Speaker 2: of generals thinking. I mean something you did, like you
Speaker 2: wrote a post, So man, interrupt me if I'm like
Speaker 2: going too much on tangents. I know myself, so I
Speaker 2: don't get upset when people interrupt me because I know
Speaker 2: how digressive my like, my books are digressed with that's
Speaker 2: me organizing my brain. Okay, So so interrupt me when needed.
Speaker 1: I'll feel free to interrupt you.
Speaker 2: Okay, good, Remember you wrote I think it was a
Speaker 2: poster or an article where when Andres Ericson's Peak came out,
Speaker 2: which he was he was writing about, you know, the
Speaker 2: so called kind of father of the ten thousand hour rule,
Speaker 2: even though he did not like that Moniker. And he
Speaker 2: wrote the book because he wanted to sort of clarify
Speaker 2: so much had been written about his work that he
Speaker 2: wanted to kind of clarify what he thought about his
Speaker 2: own work and the so called ten thousand hour rule.
Speaker 2: And there was a part in the book where he
Speaker 2: has sort of an aside and he says, like, by
Speaker 2: the way, this framework that I propose applies best really
Speaker 2: in places where we know the tenets of success and
Speaker 2: someone can tell you what they are and watch you
Speaker 2: while you're practicing and then tell you how to do
Speaker 2: it right. And I think you wrote and he said, so,
Speaker 2: you know, like and then he listed places where he
Speaker 2: didn't think it applied as much, and it was like
Speaker 2: most of the places where most of us work. And
Speaker 2: I think you wrote a post saying something like that's
Speaker 2: that's not just a small offhand re mark he made.
Speaker 2: That's like, for example, the entire domain of creativity that
Speaker 2: he's he's setting aside there.
Speaker 1: And so it was the big, the big clash between
Speaker 1: me and him and in our lifetimes because he's but
Speaker 1: he rest in peace.
Speaker 2: I had an incredibly wonderful and generative relationship with him,
Speaker 2: largely based on disagreements, and I and I miss him,
Speaker 2: even though we were constantly disagreeing.
Speaker 1: Too, and he welcomed them. He welcomed them absolutely.
Speaker 2: But there's a case where he put forward a strong
Speaker 2: argument that I think was important to have a strong
Speaker 2: argument so that we could test it. And then even
Speaker 2: he at a certain point started saying, but it's different
Speaker 2: in different domains, And so even though we don't know
Speaker 2: everything that works, I think we can learn some things,
Speaker 2: you know, that are that are important even if we
Speaker 2: don't have a perfect general model.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And in that article that you're referencing, called that
Speaker 1: creativity is more than ten thousand hours of deliberate practice,
Speaker 1: I just talked about all the sort of complexities. Things
Speaker 1: that may look like nature actually nurture, some things that
Speaker 1: look like nurture or actually nature. And you start adding
Speaker 1: up all these complexities and it's sort of like, well,
Speaker 1: what do we know? You know, what can we say?
Speaker 1: Because I edited an academic volume called The Complexity of
Speaker 1: Greatness Beyond Talent and practice. I believe it was the
Speaker 1: subtitle and had experts way in, but I was hoping
Speaker 1: to write a concluding chapter summarizing some main principles. I
Speaker 1: never was able to do that because there really weren't.
Speaker 1: There really weren't. And I'm like, well, then what is
Speaker 1: the point of scientifically studying this if we can't say,
Speaker 1: you know, have more general principles. There are plenty of
Speaker 1: people out there, by the way, and I won't start
Speaker 1: mentioning names, but there are plenty of people out there
Speaker 1: that are perfectly confident that they know the general principles.
Speaker 1: They'll write books, you know, and they'll have blog, very
Speaker 1: popular blogs with the hundreds and thousands of people where
Speaker 1: they're they're like, let me tell you the secret of greatness,
Speaker 1: you know. And it's like, well, would you mind telling
Speaker 1: the scientists because we even figured it out. I'm glad
Speaker 1: you haven't figured out. I'm glad you have the secret
Speaker 1: figured out. If there was a secret or a blueprint,
Speaker 1: don't you think like everyone would become geniuses all of
Speaker 1: a sudden, you know. That's it's not like people read
Speaker 1: those books and become geniuses, right, It's not Has anyone
Speaker 1: ever become a genius because they read a book that
Speaker 1: said this is the secret to genius.
Speaker 2: Well, I mean, like any questions, does it make them
Speaker 2: improve in anything, right, as opposed to making them become
Speaker 2: a genius? Right cause like if I read about you know,
Speaker 2: Picasso's or something like literally, I just got a new
Speaker 2: book about like all these like quirky habits that like
Speaker 2: a lot of great writers have called odd typewriters, you know.
Speaker 2: And it's not because like I think, if I write
Speaker 2: in crayons like James Joyce did that, I'm going to
Speaker 2: become James Joyce. But sometimes there's still stuff that you
Speaker 2: can pick out that's useful or just interesting, and like
Speaker 2: for you your responsible thinker, So of course you're not
Speaker 2: going to be you know, because you see that you
Speaker 2: lean into the complexity, right, so you're not going to
Speaker 2: be saying that having an easy time summarizing some of
Speaker 2: this work. At the same time, I'm pretty confident that
Speaker 2: you could tell a whole lot of people a few
Speaker 2: things that would likely improve their creativity a bit. And
Speaker 2: so even if that's not a general model or a
Speaker 2: quick fix, I'm very confident you could do that for
Speaker 2: a lot of people that there are things that we
Speaker 2: know that you could tell people that would likely make
Speaker 2: many of them, you know, more creative. But to get
Speaker 2: to your point about sort of the gurus that are
Speaker 2: very popular. That always reminds me of Phil Tetlock's work,
Speaker 2: you know on forecasters, where there was basically an inverse
Speaker 2: relationship between fame and accuracy over the like twenty years
Speaker 2: of forecasting research. In part, I think because the forecasters,
Speaker 2: who are not very like open minded, not very flexible minded,
Speaker 2: could speak very authoritatively all the time. So it's like
Speaker 2: the people on TV making prognostications are like scientifically proven
Speaker 2: to be the worst forecasters in the world, but they
Speaker 2: sound so authoritative, right, And so when you lean into
Speaker 2: the complexity, it can be harder, I think, to sound
Speaker 2: super authoritative all the time, you know what I mean.
Speaker 1: Not to be necessarily more creative, but to I mean,
Speaker 1: I want to focus. I really do want to focus
Speaker 1: on greatness. See. I think that's where I think there's
Speaker 1: things that maybe different, you know, like you to be
Speaker 1: a little bit better, to be a little more creative,
Speaker 1: but the greatness is such a fascinating thing on its own.
Speaker 1: It's a beast on its own right, And I think
Speaker 1: like when it comes to the nature of nurture to
Speaker 1: be in greatness. I think the research does suggest that
Speaker 1: talent matters a lot. And then the question is what
Speaker 1: is talent? Well, talent is not something that's fully formed
Speaker 1: or fully you're not born with all the skills that
Speaker 1: can only talent. But I do think there are certain
Speaker 1: potentialities that are influenced by genes. Then you can agree
Speaker 1: or disagree with this. That aid in rapid knowledge acquisition
Speaker 1: within a specific domain. And there are people that from
Speaker 1: a very young age to clearly show once they make
Speaker 1: contact with that. I mean actually sometimes it may take
Speaker 1: much later in life to make contact with that. You
Speaker 1: see that huge rate of growth that is undeniable. So
Speaker 1: I want to start there and see what your thoughts
Speaker 1: are on that.
Speaker 2: I think that's well said, you know, and of course
Speaker 2: we both know, like the work for example of Ellen Winner, right,
Speaker 2: who looks at of course prodigies basically and they will
Speaker 2: have you know, And she's she's studied some who have
Speaker 2: a great ability to progress in a domain very quickly,
Speaker 2: much more so than their peers, but don't have what
Speaker 2: she calls the rage to master right, that like drive
Speaker 2: to keep doing the thing and others that have a
Speaker 2: rage to master but don't have that ability to progress
Speaker 2: faster than their peers. And so I think she's She's
Speaker 2: documents some interesting cases of both of those separately, and
Speaker 2: when you see like the really sort of stunning prodigy,
Speaker 2: it's when those things come together at the same time. Basically,
Speaker 2: I think we can be a little narrow minded about
Speaker 2: some of that because I think they're like the more
Speaker 2: and more I've learned about human development, the zig zagger
Speaker 2: and mess here, I think it is, and so even
Speaker 2: stuff just to take like a sports perspective, right, there's
Speaker 2: this very well known phenomenon where coaches of young people,
Speaker 2: you know, kids are very frequently mistaking biological maturation for talent,
Speaker 2: right Like some kids are maybe there are a few,
Speaker 2: maybe there's some months older, or maybe they've just biologically
Speaker 2: matured faster, and a coach sees them as better and
Speaker 2: says they are more talented, they have more potential, but
Speaker 2: really they're just seeing someone who's further along their developmental trajectory.
Speaker 2: And so I think those things are real, but I
Speaker 2: also think we need to you know, I think I
Speaker 2: think talent is very real, but I also think we
Speaker 2: need to work hard to keep our talent funnel wide
Speaker 2: so that we're not we're working hard not to be
Speaker 2: de selecting people in a way that that doesn't even
Speaker 2: allow them to kind of develop, you know, more slowly. Basically,
Speaker 2: they called this in there was this like brilliant assigned
Speaker 2: as Chelsea Warr who was like working with me in
Speaker 2: Australia when they had Olympics in the UK and the Olympics,
Speaker 2: and she would refer to this as you need the
Speaker 2: pipelines for slow bakers and fast risers, you know, the
Speaker 2: people who developed really quickly. But then they realized that
Speaker 2: many of their top performers were these slow bakers who came,
Speaker 2: you know, in a much more kind of gradual development process,
Speaker 2: and that they could have a competitive advantage by not
Speaker 2: kind of pushing those people out essentially just like allowing
Speaker 2: them to hang on.
