- Child prodigies, especially in the YouTube age,
are sort of like human cat videos.
Whether they're playing classical music
or they're in a sport or playing chess,
you can't look away from them,
they're so entertaining.
We think of that as a trajectory.
If they're this good at age five or age 10,
they're gonna be so good at age 20 or 30 or 40.
And I think the idea that parents tend to take from them
is that if I just give my kid this very narrowly focused,
early, technical training, my kids will be ahead
and they'll stay ahead forever.
It's just the problem is that turns out not to be the case.
I'm David Epstein, author of
"Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World."
(climactic synthetic music)
- [Cameraman] Nice, bro!
(scribbling)
- Okay, so even if you don't know
the details of Tiger Woods' story,
it's probably the most powerful modern story of development.
His father gave him a putter when he was seven months old.
At two years old, he was on national television
showing off his swing in front of Bobe Hope.
At three, he was learning how to play out of a "sand twap,"
as he put it at the time
and saying, "I'm gonna be the next great golfer.
"I'm gonna be the next Jack Nicholas."
By the time he's a teenager, he's famous.
And you fast forward to age 21
and he's the greatest golfer in the world.
I think one of the reasons
that prodigy stories are so attractive
is because we're used to thinking of everything
as being a trajectory, right?
It's intuitive to want to give a kid a headstart.
In sports, that might be something
like learning how to run certain types of plays
or very specific techniques.
Or in music, how to play the same piece
over and over and over again.
Or in academics, tricks for working out math problems.
The problem is, we don't follow linear progressions.
We are not wired correctly
to interpret our own development, necessarily,
'cause we just want what comes the fastest
when, in many cases, slower development
is actually the best in the long run.
One way to think about the world is to think of it
as a learning environment,
and the milieu in which you have to develop
some kind of skill.
They run on a spectrum from kind learning environments
where what you have to do is very clear
and delineated by clear rules and patterns repeat
and the task doesn't change,
all the way to wicked learning environments
where information might be obscured,
there are no discernible rules, the work can change
and even the feedback you get can be delayed and inaccurate.
And we only see those prodigies
in these very kind learning environments.
You can think of something like chess.
The grandmaster's advantage is essentially based
on recognizing recurring patterns.
But most of the work we do these days
is more toward the wicked end of the spectrum,
where we can't just count on things being the same
over and over or giving us perfectly accurate feedback.
For the wicked world, you want a really broad training base,
what scientists call a sampling period,
where you're forming conceptual frameworks
and abstract ideas that you can bend to the activity
as the activity itself changes.
For a lot of the 20th century,
the biggest contributions came from specialists.
But in the information age, as more information
became quickly and easily disseminated,
it became easier to be broader than a specialist
and the biggest contributions started coming
from people who spread their work across a large number
of technological domains, often taking something from one
and bringing it to another area
where it was seen as extraordinary,
even if it was more ordinary somewhere else.
(playful music)
Gunpei Yokoi was was a Japanese man
who didn't score well on his electronics exams in university
so he had to settle for a low tier job
as a machine maintenance worker at a playing card company.
This playing card company, founded in the 19th century,
is called Nintendo.
And one day, the president of the company saw Yokoi
essentially playing around with company equipment
'cause he didn't have anything to do
and he made an extendable arm called the Ultra Hand.
It was just a device where you could grab distant objects
with suction cups.
And the desperate president says, "turn that into a toy,
"we're going to market,"
and it's sort of a success.
And so the president says, "all right,
"you're going to start a game and toy operation."
Yokoi realizes that he's not equipped
to work on the cutting edge,
but there's so much information widely available
that he can take information from different domains
and merge it, and he did that for his magnum opus,
the Game Boy.
He developed this philosophy
he called lateral thinking with withered technology.
And what he meant by that, withered technology,
he meant technology that's already well understood
easily available and often cheap,
and lateral thinking meant taking it from an area
where everyone's already used to it
and merging it with something else.
Because the technology was so withered
and so well understood,
programmers inside and outside of Nintendo
pumped out games for it way faster than their competitors
and the Game Boy became the best selling console
of the 20th century
and Nintendo still uses that lateral thinking
with withered technology philosophy today.
The more we work in a rapidly changing world
where we're not exactly sure what we should do next
or what work will look like next year
or in five years or 10 years,
the more we want those people who have had a broad view
and can kind of draw on different stores of knowledge.
And one of the ways I think about operationalizing that
is essentially having a short term mindset.
I know that sounds bad, right?
You tell people we should have long term goals
and that it's like the commencement speech advice,
"who are you gonna be in 10 or 20 years?"
and "march toward that."
It turns out that's not really a good way to operate,
especially when you're younger.
We're essentially telling someone to choose
for a person they don't yet know
who's gonna be working in a world they can't yet conceive.
The main advice, if I judge by what people say back to me,
is to not feel behind because you probably don't even know
where you're going, anyway.
And I think, rather than comparing yourself
to someone who isn't you,
you should compare yourself to yourself yesterday
and proceed that way.
- [Cameraman] Awesome.
- Do you wanna try the cool catch again?
- [Cameraman] Yeah.
- All right.
Oh!
I'm David Epstein, (cameraman laughing)
(laughs) author of...
Now you guys made me laugh.
(crew laughing)
- Thanks for watching.
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