It's great to welcome to the program today, David Epstein, who's the author of the New
York Times best
cellar range wide generalists, triumph in a specialized world.
Also the best selling book, the sports gene as well.
Today we'll be talking about generalists in a specialized world.
David, great to have you on.
Thank you for having me.
So this is a super interesting topic to me because if you read some of the scholarship
about the future of work in the United States, uh, and the types of jobs that are more and
less likely to be automated away, one of the things that often comes up is jobs that require
sort of, uh, working in the gray areas, subjective advice, interpretation of material, et Cetera,
are less likely to be automated away.
And that very often those are the types of jobs that are more rather than less specialized
that the more general tasks are easier to automate away.
But in your book you talk about actually the value of generalist knowledge, general knowledge
rather than specialization in the modern world.
So let's start there.
Like why, why do you believe that that's so important.
I would say that historically they actually, the opposite has been true that it's the specialist
jobs to get audited and automated away.
So one of the examples I talk about in the book is, is chess, right?
Where chess is what's called a kind learning environment.
It's with a psychologist, Robin Hogarth turned to kind learning and term to kind learning
environment, which means it's based on repetitive patterns, essentially information's clear.
Uh, the task next year will look like it did last year.
The experts advantage in fact is based on static rules and the ability to recognize
patterns.
And in a scenario like that, specialization is a, an enormous advantage.
So in fact, if you haven't started studying chess patterns by the age of 12, your chances
of ever becoming an international master dropped from about one in four to about one in 55.
But that's also why chess is, uh, so easy to automate because it's based on static rules
and repetitive patterns.
And we see similar things in other parts of the work world.
To give an example that I can sort of tell quickly.
I guess when the ATM came online, the prophecy was that the bank teller would be a extinct
overnight.
But in fact, as we've had more bank tail, more ATM in America, we've had more bank tellers
and that's because ATM is make each bank branch cheaper to operate.
And so you need fewer tellers, but banks opened more branches and you end up with more total
tellers.
But it completely changes the job from one of repetitive transactions, um, to one of
someone who is more of a marketing professional and a customer service, uh, agent.
And they have to have this much broader range of often much sort of softer skills.
And that, that actually, um, looks like the pattern when you actually look at what happens
as opposed to to what people, uh, predict and, and are not accountable for those predictions.
Yes.
And much to the dismay of many people having to be sold things every time they go in and
just want to deposit a check.
Are you sure you don't want to, uh, open up a new CD or whatever?
Yeah, I certainly have experienced that.
Um, there's a big analogy here I want to get into the work side more, but there is a big
analogy here to sports that there are lots of analogies to sports in fact of specialists
versus generalists.
Can you talk a little bit with some of the sports examples that you cite about ways to
think about generalist versus specialist in some particular sports context?
Sure.
Well, I mean the, the books I'm partly came out of a debate I was set up to have with
Malcolm Gladwell, right about the 10,000 hour rule.
It's on, it's on youtube.
Um, and basically his hypothesis was that early specialization in sports is an insurmountable
advantage.
And I was the science writer at sports illustrated at the time.
And so I went and looked at what research had to say.
And in fact, in most sports, when scientists look at athletes who go on to become elite,
they find that they have what's called a sampling period where they learn this broader range
of skills that scaffold later learning.
Uh, they, they play a variety of sports.
They learn about their interests and abilities and they systematically delay specializing
until later than their peers who plateau at lower levels.
Now, there are some exceptions to that.
Um, golf I think is one exception to that and that's why I opened the book.
Comparing and contrasting a tiger woods and Roger Federer.
Golf is the epitome of a kind learning environment.
Again, all the information is clear.
You're, it's almost like an industrial task.
You're trying to do the same known movements over and over with as little deviation as
possible, whereas in the sports that are more dynamic, which are sort of more a little bit
more toward the end of what Hogarth would call a wicked learning environment where you
can't just do the same thing over and over essentially.
Um, in those sports, you almost, you pretty much ubiquitously see this, this sampling
period, this, this broad broad range of skills gained early and delayed specialization and
is in fact like one of the hallmarks of, of, uh, the path to expertise and those other,
yeah, I guess it's easy to imagine.
Well.