Speaker 1: That's a fascinating topic to double quick on there for
Speaker 1: a second, because I love that distinction. You can clearly
Speaker 1: see there they're like, uh, was it flashed in the
Speaker 1: pan sort of people they sort of just come out
Speaker 1: of the gate and you can just see greatness or
Speaker 1: see the great potential for greatness that they rarely do
Speaker 1: become great, and I can give examples, like I love
Speaker 1: watching the YouTube videos of like some of my favorite
Speaker 1: comedians in their first David Letterman appearance, you know, and
Speaker 1: they're essentially fully the fully formed adult that we all
Speaker 1: know now. It's recognizable even when they're like in nineteen
Speaker 1: or twenty, like Jim Carrey his first appearance, I'm like, there, no,
Speaker 1: Jim Carrey was Jim Carrey, you know from a very
Speaker 1: you know, like that set is obvious. When I even
Speaker 1: watched I watched Dioyoma's performance at age two for JFK.
Speaker 1: It's on YouTube. I I was so excited to realize
Speaker 1: that was archived and I was like, wow, that's your
Speaker 1: nimal So that's interesting. So I think there is that,
Speaker 1: but I don't think we need to generalize that to everyone.
Speaker 1: I do think there are those who can apply principles
Speaker 1: of expertise and with much more modest talents over the
Speaker 1: long run who eventually appeared us to be great, and
Speaker 1: maybe even we put the label on them talent, but
Speaker 1: that really doesn't explain them as much as the harder
Speaker 1: work that they put in. Not the people that I
Speaker 1: just mentioned didn't work extremely hard as well, but they
Speaker 1: were more flash in the pan, you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 2: I mean, you know, in some of those mentioning Yoyoma,
Speaker 2: we actually did. He cycled through he like quit two
Speaker 2: instruments early in life, while he went through his so
Speaker 2: called sampling period much faster than most musicians do. But
Speaker 2: he still had it. But I think there's a reason
Speaker 2: why a lot a lot of times those like most
Speaker 2: astounding prodigies show up in a very small number of
Speaker 2: domains like classical music and chess, where they're doing things
Speaker 2: that are really based on pattern repetition, and that that
Speaker 2: kind of that speed of growth is not as realistic
Speaker 2: in other domains that are sort of more open ended. Basically,
Speaker 2: you know what what Robin Hogarth calls the wicked learning
Speaker 2: environments where it's not just static rules and repetitive patterns
Speaker 2: and you know, quick and accurate feedback and all that stuff.
Speaker 1: Well, I mentioned comedy, which is pretty open you know.
Speaker 1: Would I would say that like Jim Carrey's unique brand
Speaker 1: of comedy emanated from his being early you know, I
Speaker 1: also looked at like Robin Williams, you know, and his
Speaker 1: first appearance in Letterman, it was Robin Williams, like that's
Speaker 1: fascinating to me, you know that, Like, as someone who
Speaker 1: studies self acts, who studies self actualization, I believe so
Speaker 1: much of self actualization is like getting in touch with
Speaker 1: who you really truly are as much as you can
Speaker 1: in your life, as opposed to all the ways society
Speaker 1: tries to move us in this direction, in that direction,
Speaker 1: and all the ways in which we have self doubts,
Speaker 1: and all the ways and we want to conform and
Speaker 1: we don't want to stand out. But you know, there
Speaker 1: are these amazing examples of people that got really deeply
Speaker 1: in touch with the pattern recognition that was unique with
Speaker 1: them within them at a very very early aid.
Speaker 2: Just sort of their self knowledge. Yeah, I mean obviously
Speaker 2: once the comedians on Letterman, they're like, we're basically talking
Speaker 2: about like an Olympic gold medalist already, right, like looking
Speaker 2: at them as at yeah, that level of performance. But
Speaker 2: I can definitely believe that a way to accelerate that
Speaker 2: is to know a lot about yourself. Right. I actually
Speaker 2: think comedy in some ways too, can be a little
Speaker 2: bit of a more kind learning environment in the sense
Speaker 2: that my sense and tell me if I'm wrong, is
Speaker 2: that a lot of the really good comedians spend a
Speaker 2: lot of time like tossing out material to small audiences
Speaker 2: and then just and then like waiting. They're like scientists
Speaker 2: of their material. They like throw something out at smaller club,
Speaker 2: you know, and they practice it and get it back,
Speaker 2: that's for sure. Yeah, and so right, so they're i
Speaker 2: think trying to make take this more sort of wicked
Speaker 2: learning environment and turned it into something sort of more
Speaker 2: sports like, where like you take a shot and you
Speaker 2: look like where did it go? And then you adjust
Speaker 2: and adjust and adjust. As open ended as comedy is,
Speaker 2: I still think it's it's rare to be able to
Speaker 2: get that quick like feedback that quick and accurate in
Speaker 2: the things that that most people do. I think domains
Speaker 2: that allow that, you know, sometimes people can progress a
Speaker 2: lot faster.
Speaker 1: It's a great point. And I look at my own
Speaker 1: sort of draw to social media, and I'm trying to
Speaker 1: be honest with myself why I really am drawn? Why
Speaker 1: am I on Instagram so much? I'm on Twitter? You know,
Speaker 1: like I could get so much more work done perhaps
Speaker 1: in that intervening period if I wasn't on social media
Speaker 1: and you know, writing a book, you know, if I'm
Speaker 1: working on a year long project or two year long
Speaker 1: project with no immediate feedback. There's something really soul sucking
Speaker 1: about that, and wolle wasting and social media in a
Speaker 1: way like gets my craving for just some sort of
Speaker 1: immediate feedback in some way, even if it's just taking
Speaker 1: an idea for my book and putting it on Twitter
Speaker 1: and see how many likes it gets. It makes me
Speaker 1: feel like I'm engaging in the world without having to
Speaker 1: wait two years before engaging in the world.
Speaker 2: That's interesting. That gives me a bunch of thoughts, one
Speaker 2: of which is, so I took like Twitter off my
Speaker 2: phone months ago, and so I haven't been on very
Speaker 2: much cause like, for whatever reason, the barrier of having
Speaker 2: to go to the URL has been like a very
Speaker 2: high one for me. It just doesn't happen much and
Speaker 2: whenever I'm off for that time. But whenever I'm off,
Speaker 2: I used to always go like on detox for like
Speaker 2: a few months at a time, and it would feel
Speaker 2: like such a smaller part of my life when I
Speaker 2: went back, a smaller part of the world when you
Speaker 2: haven't been it for a while. But but I would
Speaker 2: say for you, when I haven't, I've been on there
Speaker 2: as much lately, so I haven't been seeing what you're doing,
Speaker 2: but I thought you were like a really good force
Speaker 2: on Twitter. Like you, I think you're a very you know,
Speaker 2: it seemed to me like pro social optimistic, you know,
Speaker 2: person who feels deeply and empathizes and yet do hard
Speaker 2: work to sometimes share ideas that people may not like,
Speaker 2: you know, sometimes about talent online and to be fair
Speaker 2: about them and to be civil about them. And so
Speaker 2: I think, you know, you raise the like sort of
Speaker 2: the goodness quotion of that space that you're in on Twitter,
Speaker 2: and so I think it's you know, you're you're being
Speaker 2: productive on Twitter for other people. Also in terms of
Speaker 2: the feedback to you, like that did you need that
Speaker 2: feedback when you're away writing a book for two years?
Speaker 2: I'm like the total opposite of that. Like when I'm
Speaker 2: when I'm like, great, I have an excuse to go
Speaker 2: off all this other stuff and just like be in
Speaker 2: my head in the book, I'm like, this is the best.
Speaker 2: Why do I? And then I like go back when they,
Speaker 2: you know, try to promote the book and then and
Speaker 2: then I get sort of stuck into the cycle of
Speaker 2: being there. But when I'm off, I yeah, I guess
Speaker 2: I feel differently in that.
Speaker 1: Well, I should say, to be fair to myself, when
Speaker 1: I get really towards the finishing line, when I'm in
Speaker 1: the last six months or so, I do like to
Speaker 1: go in a cave. That is true, That is true,
Speaker 1: But a two year that's daunting. That's daunting. In a cave.
Speaker 1: I like to really have a good spurt at the
Speaker 1: end of complete silence. That much I love so I'm
Speaker 1: I'm like a quarter there with you. So in terms
Speaker 1: of general principles, I want to circle back to the
Speaker 1: idea of the ten thousand hour rule. Who called it
Speaker 1: the ten thousand hour rule? Malcolm godwill do you ever
Speaker 1: say that?
Speaker 2: Oh? Yeah, yeah, okay.
Speaker 1: So Andrews Erickson, as much as he's tried to, you know,
Speaker 1: disavowt himself from the ten thousand hour rule thing, he
Speaker 1: wasn't completely innocent in really making the claim that a
Speaker 1: certain amount of hard work or that hard work into
Speaker 1: sort of the way he describes it, deliberate practice is
Speaker 1: linear with progress, Yeah, is how it framed it. He
Speaker 1: really does believe that, or did believe that, And that's
Speaker 1: the thing that I don't think can be defended fully.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I agree I think, to be honest with you,
Speaker 2: that you know, I know sort of not that he
Speaker 2: and Gladwell were in touch, but but he pushed back
Speaker 2: against Gladwell's characterization of the ten thousand hour rule. But
Speaker 2: what I think a lot of people missed is that
Speaker 2: my feeling was that Andres is more extreme, not less
Speaker 2: extreme than Gladwell. I think that's right, and I think
Speaker 2: people right sort of intuitively felt they pushed back because like, oh,
Speaker 2: Gladwell is saying in this extreme way. I'm like, no, No,
Speaker 2: Andres just thinks he's not saying extreme enough.
Speaker 1: And that's right, that's right.
Speaker 2: And Anders. You know, if you go deep into that
Speaker 2: ten thousand hours again, he wouldn't call it that deliberate
Speaker 2: practice framework literature, whatever you want to call it, there's
Speaker 2: underlying it is always this so called monotonic benefits assumption,
Speaker 2: which is that two people get the exact same two
Speaker 2: people the same level get the same amount of improvement
Speaker 2: from the same unit practice. And that just doesn't hold
Speaker 2: up anywhere in skill building literature, like literally anywhere.
Speaker 1: It doesn't hold up. I mean I would literally send
Speaker 1: him prodigy are articles about prodigies? And he said, no,
Speaker 1: that we don't have all the I bet if we
Speaker 1: got their diaries we would find it's all about deliberate practice.
