so I'd like to talk about the
development of human potential and I'd
like to start with maybe the most
impactful modern story of development
many of you here have probably heard of
the 10,000 hours rule maybe you even
model your own life after it basically
it's the idea that to become great in
anything takes 10,000 hours of focused
practice so you'd better get started as
early as possible the poster child for
this story is Tiger Woods his father
famously gave him a putter when he was 7
months old at 10 months he started
imitating his father's swing at 2 you
can go on YouTube and see him on
national television fast-forward to the
age of 21 he's the greatest golfer in
the world quintessential $10,000 story
another that features a number of
best-selling books is that of the three
polgár sisters whose father decided to
teach them chess in a very technical
manner from a very early age and really
he wanted to show that with a head start
and focused practice any child could
become a genius in anything and in fact
two of his daughters went on to become
Grandmaster chess players so when I
became the science writer at Sports
Illustrated magazine I got curious if
there's 10,000 hours rules correct then
we should see that elite athletes get a
head start in so-called deliberate
practice this is coached
error-correction focused practice not
just playing around and in fact when
scientists study elite athletes they see
that they spend more time in deliberate
practice not a big surprise but they
actually when they actually track
athletes over the course of their
development the pattern looks like this
the future elites actually spend less
time early on in deliberate practice in
their eventual sport they tend to have
what scientists call a sampling period
where they try a variety of physical
activities they gain broad general
skills they learn about their interests
and abilities and delay specializing
until later than peers who plateau at
lower levels and so when I saw that I
said gosh that doesn't really comport
with the 10,000 hours rule does it so I
started to wonder about other domains
that we associate with obligatory early
specialization like music turns out the
patterns often similar this is research
from a world-class music
of me and what I want to draw your
attention to is this the exceptional
musicians didn't start spending more
time into the practice than the average
musicians until their third instrument
they too tended to have a sampling
period even musicians we think of as
famously precocious like yo-yo ma
he had a sampling period he just went
through it more rapidly than most
musicians do nonetheless this research
is almost entirely ignored and much more
impactful is the first page of the book
Battle Hymn of the tiger mother where
the author recounts assigning her
daughter violin nobody seems to remember
the part later in the book where her
daughter turns to her and says you
picked it not me and largely quits
so having seen this sort of surprising
pattern in sports and music I started to
wonder about domains that affect even
more people like education an economist
found a natural experiment in the higher
ed systems of England and Scotland in
the period he studied the systems were
very similar except in England students
had to specialize in their mid teen
years to pick a specific course of study
to apply to ORS in Scotland they could
keep trying things in university if they
wanted to and his question was who wins
the trade-off the early or the late
specialized errs and what he saw was
that the early specialized jump out to
an income lead because they have more
domain-specific skills the late
specialized errs get to try more
different things and when they do pick
they have better fit or what economists
call match quality and so their growth
rates are faster by six years out they
erased that income gap meanwhile the
early specialized errs start quitting
their career tracks in much higher
numbers essentially because they were
made to choose so early that they more
often made poor choices so the late
specialized errs losing the short term
and win in the long run I think if we
thought about career choice like dating
we might not pressure people to settle
down quite so quickly so this got me
interested seeing this pattern again in
exploring the developmental backgrounds
of people whose work I had long admired
like Duke Ellington who shunned music
lessons as a kid to focus on baseball
and painting and drawing or Maruyama
Mirza Connie who wasn't interested in
math as a girl dreamed of becoming a
novelist and went on to become the first
and so far only woman to win the Fields
Medal the most prestigious prize in the
world in math Vincent van Gogh had five
different careers each of which he
deemed his true calling
before flaming out spectacularly
and in his late 20s picked up a book
called the guide to the ABCs of drawing
that worked out okay Claude Shannon was
an electrical engineer at the University
of Michigan who took a philosophy course
just to fulfill a requirement and in it
he learned about a near century-old
system of logic by which true and false
statements could be coded as ones and
zeros and solved like math problems this
led to the development of binary code
which underlies all of our digital
computers today for finally my own sort
of role model Frances Hesselbein this is
me with her she took her first
professional job at the age of 54 it
went on to become the CEO of the Girl
Scouts which she saved she tripled
minority membership added a hundred and
thirty thousand volunteers and this is
one of the proficiency badges that came
out of her tenure it's binary code for
girls learning about computers today
Frances runs a Leadership Institute
where she works every weekday in
Manhattan and she's only a hundred and
four so who knows what's next we never
really hear developmental stories like
this do we we don't hear about the
research that found a Nobel laureate
scientists are 22 times more likely to
have a hobby outside of work as our
typical scientists we never hear that
even when the performers of the work is
