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Transcription of interview with David Epstein on January 20, 2014.
Douglas Goldstein, CFP®, Financial Planner & Investment Advisor
David Epstein is a bestselling author who writes about science, medicine, and sports.
He has written a fabulous book called The Sports Gene.
Douglas Goldstein, financial planner & investment advisor, interviewed Epstein on Arutz Sheva
Radio.
Douglas Goldstein: Tell me do I have a sports gene?
David Epstein: I don’t really know, I haven’t had a chance to look at your genes and don’t
know about your athletic accomplishment but if you’re like most people, you probably
do have some if you can find the right environment in which to cultivate them.
Douglas Goldstein: How about for sort of like a middle-aged Jewish money manager, does that
sound like a guy with a sports gene?
David Epstein: The revolution in exercise genetics is finding the most important sports
genes are those that prime you to benefit from a certain type of training so before
you found a particular type of training, you really don’t know.
I know all the tongue-and-cheek question but that’s really what some of the revolution
in exercise genetics is finding, trainability genes.
Douglas Goldstein: Trainability just applies only to sports or does it apply to intellectual
pursuits as well?
David Epstein: We’ll say it appears to apply to motor skill acquisition which is nothing
more than kind of a changing of your brain and to memory as well in some cases where
some people are more trainable and one of the genes that is emerging in that study is
called BDNF (Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor).
I stay with sort of within that realm and I think that’s where the research is more
robust but it’s looking more and more like it affects many aspects of our training.
Douglas Goldstein: According to Harry Lorayne that memory is something that you can train
to improve.
Is that true or do you think some people are born with it?
David Epstein: That’s absolutely true but that’s not differentiating from people having
talents for to train faster.
Actually, you can improve basically everything, it’s just the question of the learning rate.
Chess masters used to be thought to have this miraculous memory because if they were given
chess board and was taken away after 3 seconds, they could recreate the entire board.
They must just be gifted with great memory but then when they were presented with boards
that didn’t have a meaningful game situation, they were no better than normal people.
It turned out it was just that they had learned to remember groupings or positions that were
meaningful from the practice.
You absolutely can improve your memory by learning systems in incredible amount and
yet people don’t improve at the same right.
Douglas Goldstein: I wrote a book with world chess champion Susan Polgar.
She has been studied by many people because of her amazing chess skills and one of the
things that she and I talked about when we were writing the book was when she plays blindfolded,
what does she really see in her mind and what was fascinating is that if I were playing
chess blindfold that I think I would try to remember where every piece was and if nothing
like what she sees, she just sort of sees power on the board, but to me would look like
clouds of influence as opposed to individual pieces and that is how she remembers things.
David Epstein: It’s quite the same thing with what quarterbacks do, like a real grandmaster
chess player doesn’t need to see the board at that level anymore.
The blindfold is sort of a gimmick because they are practically playing blindfold anyway,
they don’t really need the book.
They play the whole game in their mind.
Douglas Goldstein: That’s what they say about Magnus Carlsen that when he reads books
about chess games, he just simply reads the game.
He will just read the moves that where in the game and sees the whole thing going on
and doesn’t actually have a chess board near him.
David Epstein: Interestingly, you use the analogy of reading.
What they are doing is chunking, learning groups and systems that break down what would
otherwise be large groups of chaotic information so it makes sense and we all do that with
things that we’re expert at.
If I gave you 20 random words right now, you’d have trouble repeating them back to me but
if I said a 20-word sentence to you with the same words, you might be able to repeat it
back to me because you’ve learned the system of grammar and groups of words and phrases
that it makes sense out of otherwise chaotic information for you.
Douglas Goldstein: Based on what you
wrote
on your book, a lot of what you talk about is very relevant to people handling their
money and learning about handling their money.
Do you think that wealth is something that has a genetic component?
David Epstein: I certainly think that people would predispose a certain type of skills
given the nature of our information economy will tend to get more wealth but if you mean
sort of managing the wealth that you already have, I still think yes because people do
have sort of different talents but I think anyone can also learn to do what you’re
talking about which is what you’re talking about in looking at statements is basically
honing an unimportant information and discarding the unimportant information and that’s exactly
what a lead athlete learned to do when they look at a field so it doesn’t become chaos,
someone whose never played soccer or hockey, all they see is chaos whereas experts learn
how to hone in on the important information.
I think anyone can learn to do that to a degree but in every case in sports, some people learn
it faster than others and actually in every study of skill acquisition that I’ve seen,
that’s the case, some learn faster than others but everyone can improve.