Speaker 1: And I'm like, I'm trying. I said, like the most
Speaker 1: extreme examples that are like obviously not they're not deliberately practicing,
Speaker 1: you know, they're making leaps that are far beyond are
Speaker 1: what are practiced.
Speaker 2: And there are studies that take people that are at
Speaker 2: the same level as something, put them on tightly controlled
Speaker 2: training for something in a lab and they progress at
Speaker 2: different rates, you know. So that was my when I
Speaker 2: would share with him some of that work, he would say,
Speaker 2: but these aren't elite performers in a lot of cases
Speaker 2: because you know, these lab like large lab studies aren't
Speaker 2: going on with like there are only so many elite
Speaker 2: performers anyway. And my my feeling for that was, well,
Speaker 2: if you're posing a comprehensive framework skill development, if you
Speaker 2: can't account for s where one like if you can
Speaker 2: only account for someone who's already standing atop the Olympic
Speaker 2: medal stand and look backward, then you don't have a
Speaker 2: development model because you can't you can't even account for
Speaker 2: the starting. At the same time, I do think that
Speaker 2: he did really important work in emphasizing that type of
Speaker 2: practice matters, probably in convincing, you know, in compelling other
Speaker 2: people to start researching practice in important ways, and also
Speaker 2: in like making strong arguments in some cases that give
Speaker 2: people like you and I something to hold so that
Speaker 2: we can say, well, let's test this against the world,
Speaker 2: you know, let's let's see how this holds up. Sometimes
Speaker 2: I'm frustrated by work and skill development because I can't
Speaker 2: even figure out exactly what they're saying, and so it's
Speaker 2: hard to use it as a way to learn. And
Speaker 2: so I appreciated that he made these strong arguments and
Speaker 2: then engaged with you. You wanted to engage with him, Yeah,
Speaker 2: So I appreciated that that about him.
Speaker 1: You know, he engaged, but he never changes his mind
Speaker 1: even a little bit.
Speaker 2: That's right. You don't think that. You don't think the
Speaker 2: loophole that we talked about that he put in his
Speaker 2: book was a bit of a mind change, a little
Speaker 2: bit of a mind change.
Speaker 1: Ooh, interesting, admitting that different kinds of fields may be
Speaker 1: more applicable to the principles in his book than others.
Speaker 1: Maybe maybe you're right, maybe that was a that took
Speaker 1: a sort of a career of engaging with scholars and
Speaker 1: others to add that caveat. It was a one paragraph caveat.
Speaker 2: It's one character, but it's like a huge deal.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, it might even have been a footnote. I
Speaker 1: had this, I have to. I remember I wrote something
Speaker 1: cheeky in my review for Scientific America, was like in
Speaker 1: this throwaway footnote or whatever. Well, it's tricky because I
Speaker 1: send him that scientif American article. I had a whole
Speaker 1: correspond with him, and he said, you know what creativity
Speaker 1: can be, we applied by my deliberate practice framework as well.
Speaker 1: I'm going to write an article about that someday. So
Speaker 1: that's what he said, okay to me. So that's it's interesting.
Speaker 1: I do think you're right, and I thank you for
Speaker 1: pointing out that he I mean, he initiated the whole
Speaker 1: expert performance approach in psychology, pioneered a whole field of investigation.
Speaker 1: I mean that's no small thing, huge, huge props right
Speaker 1: to that.
Speaker 2: And appreciation.
Speaker 1: Yeah, oh my gosh. I mean there's a Cambridge Handbook
Speaker 1: of expert performance when lots of scientists are studying this topic.
Speaker 1: I guess what it's difficult about pop writers who want
Speaker 1: to make a lot of money and write the next
Speaker 1: big book on how to be great. I think the
Speaker 1: problem for them You'll hear all the time, the thing
Speaker 1: they'll say is a, well, look, there's nothing we can
Speaker 1: do about the genes. I'm just focused on what we
Speaker 1: can do to help people change.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Okay, so you hear that. All that's like, there get
Speaker 1: out of jail card. But what if I was like,
Speaker 1: you know what, that doesn't really get you out of jail.
Speaker 1: I think a really truly honest book on the topic
Speaker 1: as I try, I try to do an unngifted If
Speaker 1: we're going to be really honest, we have to admit
Speaker 1: that that maybe there are some things in our lives
Speaker 1: that we will never have, and there are some things
Speaker 1: that we can work on and focus on that that
Speaker 1: are right for that are right for us, not that
Speaker 1: there's general things that we can all work on. I'm
Speaker 1: not sure if I'm articulating my point well at all,
Speaker 1: but I sort of feel like this is why I'm
Speaker 1: interested in self actualization versus everyone can be great and everything. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I really do believe that that self actorisation is where
Speaker 1: it's at in this regard. Okay, what do you think
Speaker 1: of what I just said, is it controversial.
Speaker 2: It's it's totally uncontroversial among some people and very controversial
Speaker 2: among others. You know, there are these like it depends
Speaker 2: what set you're talking to, but the yeah, it's true.
Speaker 2: I think there are sort of two things there. You
Speaker 2: mentioned like the integrity of pop writers and actually think
Speaker 2: a lot of there's quite a number of scientists that
Speaker 2: play that same card that's like, well, why would I
Speaker 2: study g Nobody should say genetics because there's nothing you
Speaker 2: can do about them, which I think is a serious misunderstanding,
Speaker 2: because one of the reasons you study genes is so
Speaker 2: that you can understand what is environmental influence and how
Speaker 2: to work with it. The reason to so like this
Speaker 2: huge amount of research is confounded because people have said,
Speaker 2: I'm not interested in genes, so I want to study them,
Speaker 2: like and that's why you're not sure what you're actually
Speaker 2: seeing in your study. So one reason again is you
Speaker 2: study gene so that you understand what environmental interventions help.
Speaker 2: I think what you said about self actualization to turn
Speaker 2: a little bit is really important whether we're thinking about
Speaker 2: that from you know, I think one thing that came
Speaker 2: out for my first book was about genetics was The
Speaker 2: one reason that ten thousand hours Thinking may have some
Speaker 2: may backfire in some ways is because you actually don't
Speaker 2: want to be randomly selected into the thing you start
Speaker 2: practicing in. You want to learn some stuff about yourself
Speaker 2: and match into something that's a good fit for you
Speaker 2: in a lot of ways. And I think that requires
Speaker 2: these sort of habits of mind, of like self regulatory
Speaker 2: learning of everything you try, becoming a scientist of yourself,
Speaker 2: saying you know, what am I trying to do here?
Speaker 2: And why who do I need to help me? Like
Speaker 2: what fit my expectations? What did I learn about my
Speaker 2: strengths and weaknesses and the things that I enjoy and
Speaker 2: the things that I hate? And so to me, that
Speaker 2: was sort of the I think there were there were
Speaker 2: positive aspects of of the ten thousand hours Thinking, but
Speaker 2: I think one negative aspect was this was it implicitly
Speaker 2: downplays the need for self knowledge and sort of makes
Speaker 2: it seem like you should just like pick something as
Speaker 2: early as possible and stick with it. And of course
Speaker 2: that is like picking something to stick with at the
Speaker 2: point of your life when you have like the least
Speaker 2: self knowledge is actually not the way to go.
Speaker 1: I think sticking with something when you have the least
Speaker 1: self knowledge, can you can you double click on that
Speaker 1: a little bit more for me?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean think of like you know, of course,
Speaker 2: like the psychology find the end of history illusion, you
Speaker 2: know that catchy name that people will always say if
Speaker 2: you ask something, have you changed a lot based on
Speaker 2: your experiences in the past? Say oh, yeah, of course
Speaker 2: you know. Well are you going to change a lot
Speaker 2: in the future? No, Like now, I'm pretty much now,
Speaker 2: I'm pretty much know who I am. And so people
Speaker 2: whether it's like values, how they want to spend their time,
Speaker 2: you know, their favorite music, like whatever, their personality, they
Speaker 2: underestimate future personality change. It does slow down over life,
Speaker 2: but so we're always like works in progress, constantly claiming
Speaker 2: to be finished basically, And the fastest time of personality
Speaker 2: change I think is about eighteen to like your late twenties,
Speaker 2: which is I think the kind of exactly when we're
Speaker 2: usually telling people like, now's the time to figure it out.
Speaker 2: And I think that's you're asking, like someone to choose
Speaker 2: a long term future for a person that doesn't exist yet,
Speaker 2: in a world that they can't possibly guess at yet.
Speaker 2: And so I think a less high probability for good
Speaker 2: outcome kind of proposition than if you say, like, do
Speaker 2: dive into something and treat it as an experiment, like
Speaker 2: what you don't have to just like pinball around or
Speaker 2: not know what to do, Like pick something and dive
Speaker 2: into it, but take to it as what am I
Speaker 2: going to learn about myself from this? And let that
Speaker 2: inform your next pivot? Don't your ten year plan Like, fine,
Speaker 2: have it if you want. But if that means you're
Speaker 2: not going to pivot based on things you're learning about
Speaker 2: yourself in that period, then I think you're not going
Speaker 2: to to be you know, working toward optimizing your so
Speaker 2: called match quality that's fit between who you are and
Speaker 2: what you do.
Speaker 1: That's a great point and the idea of not giving
Speaker 1: up too soon. I think you do find a lot
Speaker 1: of examples throughout the history of greatness of people who
Speaker 1: did end up becoming great, but they were they weren't
Speaker 1: the best when they started, yeah, out of all their peers.
Speaker 1: You know. Again, it's hard to just disentangle sometimes talent
Speaker 1: and that rate of development, the advantage they had versus
Speaker 1: the tenacity they had. But I will say that is
Speaker 1: quite a fierce interaction when you have. You know, I
Speaker 1: think case of Michael Jordan, for instance, made that you
Speaker 1: look at the interaction between the talent and the ferociousness
Speaker 1: of wanting to learn. That interplay is is so ferocious
Speaker 1: in a way where those people they refuse to quit,
Speaker 1: they refuse to give up. There's almost a ferociousness to
Speaker 1: not give up.
Speaker 2: People often cite him as saying though too right, like,
Speaker 2: is that did that make him the world's best baseball player? No,
Speaker 2: it's like he still had to fit where he fits.
