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