So NHL goalies today are highly, highly specialized, but in many cases they only became special
specialists in being goalies after they had already become just generally good hockey
players in their communities in high school, maybe even in college to some degree.
Yeah.
And even actually if you look at, so I, I filled a full page of small of, of shrunken
size type in the back of the book with citations showing all, you know, not all, but many of
the studies have delayed specialization athletes who want to become elite.
And one of them is in fact of current NFL players who did more unstructured play and
sampled more sports formally or unformally than peers who plateaued at lower levels.
So, um, you know, sports from volleyball and baseball, football, soccer, hockey, those
citations.
I stuck all back there because I thought people would be interested in being able to look
up whatever sport, whatever their favorite sport was basically.
So to bring this back to careers and thinking about jobs, I mean there are lots of careers
where there is this natural flow of being a generalist and then specializing.
I mean everybody starts other than I guess dentists and podiatrists, maybe there's some
other exotic exceptions.
Everybody starts going to medical school, whether you end up in psychiatry or thoracic
surgery, and then there is a sort of natural flow at which you start to specialize.
Sometimes it relates to the residency that a period that you have in the law, people
start with a very similar first year law curriculum and then eventually you start to specialize
sometimes through an internship.
Is there a sort of general rule about the transition between being a generalist into
a specialist that applies more broadly?
So think it sort of depends, right?
Medical School, I guess your more general in medical school than when you become a hyper
specialist later.
Right.
And a hyper specialist now like a cardiologist used to be the epitome of specialization in
medicine.
Now to be specialized, a cardiologist might be someone who only works on cardiac valves,
you know the little doors that, that let blood in now to the heart and even the rest of the
heart is outside of their purview.
And that's caused, um, a major problem of overtreatment with things that don't work
because all these specialists are looking at what's called surrogate markers.
Basically they're looking at some small part of a system and assuming that it's a proxy
for the rest of the system and it turns out that it often isn't.
So you know, we'll have things like very popular blood pressure medications and people who
take it die of heart attack and stroke at the exact same rates, um, just with lower
blood pressure numbers.
So I think while the beginning of med school is certainly less specialized than someone
becomes eventually, I think there's a movement, and this is, this is one of the pioneers of
this I profile in the last chapter of the book who is saying, look, we need to stop.
We need to stop beginning med school with reductionism.
Essentially it's anatomy and physiology before people learn how to think about a whole organism
in context.
And so already in the beginning of some of those schools, I think there's a pretty, pretty
good argument to be made that it's starting with the type of specialization that's, that's
sort of counterproductive in terms of which direction people go, whether they specialize
or generalized first.
Uh, in sports it's clear that you should generalize first.
Um, in some other areas, like when I look at technological innovation, the biggest impact,
um, there are generalists and specialists and they are defined in that type of research
based on how many different types of technologies they work across as categorized by the patent
office and the specialists who, you know, stick to one or two make contributions to
generalists who go across a whole bunch of technological classes, make contributions
at dilettantes who don't go very deep or very broad, don't make big contributions, but the
biggest ones come from the polymaths who either start with an anchored in area of expertise
and then sacrifice some depth for breadth or start broad and then sacrifice going broader
for some depth.
So it doesn't really matter what direction they take, uh, as long as they, as long as
they ultimately get the breadth that is the ally rather than the enemy of depth.
So in a really general sense, it would seem as though in a world where there are at least
questions about how employment is going to work in 20 years or in 30 years or whatever,
that there would be some kind of obvious superficial advantage to having more general knowledge
and abilities because of the flexibility that it would conceivably provide to allow someone
to switch career or, or industry more easily than someone who is a specialist or a hyper
specialist.
Is that something that people now going into college and choosing majors should be thinking
of or, or is that a what appears to be common sense?
Not actually that that much common sense?
No, I, I, I, I do think they should be thinking about that and I don't even think it requires
changing careers necessarily because the even jobs themselves are going to change.
So even if you stick with the same job or career, you're going to need to evolve pretty
quickly.
So the scholar James Besson, who, um, did an amazing job of documenting sort of technological
disruption over time, uh, his, one of his findings is that we're not really going through
an unprecedented time in terms of the scale of disruption has happened many times before.