Speaker 2: You know, I don't think that said. I'm always hesitant
Speaker 2: to trot that out though, because in my opinion, although
Speaker 2: he was a bad minor league baseball player, he was
Speaker 2: a much much better baseball player than most people dropped
Speaker 2: into the minor leagues would have been in my opinion,
Speaker 2: like most people dropped into the minor leagues after not
Speaker 2: having played for a long time would probably hit zero.
Speaker 2: So like, he didn't have a good batting average, but
Speaker 2: he didn't hit zero. But you know, I think it's
Speaker 2: it was important for him also to find a spot
Speaker 2: where he fits, even with that that ferociousness of that tenacious.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and of course you don't know what it would
Speaker 1: have been like, if all that time spent playing basketball
Speaker 1: he honed his craft of baseball. Yeah, yeah, how good
Speaker 1: you'd be. You know, I'm just thinking, like, you know
Speaker 1: Abraham Maslow, who raised about self actuation. I mean, he
Speaker 1: talks a lot about fit finding. Self actuation is finding
Speaker 1: the thing that is the best fit for you in
Speaker 1: the whole world. He's very dramatic, and the way that
Speaker 1: he talks about this is actually cool. I wish, I
Speaker 1: wish I could look up real quick, but I don't
Speaker 1: think I'll be able to warn the spot I send
Speaker 1: to you later. But it's like, yeah, it's pretty dramatic
Speaker 1: that he puts it, But I'm like, no, that's kind
Speaker 1: of cool. I kind of I kind of dig it
Speaker 1: and viewing life in that way I think puts a
Speaker 1: lot of pressure, takes a lot of pressure off of us.
Speaker 1: He also has this writing he ponders, He said, what
Speaker 1: what does the person do who has aspired to greatness
Speaker 1: their whole lives and and then realizes that they really
Speaker 1: don't have what it takes to be great? He asked
Speaker 1: this question once, and I think he's a little and
Speaker 1: maybe it was an unpublished essay I read of his
Speaker 1: about this and I and now I found that very
Speaker 1: interesting as well. What do you do when you face
Speaker 1: the reality of a situation? Do you do you feel
Speaker 1: like your life has failed because you didn't become great?
Speaker 1: I mean, is greatness all there is to life? What
Speaker 1: is what is a life worth living? A lot of
Speaker 1: people are great or miserable right about their lives as well.
Speaker 1: It's all these kinds of questions. I've been pondering them
Speaker 1: my whole life. I don't I don't have the answers.
Speaker 2: And my friend, this goes way beyond I mean, people
Speaker 2: have been pondering those questions for millennia in different forms
Speaker 2: and haven't come up with all the answers, right, Like,
Speaker 2: these are questions you can find like pretty readily in
Speaker 2: like the Greeks, and.
Speaker 1: Every generation recreates these.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so if you could answer those ones, you wouldn't
Speaker 2: have to have any more podcast episodes like ever again
Speaker 2: you nor anyone else. And when I think like achievements
Speaker 2: of mine professionally that have been the most sort of
Speaker 2: objectively successful certainly haven't coincided necessarily with the times I've
Speaker 2: felt most fulfilled in my life. And I have to
Speaker 2: say that has been a little bit of of a
Speaker 2: rude awakening in the past for me. And you know,
Speaker 2: so sometimes now occasionally now, when I look at someone
Speaker 2: who has just achieved something great, you feel good for them.
Speaker 2: But sometimes I also wonder if I should feel a
Speaker 2: little bad for them, because I think in some of
Speaker 2: those cases that people are that's like the moment when
Speaker 2: they are understanding that, oh, this this doesn't do what
Speaker 2: I what I thought it was gonna do. You know,
Speaker 2: it doesn't fill the hole that I thought it was
Speaker 2: gonna fill. Whatever, And does that mean that they then say, well, well,
Speaker 2: I guess I just got to go even bigger, or
Speaker 2: is it. Oh, maybe I have to kind of diversify
Speaker 2: how I think about this and my identity, and so
Speaker 2: I think that's a challenge too. But I'm curious. I
Speaker 2: want to ask you a question cause you mentioned that
Speaker 2: you feel that that Maslow is saying that very dramatic
Speaker 2: of find like the best fit for yourself in the
Speaker 2: entire world takes pressure off of us. And I could
Speaker 2: see that from either way. So I'm curious to hear
Speaker 2: you dissect that a little bit.
Speaker 1: You're right, You're right, You're right. One could definitely see
Speaker 1: that in a way of like, oh, well, a lot
Speaker 1: of things in the world, what do I do?
Speaker 2: It's like a constant fomo, right, Like that's like he's saying,
Speaker 2: like you got to go through all of Instagram and
Speaker 2: find like the house.
Speaker 1: No, no, no, In a way, it's not fomo, it's the opposite.
Speaker 1: I think that's why it takes the pressure off us
Speaker 1: to recognize there's really only one thing in the world
Speaker 1: that's the best fit for us. Is the point, you know,
Speaker 1: and Okay, maybe we'll never find it. Yeah, maybe that
Speaker 1: puts on a lot of pressure on us to find it. Okay,
Speaker 1: So yeah, that puts a lot of pressure and to
Speaker 1: find that one thing. But it also makes us the
Speaker 1: idea of fit being the criteria as opposed to greatness
Speaker 1: being the criteria, I think is what takes the pressure
Speaker 1: off of us. Maybe that was the point I'm making
Speaker 1: because we put oh my gosh, like people who are
Speaker 1: high achievers are constantly comparing themselves upward. Everyone's comparing themselves upward.
Speaker 1: You think, you know the person you're hugely, hugely jealous of,
Speaker 1: and everyone can think of someone that that person. I
Speaker 1: guarantee you that person is constantly on Instagram looking at
Speaker 1: someone else hugely jealous of that person of a someone
Speaker 1: else upward. Everyone looks upward, and that game is not fulfilling,
Speaker 1: that game is well, that game never never will fulfill
Speaker 1: one soul. But the idea of like, wow, I'm doing
Speaker 1: the thing in my life that I feel like I
Speaker 1: am a pretty damn good fit for that. That seems
Speaker 1: like a successful life to me, you know, Like I
Speaker 1: feel like, you know, discovering and being able to have
Speaker 1: the time and and and and finagle my life in
Speaker 1: a certain way where I can focus just on those
Speaker 1: things or focus on those things deeply. I'm like, that's
Speaker 1: a life will lived. Doesn't have to be greatness doesn't
Speaker 1: have to be the criteria for a life will lived.
Speaker 2: Or you know, I think we could, you know, maybe
Speaker 2: we need other definitions of greatness, like what is what
Speaker 2: does a life greatly live for? That for someone you know,
Speaker 2: which always sort of makes me think of like a
Speaker 2: lot of people know that their friends and their family
Speaker 2: are their priority, but like they don't they don't schedule
Speaker 2: those things like they do the things that advance them
Speaker 2: in work, even if they're as are more important. So
Speaker 2: maybe we need to think about our sort of end
Speaker 2: invariables of greatness a little differently, and I think also
Speaker 2: I guess why I why I sort of jump to like, whoa,
Speaker 2: that sounds like a lot of pressure is where as
Speaker 2: you put it something it's a pretty damn good fit,
Speaker 2: which I think is is better than the best in
Speaker 2: the world, because there is of course, like this, you know,
Speaker 2: research on maximizers and satisficers, whereas like the people who
Speaker 2: like all you have to like really are hung up
Speaker 2: on always that there might be something better, can have
Speaker 2: tons of opportunities, tons of achievement and be like quite
Speaker 2: miserable because there is always something. So you have to
Speaker 2: find like a level for yourself a little bit in
Speaker 2: some ways.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, so I'm glad that I did it. I came
Speaker 1: up with a satisficing definition of it. Yeah, sorry, go on.
Speaker 2: I just wanted to mention something when we were talking
Speaker 2: about creativity early, because like you that the satisficing dovetails
Speaker 2: a little with something where like some of your writing
Speaker 2: influenced me. You know, I know we're not supposed to
Speaker 2: be talking about creativity, but I think that's you know.
Speaker 1: Oh right, creative creative creative greatness is a form of
Speaker 1: greatness in my.
Speaker 2: View, So like One of the things that made an
Speaker 2: impression on me in whir to create was that you
Speaker 2: got to have a lot of ideas, Like you got
Speaker 2: to throw a lot of stuff out there, and some
Speaker 2: of it's going to be crap. And so I after
Speaker 2: writing a first book and it becoming like thinking it
Speaker 2: was like just my own oddball interests, and then it
Speaker 2: sort of taking on a life of its own, and
Speaker 2: I got a little bit of paralysis of like everything
Speaker 2: has to be that level or better, you know, and
Speaker 2: it made it hard for me to do anything. So
Speaker 2: I like left that whole field and wrote about other stuff,
Speaker 2: which was fine, and then when I left like a
Speaker 2: next job, I didn't I wasn't putting out enough ideas
Speaker 2: because I had the sort of like perfectionism, not perfectionism,
Speaker 2: but you know, like things had to be like more finished.
Speaker 2: And so I sort of thought back to that that
Speaker 2: the good creators put out lots of ideas, like they
Speaker 2: just generate more. They generate more bad ideas and good ideas,
Speaker 2: and so that was like partly what prompted me to
Speaker 2: start a newsletter, to be like I need a place
Speaker 2: where I can feel like I can just put some
Speaker 2: ideas out there. Without them having to be too perfect,
Speaker 2: like where I can think out loud, where I can
Speaker 2: just like generate, And I found that tremendously, you know,
Speaker 2: liberating from this sort of paralysis I was having, uh
Speaker 2: and and you know allowed me to to generate a
Speaker 2: lot more ideas that that led into other interesting places.
Speaker 2: So sort of combination I feel like of being a
Speaker 2: little bit influenced by something you wrote in that work
Speaker 2: and trying to get off the maximizer train a little bit.
Speaker 1: That's good. That's good. The equal ods rule, although I
Speaker 1: think Dan Simonson has recently called it something renamed it
Speaker 1: to the equal ods something else not rule. But anyway, yeah, no,
Speaker 1: that's exactly right. And uh and even in those models,
Speaker 1: talent matters. But but of course that's that's there's there's
Speaker 1: certain like basic restriction of range, uh, criteria for things
Speaker 1: that are that are obviously true. Like Erickson, he's he
Speaker 1: the only thing he's ever admitted to, he says, well,
Speaker 1: in the case of sports or a case of basketball height,
Speaker 1: he'll admit that, which.