Douglas Goldstein: David Shank, in his book The Genius in All of Us talks about the concept
of the 10,000 hour rule and gives examples of Tiger Woods and people who we think are
great and he points out that these people just really work their bottoms off to become
great.
What’s the connection?
David Epstein: You certainly have to work like crazy but actually the Tiger Woods example
is by far the exemption, not the norm.
If you actually look at the number of hours of practice that athletes would go on to become
elite in childhood compared to those who go on to become near elite, the elites are actually
always practicing less until their mid to late teen years but Tiger Woods is a very
rare exception.
What they have is what’s called the sampling period where they actually try a bunch of
different things while the eventual near elites are already choosing one thing.
They try different things, they find what best fits their talents and then they hone
and focus in on that in their mid teen years.
If you look at the ultimate number of practice hours, the elites have more but if you look
at their developmental path, they actually had less until most of the population was
screened out.
In the 10,000 hour rule, you can look at the guy who did the original study.
He’s now become so upset with how journalist like David Shank had interpreted it that he
has a letter on his faculty webpage called the Danger of Delegating Education to Journalist.
He talks about how that was invented in that letter.
Douglas Goldstein: Do you think that maybe these people who are just practicing fewer
hours maybe they just practice more efficiently?
David Epstein: I think there is some element of that for sure but the body of literature
for the athletes suggest that that’s not necessarily what’s going on with the kids
when they are 8, 9 or 10 years old.
Most of their practices are not that would qualify.
It’s like deliberate practice.
Really what they are doing is they are engaging in a sampling period in finding the thing
that actually best fits their talents before they choose.
You have a rare case where the first implement that someone grabs is the perfect one like
Tiger Woods but for most athlete, they should actually try a bunch of different things and
figure out what they are best at and then focusing on that and that’s both in team
sports, individual sports.
I do just a new study for tennis and that’s the pattern that the vast majority have ultimately
followed.
Douglas Goldstein: If you just aren’t good with money, I’ll say with someone who is
in my office “You got to budget a little better” and he says “Yes, great idea but
money just flips through my finger.
I got it from parents.”
Is that true or can I give them some encouragement and it says it’s not genetic?
David Epstein: I would say as a general rule of thumb, for the kind of things we’re talking
about, genes influence everything and determine very little.
They will influence people’s proclivities and [stick] that old question, do you blame
your genes, you then blame your parents, well how do you know it’s the same thing?
They might not be as natural to those skills at money management as an expert but the idea
that they can’t improve thinking that “That’s just my luck” that’s almost never the
case.
So absolutely they can improve and it’s actually problematic to have the mindset “This
is just who I am.”
It’s what’s called the fixed mindset and that really inhibits your ability to improve
in a certain task.
Douglas Goldstein: Would you say that sports players in the major league, regular guy is
on the team, they might be the normal guys and they weren’t certainly genetically predisposed
but they just simply worked hard enough to be able to make it at the big leagues?
David Epstein: The average major league baseball player has a visual acuity of 20/12 which
means they can see from 20 feet away what I have to stand 12 feet away to see.
So they absolutely have to put in many hours of practice but that’s actually quite rare
so they have to have a pretty rare level of visual acuity to go with their accumulated
practice even the average guys.
So you just don’t make it to that level without a certain density of photo receptors
in your eyeball.
Douglas Goldstein: Have you found this or checked this in other place out of sports,
for example surgeons, money managers, lawyers?
Do they all have something that makes them special?
David Epstein: My research has been restricted to sports and games including chess and pool
and things like that realm so I don’t know, I can’t speak to the head as well.
Douglas Goldstein: How can people follow your work?
David Epstein: They can read the rest of the book which they can see at www.thesportsgene.com
or it’s available on Amazon.
I would say that I don’t take the anti-practice or opposite stand, I just also include the
decade of research that’s been done since the sequencing of the human genome and I don’t
act like that hasn’t informed us at all like some writers do.
Douglas Goldstein, CFP®, is the director of Profile Investment Services and the host
of the Goldstein on Gelt radio show (Monday nights at 7:00 PM on www.israelnationalradio.com.
He is a licensed financial professional both in the U.S. and Israel.
Securities offered through Portfolio Resources Group, Inc., Member FINRA, SIPC, MSRB, NFA,
SIFMA.
Accounts carried by National Financial Services LLC.
Member NYSE/SIPC, a Fidelity Investments company.
His book Building Wealth in Israel is available in bookstores, on the web, or can be ordered
at: www.profile-financial.com (02) 624-2788 or (03) 524-0942.
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