It's just that workers may have to reinvent themselves more times than they did in the
past because of the pace of the change.
And so I think that's, that's pretty much going to be true for everyone.
Starting with the late baby boomers, actually, the bureau of Labor Statistics data shows
that starting with late baby boomers, the average number of jobs from age 18 to about
50 is 12.
And so this really, this, this idea of the itinerant millennial sort of actually started
with the very last of the baby boomers and it's just accelerating now.
So I think we should expect to be having to reinvent.
And in fact, if you look at it, so one of the studies I look at in range is done by
an economist.
Looking at whether these early or late specialized hours, um, who wins the trade off in college,
right?
The people who get into their specialty right away or those who try a variety of things
and delay sampling and, and sorry in sample and delay specializing.
And what he finds is that the early specializes do jump out to an income lead because they
have more domain specific skills, but by year six, the later specializes shoot pass them.
And then the early specializes have to start quitting their entire career track in much
higher numbers because they don't have that flexibility to adapt.
Now when they do quit, it's often to improve their match quality.
They find a better fit.
So there their growth rates are pretty good.
So they should be quitting when they do that.
But you know, they, they lose the tradeoff in pretty short order.
They're made to choose so early that they often make bad choices for what they should
be doing.
And they also don't end up as flexible.
So the late specialized years, um, lose a bit in the short term.
But when in the longterm,
if someone's in the middle of their career right now, in other words, they, they're not
close enough to retirement that this is not that big of an issue for them.
It's also not early enough that they're going to be thinking about it in the way that a
college student is going to be thinking about what are the priorities and sort of most important
things to be doing at the mid career level?
Yeah, I think some of it depends on their goals, right?
So let's say they want to be become an executive because if they're in their mid career, that
may be something that they're, that they're targeting.
So recent research by Linkedin on a half million members found that one of the best predictors
of who would go on to become an executive was the number of different job functions
that someone had worked across in an industry.
So if they're sort of settled on their industry, you know, the best advice, well this is not
my advice, it's from the chief economist of Linkedin, is to work across a large number
of job functions.
Each additional job function saves about three years on average of experience in terms of
trying to, trying to get to the c suite.
I think if they're more oriented toward, um, you know, I, I think a way to focus, well,
something else to remember by the way is that we always think of, I was at a motley fool
event recently and they took something from the introduction of my book to pull the crowd
where they asked what do you think is the average age of, um, a founder of a blockbuster
startup on the day it was founded, not when it becomes a blockbuster 25, 35, 45 or 55
25 was the overwhelming favorite.
And then it went down to 35 and then 45 and 55.
And the answer based on research by MIT in the Census Bureau is 45 and a half.
We just, you know, just like, just like we've heard the tiger woods story of early specialization
but not the Roger Federer story where he played a dozen different sports.
We hear the Mark Zuckerberg story.
You know, when at 22 he said young people are just smarter, but we don't know the norm,
which is that 45 disease people have to zigzag a little bit before they know what to do.
So one, I think that's prime time to be thinking about starting your own thing, if that's something
of interest to you.
If it's not, I think the principle to remember is I'm seeking what economists called match
quality, which is a degree of fit between your interests, your abilities, and the work
that you do.
And the better your match quality, the harder you work, the more resilient you'll be.
As, as one of the researchers I quote says, when you get fit, it will look like grit.
That means when people get into a good spot for themselves, um, they'll display all the
characteristics of grit anyway, like resilience and work ethic.
So don't stop trying to triangulate your best fit, run lots of short term experiments.
And this, this advice is kind of laid out in more detail in the book where you keep
making sure to try something new instead of just doing what you've done so that you can
get signals about work that might better fit your interest and abilities.
And you pick up new skills while doing that.
So if you just aim towards searching for match quality, this sort of broadening of your toolbox
happens anyway while you're seeking out the work that best fits you and some of the, the
habits of mind that, that help people
to do that.
You know, I, I lay out from some of the researchers who have studied in, yeah, the book is super
interesting.
It's called range wide generalists
triumph in a specialized world.
We've been speaking with the book's author, David Epstein.
David, such a pleasure having you on.
I appreciate it.
Pleasure's all mine.