Speaker 2: Is just because just because it's easily measurable with your eyeball,
Speaker 2: that's why.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, but come on, everything has their own thing
Speaker 1: like I don't want to start coming up with ideas.
Speaker 1: I don't want to be able list. I don't want
Speaker 1: to be But there are all sorts of domains and
Speaker 1: things where there are some like basic ingredients to be
Speaker 1: in that you know sort of situation.
Speaker 2: I mean, basketball is a really good analogy to explain
Speaker 2: like restriction of range a little by the way, so
Speaker 2: like in it is actually did this for my first book.
Speaker 2: If you look at height among the American men and
Speaker 2: points scored in the NBA, there's like a very high
Speaker 2: positive correlation, as you might imagine. But if you do
Speaker 2: a study of only NBA players, you restrict your range
Speaker 2: to only NBA players, then the correlation becomes negative because
Speaker 2: guards score more points. And so if you didn't know
Speaker 2: what you were looking at, you could do that study
Speaker 2: and tell parents to have shorter children for them to
Speaker 2: score more points in the NBA, right, because you don't
Speaker 2: realize the impact. And I would say, like the overwhelming
Speaker 2: majority of expertise literature suffers from this restriction of range
Speaker 2: problem where you've selected people who are you know, have
Speaker 2: already been before that highly highly highly pre selected for
Speaker 2: the activity they're doing, and so you've you've removed a
Speaker 2: lot of the variation in in things that got them
Speaker 2: where they are, so you're not going to learn anything
Speaker 2: about it from your from your study.
Speaker 1: Basically, very important to recognize that. I've seen that firsthand
Speaker 1: in like a carnegiemail. In the computer science program, they
Speaker 1: weed out people quickly that first year. M like that
Speaker 1: first year they are like that, look, we're going to
Speaker 1: make you jump in the deep end and see who
Speaker 1: can swim and who can't. You also see that in
Speaker 1: the Beast Barracks or of the uh you know a
Speaker 1: west point west point, yeah, west Point, various things that. Yeah, absolutely,
Speaker 1: they weed you out quickly. And then if you only
Speaker 1: do the study and those who made it and look
Speaker 1: at correlations, you're missing out on lots of potential variables
Speaker 1: that were important there. Yeah. So I think the restriction
Speaker 1: arrange idea is a really important one. But at the
Speaker 1: same time same time, the unngifted in me is saying
Speaker 1: we shouldn't count people out too soon. In a in
Speaker 1: it K through twelve, I don't think we're in any
Speaker 1: business before. There are a lot of things were non
Speaker 1: business before the age of eighteen, you know, like know
Speaker 1: what was smoking? Right? Smoking is not allowed drinking. I
Speaker 1: also feel like we should also ban teachers from limiting
Speaker 1: student potential. Can we add that to the list of
Speaker 1: things that should be illegal? I mean below the age
Speaker 1: of eighteen. Do you know what I'm saying? Though?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean I think I'm a very strong believer that,
Speaker 2: like the most of the most of the high performers,
Speaker 2: never mind, most people are going to follow more sort
Speaker 2: of zig zaggy trajectory, especially the way that the work
Speaker 2: world is now today, like it's in range. I wrote
Speaker 2: a little bit about the so called the Dark Horse
Speaker 2: Project at Harvard, which was like looking at I love
Speaker 2: that how people found fulfilling work, Like some of them were,
Speaker 2: you know, very financially successful in everything, but they were
Speaker 2: really looking for fulfillment and that the reason wasn't called
Speaker 2: the Dark Course project initially, but they like brought people
Speaker 2: in for informational interviews, and people would say, like, not everyone.
Speaker 2: There were some people who had followed a linear you know,
Speaker 2: the fast riser track, but the majority had said like, well,
Speaker 2: I tried this one thing didn't really fit me, so
Speaker 2: then I went this other way and learned I was
Speaker 2: good at this other thing, then this, you know, that way,
Speaker 2: and I liked part of that, but not all of it.
Speaker 2: So that and they like zigzag and use each stop
Speaker 2: as a lesson, and so they would tell the researchers like, so,
Speaker 2: you know, don't tell people to do what I do,
Speaker 2: because like I came out of nowhere, it was a
Speaker 2: one off, and like the majority of people were saying that.
Speaker 2: That's why they called it the dark Horse project. The
Speaker 2: norm presently, not not the exception, not the only path,
Speaker 2: but but I think it is the norm, and so
Speaker 2: doesn't really behoove us to try to enforce, you know,
Speaker 2: to overlay on that like a much narrower path. I
Speaker 2: was reading an OECD report recently and said, kids tend
Speaker 2: to start are narrowing their like what they think are
Speaker 2: possible career choices by age seven in a lot of countries. Now,
Speaker 2: like there's like a lot of the jobs they might
Speaker 2: be considering aren't going to exist. They're going to look
Speaker 2: very different by the time they get there.
Speaker 1: Anyway, Yeah, I don't like that. I guess I'm agreeing
Speaker 1: in a lot of ways with your The main thesis
Speaker 1: of your book range why generalist triumph in a specialized world,
Speaker 1: especially when younger and you do in your book, you
Speaker 1: talk about specific age range as I moved was eight
Speaker 1: to sixteen, if I remember correctly, something like that, where
Speaker 1: you're saying, well, there's this age range, we really should
Speaker 1: allow people to cross to study things from as wide
Speaker 1: fields as possible, right.
Speaker 2: I mean, I think a lot of that age range
Speaker 2: was sort of you know, looking at things like sports
Speaker 2: and using it as analogy and stuff. I think in
Speaker 2: the wider world, I think it's hard to put an
Speaker 2: age range on it, like the for example, like you know,
Speaker 2: some of the research I looked at three M, which
Speaker 2: is the reason I got interested in the company three M,
Speaker 2: was because I was reading these like world Innovation indices
Speaker 2: that come out all the time, and I recognized all
Speaker 2: the time. It would be like Apple, Google, you know
Speaker 2: these names that I really recognized. And then to be
Speaker 2: like three AM and I'm like the post it guys,
Speaker 2: like what that? Why are they up there? Turns out
Speaker 2: they have to make like a quarter of their revenue
Speaker 2: every year from products that didn't exist five years ago.
Speaker 2: They have like seven thousand inventors. They're in all these
Speaker 2: different fields, and they did an internal study looking at
Speaker 2: Brett well Inter. I mean I published it, but they
Speaker 2: were studying their own organization where they operationalized how broad
Speaker 2: or specialized someone was based on the number of tech
Speaker 2: classes they had worked in as characterized by the Patent Office.
Speaker 2: And they had these generalists who had worked in a
Speaker 2: lot of different areas who made contributions. They had specialists
Speaker 2: who had dove deep into areas that had made contributions.
Speaker 2: And there were dilettants who weren't that broad or that deep,
Speaker 2: who didn't do so much. And then the biggest contributors
Speaker 2: were these what they called the polymaths who would like
Speaker 2: go to a certain level of depth and then sort
Speaker 2: of come up and go to that level of depth
Speaker 2: in another place, and come up and go to that
Speaker 2: level of depth in another place, and then like connect
Speaker 2: these different areas. And so you could make contributions as
Speaker 2: a generalist, as a specialist. And then the big the
Speaker 2: most power was these these sort of polymath who sometimes
Speaker 2: came in with an area of depth and then at
Speaker 2: a certain point sacrificed more depth for Brett and other
Speaker 2: times came in sort of broad and then homed in
Speaker 2: on a certain area. And so there wasn't necessarily a
Speaker 2: particular like a like a singular trajectory that they had
Speaker 2: to follow.
Speaker 1: So really cool, really cool stuff. I think we would
Speaker 1: be really remiss to not have a really open, honest
Speaker 1: discussion about the link between creativity and mental illness. I
Speaker 1: feel like there's some prominent examples in the news right now,
Speaker 1: although that might be giving some people cert too much credit,
Speaker 1: calling them geniuses. But I think that this is a
Speaker 1: topic I've studied, and you are very interesting as well,
Speaker 1: and you looked into it as well, so we can
Speaker 1: compare notes.
Speaker 2: Well, I mostly was benefiting from your handiwork research, so.
Speaker 1: Well, I appreciate your modesty. You write, you know, no,
Speaker 1: I mean stuff and yeah yeah.
Speaker 2: But like you like basically laid down a blueprint of
Speaker 2: the available research, and then I just read it and
Speaker 2: wrote a newsletter post.
Speaker 1: Thank you, thank you. So let's talk about this, David Uh.
Speaker 1: It does seem like there is a connection, and it's
Speaker 1: a very interesting connection because it seems to be like
Speaker 1: up until recently, I would say the research is full
Speaker 1: ball and mentalness is not conducive to creativity. It's not well,
Speaker 1: it's not conducive to the kind of creativity that is
Speaker 1: both useful and and novel. It may just be novel
Speaker 1: but not useful. And and look, I want to just
Speaker 1: bring up Kanye West because it's so in the news
Speaker 1: right now. I think we're kind of seeing an example
Speaker 1: where a lot of the you know, keeping mentalness in vague,
Speaker 1: kind of being moderate. Lee Hyman, you know, has led
Speaker 1: to some great, great music. But I think that he's
Speaker 1: perhaps at a level that's that's kind of maybe it's
Speaker 1: explaining our the research as well. It's he's he's at
Speaker 1: a level of extremity that I don't think the ideas
Speaker 1: he's saying right now are very practical, useful, have utility
Speaker 1: value for making the world a better place, even though
Speaker 1: they may be very very novel although they're not that novel.
Speaker 1: I guess so when you look at the arc of
Speaker 1: human history.
Speaker 2: But yeah, they're not novelty. Yeah, yeah, I would say
Speaker 2: the opposite of novel.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Maybe it's it's novel to bring to say such
Speaker 1: things in mainstream media, but yeah, so I'm just under trying.
Speaker 1: I want to get some of your thoughts on that
Speaker 1: and on the on on that link.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, like you said, I think the you know,
Speaker 2: the weight of literature has has in many ways debunked
Speaker 2: that sort of folklore that that mental illness and creativity
Speaker 2: are like inextricably linked by showing in fact that when
Speaker 2: you look at a lot of creative professionals they are
Speaker 2: at lower risk. In general, we're having a whole host
Speaker 2: of mental illnesses, there are some nuances in there, and
Speaker 2: I think the study that I found the most interesting
Speaker 2: on millions of sweet like authors were like the one
Speaker 2: exception I think in the creative professions. So I think
Speaker 2: as a general principle, we can just dispense with that
Speaker 2: idea that you know, and I don't think accounts like
Speaker 2: if someone's eccentric and has like is unusual, that's not
Speaker 2: mental illness, right, That's that's like being creative shouldn't define
Speaker 2: someone as being mentally ill. Right. So but I think
Speaker 2: by and large we can put to rest that idea.
Speaker 2: But what I think is fascinating about that study that
Speaker 2: you highlighted was they found that creative professionals, while they
Speaker 2: themselves were at reduced risk of being diagnosed with the
Speaker 2: mental illness, they're family members were at increase. They were
Speaker 2: more likely they were at sort of increased chances of
Speaker 2: having family members who'd been diagnosed with men's illness. Which
Speaker 2: I think is a kind of fascinating finding that has
Speaker 2: a genetic hypothesis behind it.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, you know, being full on schizophrenic and having full
Speaker 1: delusions that you're one hundred percent notck grounded in reality,
Speaker 1: that's not going to be something that really resonates with
Speaker 1: most people who are not in a similar state. But
Speaker 1: you could see a case where the more water down
Speaker 1: genetic versions which we dispose someone child to not have
Speaker 1: skiz it, maybe have schizotippy, which is a personality trait
Speaker 1: proneness towards often magical thinking. But you see that often
Speaker 1: a lot in the spirituality world, by the way, I
Speaker 1: think a lot of the people in the spiritual order
Speaker 1: are high in schizotippy. So these these sorts of what
Speaker 1: are down traits, you could absolutely see how that would
Speaker 1: be conducive to creative thinking and having people see things
Speaker 1: in new ways.
Speaker 2: And I think what you're saying like water down to
Speaker 2: I know the the hypothesis from that, and there is
Speaker 2: some work to support it. And I think a LinkedIn
Speaker 2: in the newsletter is that let's say you know, most
Speaker 2: most traits other than like a you know a small
Speaker 2: number of rare diseases are caused not caused, are influenced
Speaker 2: by a large number of genes, also influenced by environment,
Speaker 2: but influenced by a large number of genes, each of
Speaker 2: which has a very small effect. And so if you
Speaker 2: say some family you know has a certain set of genes,
Speaker 2: and some members of the family have schizophrenia, and let's
Speaker 2: just say, like, just for argument's sake, there's like ten
Speaker 2: thousand different gene variants that could predispose them to schizophrenia
Speaker 2: some members of the family. You know, if a member
Speaker 2: of the family has more than a thousand, then they're
Speaker 2: going to have schizophrenia. Then, so you have some family
Speaker 2: members who have a serious mental illness and are incapacitated
Speaker 2: from that and can't do that kind of work that
Speaker 2: is both novel and useful. But you might have other
Speaker 2: family members who will get some of those variants that
Speaker 2: might redispose them to kind of, like you said, divergent thinking,
Speaker 2: but not so many that they are you know, not
Speaker 2: functional or not able to connect their work with things
Speaker 2: that resonate with people. So that's sort of the hypothesis
Speaker 2: of where a genetic link again not to the exclusion
Speaker 2: of environment, but that might might help account for that
Speaker 2: reason why do you see an increase increased incidents of
Speaker 2: family members with diagnosed mental illness in the families of
Speaker 2: creative professionals.
Speaker 1: Yes, And I think great points. And I think we're
Speaker 1: talking a lot about the arts, because it's very interesting
Speaker 1: when you start looking at the science as you see
Speaker 1: higher preponderance in a lot of ways of autistic like traits,
Speaker 1: and that's not a mental illness autism. I don't classify
Speaker 1: that as a mental illness. Some people classify as a
Speaker 1: developmental disorder. I don't even love classifying it as that,
Speaker 1: but it is a certain it's a different way of
Speaker 1: processing information that causes people to perhaps become a specialist.
Speaker 1: I mean, I just I want to make a link
Speaker 1: here to like your framework, and I think, like I
Speaker 1: would predict that people in the auto spectrum tend to
Speaker 1: be more specialized as people on the schizo TPY spectrum
Speaker 1: tend to be more generalizers. And there are differences between
Speaker 1: like the sciences and the arts and that. But I
Speaker 1: think that's probably two way too broad a generalization. But
Speaker 1: have you have you thought about that at all?
Speaker 2: I don't know. I mean, it kind of reminds me
Speaker 2: of Simon Baron Cohen's systematizer empathizer brain more where goshut
Speaker 2: up with that in a nutshell, but where where like
Speaker 2: a systematizer brain is more into like sort of categorizing
Speaker 2: and focusing on things and would be more like that
Speaker 2: that autism brain basically and more likely to sort of
Speaker 2: get really into you know, like a technical niche for example,
Speaker 2: and focus on it really in kind of an obsessive way.
Speaker 2: So yeah, I mean I think that I think that
Speaker 2: makes some sense to me. I think if we're talking
Speaker 2: about the level of like Nobel laureate type scientists, then
Speaker 2: I wonder because those like in one of the you know,
Speaker 2: recent Hambric and McNamara down studies where they showed it
Speaker 2: there was it was mostly on sports where they were
Speaker 2: showing there was an inverse relationship between like performance at
Speaker 2: the high junior level and the high senior level where
Speaker 2: basically the people who are the best juniors and never
Speaker 2: became the best seniors. And they mentioned they cite some
Speaker 2: German study I think it was that I haven't read
Speaker 2: because I think it's in German, but it was saying
Speaker 2: that Nobel laureate scientists tended to progress more slowly earlier
Speaker 2: in their careers because they were more interdisciplinary and so
Speaker 2: they didn't get tenure as quickly as some of their peers.
Speaker 2: So at that level, it seems like some of those
Speaker 2: people are so good at making I guess it really
Speaker 2: depends like what they're getting it for, but in some
Speaker 2: cases making these sort of fascinating connections between things and
Speaker 2: are you know, and are are known to be much
Speaker 2: more likely to have like aesthetic hobbies outside of their
Speaker 2: work and that kind of stuff. But I think in anyway,
Speaker 2: I think there's I think there's definitely something to what
Speaker 2: you're saying, But at the very very highest level, I'm
Speaker 2: just sort of thinking out loud and wondering about it.
Speaker 1: I like that Nuance Well Gregory Feiist has shown different
Speaker 1: personality trade supply to good scientists versus great s scientists.
Speaker 1: There actually is a bifurcation.
Speaker 2: They're interesting.
Speaker 1: I think what's what is problematic, shall I say about
Speaker 1: the situation is that the reward structures and science for
Speaker 1: getting grants and things is actually not being too out there,
Speaker 1: is actually it actually rewards good scientists. I don't think
Speaker 1: the basic mechanism of science rewards great scientists, and great
Speaker 1: scientists usually become great scientists despite this scientific system, not
Speaker 1: because of it.
Speaker 2: You just reminded me of this like awesome technical reports
Speaker 2: of the government, which sounds super boring. But vany Var Bush,
Speaker 2: who was a head of US science during World War Two,
Speaker 2: which involved like you know, obviously the Manhattan Project and
Speaker 2: like mass production of penicillin and all this impressive stuff,
Speaker 2: wrote a report for the president called Science the Endless
Speaker 2: Frontier that you can find all over the internet, and
Speaker 2: basically he's describing successful innovation culture. And this report led
Speaker 2: to the creation of the National Science Foundation, which funded
Speaker 2: like a half century of like mind blowing you know,
Speaker 2: from the Internet to like X rays and everything. And
Speaker 2: in it he's basically saying, like, you know, we can't
Speaker 2: perfectly predict where breakthrough is going to come from. We
Speaker 2: need to put a bunch of money into into people
Speaker 2: that are curious and interested and like let them follow
Speaker 2: their their things. And that requires some inefficiency, but that's
Speaker 2: the way it is. That's successful research culture. And so
Speaker 2: it's sort of you know, to the government's credit, they
Speaker 2: established National Science Foundation and funded a lot of stuff
Speaker 2: that was kind of open ended, I mean, but then
Speaker 2: already by the time, like when I was a science
Speaker 2: grad student. I mean I didn't go on to my
Speaker 2: PhD like you did, but already by that time I
Speaker 2: remember having to fill out grand applications and basically having
Speaker 2: to say what I was going to find before I
Speaker 2: started the study, which I think is is counterproductive to that.
Speaker 2: Not that you shouldn't have a hypothesis, right, but I
Speaker 2: thought it was basically asking for like an application before
Speaker 2: I even knew, you know, knew what I was doing.
Speaker 2: And I think that situation precipitated sort of a new
Speaker 2: there's a there was like a second group I think
Speaker 2: during the Obama administration was asked to do like an
Speaker 2: updated version of the report, and they didn't have as
Speaker 2: much literary license, but you know, and basically what they
Speaker 2: said was that, like organizations are increasingly stifling that in
Speaker 2: the in the exploration exploitation trade off, like exploitation, you know,
Speaker 2: making use of knowledge you already have and and for applications,
Speaker 2: exploration is creating new knowledge or you know, looking looking around,
Speaker 2: and that that like organizations were increasingly not funding that
Speaker 2: exploration part of of innovation, and so the government needs
Speaker 2: to really step up. It's like sometimes when I you know,
Speaker 2: I really admire like a lot of Silicon Valley innovators,
Speaker 2: and they're like pioneering spirit and all that stuff, and
Speaker 2: then they're just interested in a lot of stuff. But
Speaker 2: sometimes it bugs me when I'll hear someone who's big
Speaker 2: in tech or VC say like every good thing comes
Speaker 2: out of the private sector, Like when has the public
Speaker 2: sector it only stifles innovation. I'm like, everything you are
Speaker 2: building comes out of National Science Foundation, stuff from the
Speaker 2: second half of the twentieth century, literally everything from public funding.
Speaker 2: And so I think the venture capital community is fantastic
Speaker 2: to have it so that they can see some of
Speaker 2: those moonshot ideas and things that the and and and
Speaker 2: more immediate applications that aren't right for the government. But
Speaker 2: I think it's it can be damaging when we downplay
Speaker 2: the role that public funding has had for allowing people
Speaker 2: to do the kind of meandering exploration that's led to
Speaker 2: like tremendous breakthroughs.
Speaker 1: I agree, I agree, very much agree. When we talk
Speaker 1: about greatness, how much should we talk about being a
Speaker 1: good person? How much? How much does morality or or
Speaker 1: manner of being matter in this case to have greatness?
Speaker 1: To what extent does that sort of manner of being
Speaker 1: or the way you treat others and all that should
Speaker 1: should that matter?
Speaker 2: Think it should matter. I'm sort of on the strong
Speaker 2: end of that of feeling like it should matter. I
Speaker 2: don't think that means we should exxile people from society
Speaker 2: or anything like that. But even when like the you know,
Speaker 2: the Michael Jordan story is told and it's always yelling
Speaker 2: at his teammates and getting the bam, like, tell the
Speaker 2: Tim Duncan story, tell the Steph Curry story, like there's
Speaker 2: all these that's he succeeded in spite of that, not
Speaker 2: because of it. I think I think it's tolerated because
Speaker 2: of how good he was. And I've been in the
Speaker 2: workplace where bad behavior has been tolerated because someone was viewed,
Speaker 2: as you know, having certain special skills which turned out
Speaker 2: to be totally replaceable once they were gone. But I
Speaker 2: think that, you know, like you mentioned Kanye West, and
Speaker 2: I think he's made some amazing music. I think he
Speaker 2: has very interesting taste and you know, in design and
Speaker 2: stuff like that. But I think the first time I
Speaker 2: probably read an interview with him was I don't know,
Speaker 2: fifteen years ago, a long time ago, and from the
Speaker 2: first time I read it, I wasn't sure if it
Speaker 2: was like a satire about his own opinion of himself
Speaker 2: or serious, because I didn't know anything about him at
Speaker 2: the time. And it doesn't so much surprise me that
Speaker 2: that road ended in Man, I think Hitler's cool or
Speaker 2: whatever it was that he said. I don't think that's
Speaker 2: super unpredictable. And I think we, you know, I don't
Speaker 2: think we. I absolutely don't think that we should demand
Speaker 2: like intellectual or moral purity from people who have contributions
Speaker 2: to make, Like I think that can be a really
Speaker 2: damaging thing. At the same time, I don't think we,
Speaker 2: you know, I think if we say, well, we're going
Speaker 2: to tolerate people's behavior that goes against our values because
Speaker 2: they can make this other contribution, then then you're gonna
Speaker 2: get more of that, right, So I think I think
Speaker 2: it depends on how do you want your society to look,
Speaker 2: and then you react. You try to shape it with incentives.
Speaker 2: And if the incentive you give people they can do
Speaker 2: anything they want, if they're you know, they have certain
Speaker 2: other country, if they get famous enough or whatever, they
Speaker 2: get certain contributions that are interesting, then you're making sure
Speaker 2: that you'll get more of that. And I don't think
Speaker 2: that's you know, I don't want to live in an
Speaker 2: ends justifies the means kind of world personally, No, me neither.
Speaker 1: And I'm very interested in moral example ours people who
Speaker 1: are great because of their goodness and pro social agency.
Speaker 1: I don't want us to forget examples of moral greatness
Speaker 1: as well.
Speaker 2: You know I can. I bring one up is someone
Speaker 2: that I became, that became a role model to me
Speaker 2: when I was reporting range as Francis Hesselbein, who was
Speaker 2: the former CEO of the Girl Scouts. She well, she
Speaker 2: took her first professional job at the age of fifty four,
Speaker 2: became the later became the CEO of the Girl Scouts,
Speaker 2: which she basically saved. She tripled minority membership. She had
Speaker 2: one hundred and thirty thousand volunteers right those are people
Speaker 2: she was paying a sense of mission, transforming the organization
Speaker 2: from one that was like preparing girls for life in
Speaker 2: the home to one that was preparing them for careers
Speaker 2: in math and science. Like she gave me a binary
Speaker 2: code badge for girls learning about computers and Peter Drucker,
Speaker 2: the management guru, called her the best CEO on Americans,
Speaker 2: said she should take over like GM and all this stuff.
Speaker 2: She turned one hundred and seven a few weeks ago,
Speaker 2: so still working running Leadership in stud of Manhattan one
Speaker 2: hundred and seven and teaching at West Point occasionally. So
Speaker 2: it was her. But the thing about that went beyond
Speaker 2: what I wrote about in the book was being around her.
Speaker 2: As she would say, leadership is a matter of how
Speaker 2: to be, not what to do, and being around her
Speaker 2: like you could see she was living with that. Like
Speaker 2: the first time I ever did an interview with her,
Speaker 2: I go to her office and we do this sort
Speaker 2: of interview and it's sort of a little formal. But
Speaker 2: then she invites me to lunch with her after and
Speaker 2: I go to lunch and and it's a lot less formal,
Speaker 2: and someone at the place we went to lunch, at
Speaker 2: the counter was being kind of rude, you know, it
Speaker 2: was like Manhattan lunch rush hour kind of thing. Was
Speaker 2: being rude to the server, and she didn't say anything,
Speaker 2: but she went next and just like started talking to
Speaker 2: the server like this is look at all these people,
Speaker 2: this is this is really a tough thing to do,
Speaker 2: Like this is amazing. You must have to deal with
Speaker 2: so much stuff here, Like you're really doing a you know,
Speaker 2: a great job, and like saying it loud enough and
Speaker 2: you can see everyone else in line was like super
Speaker 2: nice after that, right, Like just being around her made
Speaker 2: you want to be a better person. At one point,
Speaker 2: I was in a conversation with multiple people where she was.
Speaker 2: She was in the hospital on a phone, and you
Speaker 2: could hear someone like yelling at a nurse and then
Speaker 2: her telling the nurse like how great of a job
Speaker 2: she's doing. So she's not going aggressive at the other person.
Speaker 2: She's just like being the example that you would want
Speaker 2: people to be. And so whenever I was around her,
Speaker 2: I feel like I was a better person because you
Speaker 2: kind of have to be, you know, like otherwise you
Speaker 2: feel embarrassed about yourself. So that that made a big
Speaker 2: impression on me that leadership is a matter of how
Speaker 2: to be now what to do?
Speaker 1: Love it. My friend actually told me a story recently
Speaker 1: about the time he met Maya Angelou. He had his
Speaker 1: baseball cap down and he was just an all watching
Speaker 1: her being and he was very shy, feeling shy where
Speaker 1: she was walking past him, and she came right up
Speaker 1: to him and she took his hat off and and said, baby,
Speaker 1: you should smile more. The world needs your light. Oh wow,
Speaker 1: pretty wow?
Speaker 2: You know, because like because like sometimes you think of
Speaker 2: the thing as like when when people tell women like
Speaker 2: smile smile, and it's like really really like annoying. But
Speaker 2: when May Angelou says it and it's like Angela and
Speaker 2: it's like poetic gold, I think that's in a different category.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it gets an exemption. It is the last
Speaker 1: topic today? Were you interested in talking about constraints on creativity?
Speaker 1: And why you so obsessed with Ulysses?
Speaker 2: Oh, is the fact that it's like one of the
Speaker 2: gems of English literature. Not enough, No, I mean it's
Speaker 2: it's I think I'm obsessed with it. Well, I've been
Speaker 2: reading it recently and I first got interested in a
Speaker 2: year nineteen twenty two is just like this epical year
Speaker 2: for modernist literature where T. S. Eliot's The Wasteland came
Speaker 2: out in nineteen twenty two, James Joyce's Ulysses, and Virginia
Speaker 2: Wolf's Jacob's Room, which is not one of her more
Speaker 2: famous ones, but it was her break into modernism. And
Speaker 2: it was interesting because these things are such incredible works
Speaker 2: of creativity and unique works. The idea that these people
Speaker 2: were sort of alighting on something kind of similar at
Speaker 2: the same time, means it's kind of like in the
Speaker 2: in the ether in a way. And I mean, Ulysses
Speaker 2: is such a challenging book, but it is so incredible.
Speaker 2: I mean, it's one of those things if you're willing
Speaker 2: to put in the work, you know, so I probably
Speaker 2: read a page outside of Ulysses for every page I
Speaker 2: read inside Ulysses in terms of, you know, to understand
Speaker 2: what was going on and the meaning and the wordplay
Speaker 2: and all these things. But like it's such an amazing adventure.
Speaker 2: I mean, it's it's a domestication of the epic. You know,
Speaker 2: it's structured after the Odyssey, and so every chapter has
Speaker 2: something that you know, it can sometimes be hard to
Speaker 2: tell what it is, but but once you know it's
Speaker 2: not that represents an episode in the Odyssey. But whereas
Speaker 2: the Odyssey is this like incredibly grandiose thing, you know,
Speaker 2: where Odysseus comes home and kills all the suitors that
Speaker 2: are like occupying his home and takes his wife back
Speaker 2: and shoots an arrow through twelve axe handles. Like Leopold Bloom,
Speaker 2: the main character of Ulysses is just trying to get
Speaker 2: through a day with his dignity intact and holding mostly
Speaker 2: to his values while also you know, sometimes acting in
Speaker 2: his self interest. And so he told this epic, but
Speaker 2: he domesticated it down to like the scale of normal life.
Speaker 2: And there's if there's a character in literature who, like,
Speaker 2: I've never even come close to having as much access
Speaker 2: to the thoughts of a character as Leopold Bloom, the
Speaker 2: main character in Ulysses. So it's like I might know
Speaker 2: his thoughts better than I know my own, and that
Speaker 2: doesn't make him more simple, it actually makes it more complex.
Speaker 2: And so it made me feel a little better sometimes
Speaker 2: about like having lots of different thoughts and not totally
Speaker 2: understanding what's going on with my head. But it's also
Speaker 2: just it's a it's funny. It's tremendous word play. Like
Speaker 2: there's a chapter that takes place in a maternity hospital
Speaker 2: and maybe I don't know, maybe like a few minutes
Speaker 2: or something passing the whole chapter, but I think there's
Speaker 2: forty paragraphs to represent each of the weeks of pregnancy
Speaker 2: in a maternity hospital, and it goes it's like the
Speaker 2: medium mimics gestation, So it starts with a prose style
Speaker 2: that's like an early prose style and moves through styles
Speaker 2: up to modernity, like just naturally as you're going through
Speaker 2: the writing, there's all this amazing stuff, and there's it's
Speaker 2: just as a writer, I think reading fiction gives me
Speaker 2: more ideas for how to structure writing and think about storytelling.
Speaker 2: And it's it's a creative explosion, an interesting book in
Speaker 2: terms of constraints. What I found fascinating about it was
Speaker 2: that I think in order to pull off something that
Speaker 2: unusual and creative, he sort of had to ground it
Speaker 2: in certain ways in the structure of very familiar things
Speaker 2: the Odyssey, you know, the Odyssey, it's clearly influenced by Hamlet,
Speaker 2: right like, so maybe the two like most well known
Speaker 2: narratives in all of Western literature and in a single day.
Speaker 2: And in some ways I think the more the more
Speaker 2: creative a certain aspect of a work is, the more familiar,
Speaker 2: some other aspect has to be so that we don't
Speaker 2: feel like totally out at sea, you know, so it
Speaker 2: isn't just purely avant garde, so we have somewhere to
Speaker 2: ground ourselves. So sorry, that was like a they went
Speaker 2: off on a long masterclass.
Speaker 1: And do you think that's a work of Do you
Speaker 1: think it's a work of genius? Absolutely, and no one's
Speaker 1: going to deliberately practice to that.
Speaker 2: Alone, didn't. I didn't see that one coming. But yeah, no, I.
Speaker 1: Mean you can't. One can't. Yeah, merely merely deliberately practiced
Speaker 1: to writing the next to.
Speaker 2: Lussi's yeah it's amazing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it is amazing. And Patricia Stokes should get
Speaker 1: some shout out or her seminal work on the importance
Speaker 1: of constraints and creativity. You know, what was the first
Speaker 1: review I ever wrote? Was it really book review? I
Speaker 1: think that was the first book review I ever wrote,
Speaker 1: two thousand and six.
Speaker 2: One of the reasons I've been thinking about it, I mean,
Speaker 2: I've been interested in it for a long time, like
Speaker 2: why do you know, why does like a haiku liberate
Speaker 2: rather than stiful creativity you know, suddenly makes everyone able
Speaker 2: to write a poem. But also I thought that I
Speaker 2: wanted like total work autonomy in my own life. So
Speaker 2: after you know, range came out, I don't have a
Speaker 2: day job anymore, like buying totally on my own, full freedom,
Speaker 2: And I think I realized after not too long that
Speaker 2: I had too much freedom and I was getting like
Speaker 2: too picky about picking a project, becoming too much of
Speaker 2: a maximizer, and I'm like, you need to stop like
Speaker 2: just exploring and like explore something and that informs like
Speaker 2: the next thing you do? You know. I think it
Speaker 2: was like me Hi Chicks and me Hi who who
Speaker 2: wrote something like Who's work? I'm sure you know way
Speaker 2: better than I do. Some like you know when you
Speaker 2: commit to a relationship or a life course. Maybe he
Speaker 2: was even saying a marriage. I can't remember exactly what
Speaker 2: it was, but his point was that you commit to
Speaker 2: it so that you can stop wondering how that you
Speaker 2: can start living and stop wondering how to live. Yeah,
Speaker 2: And I sort of felt like that with a project,
Speaker 2: Like I'm like, I just need to pick something and
Speaker 2: do it. It may not be the perfect thing, but
Speaker 2: that's how I'll stop spending time what to explore and
Speaker 2: start exploring, and that'll and form the next thing.
Speaker 1: I freaking all that? What did I tweet the other
Speaker 1: day of my life? In tweets here, I tweeted, don't
Speaker 1: wait for the motivation to commit, commit and it will
Speaker 1: motivate you.
Speaker 2: I like that. I want to talk to you more
Speaker 2: about constraints. I don't think I should use up too
Speaker 2: much of your podcast time because my thoughts are so
Speaker 2: like nebulous at the moment that.
Speaker 1: Let's get something on the cound or even talk about
Speaker 1: that some other time. You know how people say that
Speaker 1: let's get something on the cound or uh no, that
Speaker 1: sounds great, man, Well, we obviously have so much we
Speaker 1: could continue talking about. I think this was a good
Speaker 1: a good sampling of some of the main issues in
Speaker 1: the field. And yeah, I worry that a lot of
Speaker 1: the science applied to a long gone era, you know,
Speaker 1: Dean Simonton's study of genius. I just wondered what extent
Speaker 1: it applies to this new era we're living in of
Speaker 1: social media, TikTok things where anyone can be hailed a
Speaker 1: genius within all takes a certain number of followers to
Speaker 1: hail you a genius now to be a genius, and
Speaker 1: I think that we see that in a very different
Speaker 1: way than than than ever before in human history.
Speaker 2: And so when you say you wonder if Simonson's work applies,
Speaker 2: you mean like how he would in terms of how
Speaker 2: a genius is classified.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean his analyzes were based on length and
Speaker 1: history books, you know, length and like encyclopedias and trying
Speaker 1: to come up with objective metrics and things within certain
Speaker 1: well classified fields that have operated over long time courses.
Speaker 1: But I just think we're seeing a new era of thing.
Speaker 1: And yeah, I'm really I'm obviously not articularly my point
Speaker 1: quite well, because I don't know exactly what this looks
Speaker 1: like or what it's going to look like in the
Speaker 1: next one hundred two of years, but it feels different.
Speaker 2: Do you think like the label of genius is helpful
Speaker 2: or not helpful? Because when you ask me, do I
Speaker 2: think do I think Ulysses is a work of genius?
Speaker 2: I was very quick to say, oh, yeah, for sure,
Speaker 2: and then to think, like, how would I define a
Speaker 2: work of genius? Like know it when you see it?
Speaker 2: You know, I don't know. Do you think it's Do
Speaker 2: you think it's a helpful label?
Speaker 1: Well, the focus here is on greatness today, and I
Speaker 1: do think greatness can be defined as top one percent,
Speaker 1: top one percent maybe of a field on a certain
Speaker 1: set of metrics. But I think that that was easier
Speaker 1: to easier to arrive at objectively in the past.
Speaker 2: Unless the metric is followers or something like that, in
Speaker 2: which case.
Speaker 1: Yeah, maybe, yeah, yeah, Okay, Well that's a very good point.
Speaker 1: Maybe it's easier than ever for us to know who's
Speaker 1: great to But it just seems like the kind of
Speaker 1: standards were holding each other to of greatness right now
Speaker 1: seem much more soulless.
Speaker 2: I mean, if you wanted to get, if you wanted
Speaker 2: to like multiply, you know, move your followers tomorrow by
Speaker 2: in order of magnitude, what you would do is start
Speaker 2: flamethrowing on stuff that's ridiculously.
Speaker 1: Right, right, so be divisive as humanly possible. Yeah, right,
Speaker 1: that doesn't divisive things. Yeah, so I.
Speaker 2: Don't think that would be a good metric of genius.
Speaker 2: I think I think a lot of people could increase
Speaker 2: their follower accounts a lot in ways that they see
Speaker 2: other people doing it, you know, if they don't mind
Speaker 2: like doing things that are bad for everyone.
Speaker 1: In that way, maybe there's more of a template for
Speaker 1: greatness than ever before in that in that sense as well. Yeah, yeah, Oh, anyway,
Speaker 1: there's so much to talk about.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that was like a very like on heessimistic conclusion,
Speaker 2: like wrapped in optimistic sounding language.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because well, you know, just coming around full circle
Speaker 1: at the beginning when we're talking about well, if there
Speaker 1: was a template, if there were general principles, and everyone
Speaker 1: would do it. But I think now maybe the incentive
Speaker 1: structures are bad. I mean, I think it is negative
Speaker 1: in the incentive structures for people getting popularity these days.
Speaker 1: I think what we're solving for as a society is
Speaker 1: worries me. It concerns me for sure.
Speaker 2: I mean I think I think even by my own
Speaker 2: short like you know, when I was a journalist, wasn't
Speaker 2: I'm still a journalist, but when I was like sort
Speaker 2: of a daily employeed journalism journalist, if I think about
Speaker 2: how I thought about like becoming good and building a
Speaker 2: reputation and getting a following. At that point, it was
Speaker 2: like write some interesting articles. And now if someone came
Speaker 2: to me and were like, how do I how do
Speaker 2: I build a following as a writer, I mean I
Speaker 2: wouldn't if they just wanted to build a following, you'd say, like, uh,
Speaker 2: pick some people more famous than you and just start
Speaker 2: antagonizing them, you know, like in like incredibly horrible ways
Speaker 2: like and they and you can build a following that way.
Speaker 2: But I mean, I guess we're lucky that I think
Speaker 2: that that kind of thing just like does not feel
Speaker 2: even even if there's like fame and money on the line,
Speaker 2: simply not palatable to most people, and I feel lucky
Speaker 2: for that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Aristotle, if he was alive, may rest in peace
Speaker 1: would be like shaking shaking my damn head. This is
Speaker 1: not youn Aemonia. Do you know what I'm saying. That's
Speaker 1: not what I meant by you Daemonia.
Speaker 2: Be doing the shaking my head mooji.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, Hey man, thank you so much for
Speaker 1: coming on today and chatting with me and jamming with
Speaker 1: me about this topic. There's more to come, lots more
Speaker 1: to come.
Speaker 2: That's a pleasure always generally talking to you.
Speaker 1: Likewise, thanks for listening to this episode of The Psychology Podcast.
Speaker 1: If you'd like to react in some way to something
Speaker 1: you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion
Speaker 1: at the Psychology podcast dot com or on our YouTube
Speaker 1: page the Psychology Podcast. We also put up some videos
Speaker 1: of some episodes on our YouTube page as well, so
Speaker 1: you'll want to check that out. Thanks for being such
Speaker 1: a great supporter of the show, and tune in next
Speaker 1: time for more on the mind, brain, behavior, and creativity.