very famous we don't hear these
developmental stories for example here's
an athlete I've followed here he is at
age six wearing a Scottish rugby kid now
he tried some tennis some skiing
wrestling his mother was actually a
tennis coach but she declined to coach
him because he wouldn't return balls
normally he did some basketball table
tennis swimming when his coaches wanted
to move him up a level to play with
older boys he declined because he just
wanted to talk about pro wrestling after
practice with his friends and he kept
trying more sports handball volleyball
soccer badminton skateboarding so who is
this dabbler
this is Roger Federer every bit as
famous as an adult as Tiger Woods and
yet even tennis enthusiasts don't
usually know anything about his
developmental story why is that even
though it's the norm I think it's partly
because the Tiger story is very dramatic
but also because it seems like this tidy
narrative that we can extrapolate to
anything that we want to be good at in
our own lives but that I think is a
problem because it turns out that many
Golf is a uniquely horrible model of
almost everything that humans want to
learn Golf is the epitome of what the
psychologist Robin Hogarth called a kind
learning environment kind learning
environments have next steps and goals
that are clear rules that are clear and
never change when you do something to
get feedback that is quick and accurate
work next year will look like work last
year chess also a kind learning
environment the grandmasters advantage
is largely based on knowledge of
recurring patterns which is also why
it's so easy to automate on the other
end of the spectrum are wicked learning
environments where next steps and goals
may not be clear rules may change you
may or may not get feedback when you do
something it may be delayed it may be
inaccurate and work next year may not
look like work last year so which one of
these sounds like the world we're
increasingly living in in fact our need
to think in an adaptable manner and to
keep track of interconnecting parts has
fundamentally changed our perception so
that when you look at this diagram the
central circle on the right probably
looks larger to you because your brain
is drawn to the relationship of the
parts in the whole whereas someone who
hasn't been exposed to modern work with
its requirement for adaptable conceptual
thought will see correctly that the
central circles are the same size so
here we are in the wicked work world and
they're sometimes hyper specialization
can backfire badly for example in
research in a dozen countries that
matched people for their parents years
of education their test scores their own
years of Education the difference was
some got career focused education and
some got broader general education the
pattern was those who got the career
focused education are more likely to be
hired right out of training more likely
to make more money right away but so
much less adaptable in a changing work
world that they spend so much less time
in the workforce over all that they win
in the short term and lose in the long
run or consider a famous 20-year study
of experts making geopolitical and
economic predictions the worst
forecasters were the most specialized
experts those who'd spent their entire
careers studying one or two problems and
came to see the whole world through one
lens or mental model some of them
actually got worse as the accumulated
experience and credentials the best
forecasters were simply
right people with wide-ranging interests
now in some domains like medicine
increasing specialization has been both
inevitable and beneficial no question
about it and yet it's been a
double-edged sword a few years ago one
of the most popular surgeries in the
world for knee pain was tested in a
placebo controlled trial some of the
patients got sham surgery
that means the surgeons make an incision
they bang around like they're doing
something then they sew the patient back
up that performed just as well and yet
surgeons who specialize in the procedure
continue to do it by the millions
so if hyperspecialization isn't always
the trick in a wicked world what is that
can be difficult to talk about because
it doesn't always look like this path
sometimes it looks like meandering or
zigzagging or keeping a broader view it
can look like getting behind but I want
to talk about what some of those tricks
might be if we look at research on
technological innovation it shows that
increasingly the most impactful patents
are not authored by individuals who
drill deeper deeper deeper into one area
of technology as classified by the US
Patent Office but rather by teams that
include individuals who have worked
across a large number of different
technology classes and often merged
things from different domains someone
whose work I've admired who was sort of
on the forefront of this a Japanese man
named gunpei Yokoi Yokoi didn't score
well in his electronics exams at school
so he had to settle for a low tier job
as a machine maintenance worker at a
playing card company in Kyoto
he realized he wasn't equipped to work
on the cutting edge but that there was
so much information easily available
that maybe he could combine things that
were already well-known in ways that
specialists were too narrow to see so he
combines some well-known technology from
the calculator industry with some
well-known technology from the
credit-card industry and made handheld
games and they were hit and it turned
this playing card company which was
founded in a wooden storefront in the
19th century into a toy and game
operation you may have heard of it it's
called Nintendo yokoi's creative
philosophy translated to lateral
thinking with whithered technology
taking well-known technology and using
it in new ways and his magnum opus was
this the gameboy technological joke in
every way and it came out at the same
time as color competitors from Sega and
Atari
and it blew them away because Yokoi knew
what his customers cared about wasn't
color it was durability portability
affordability battery life game
selection this is mine that I found in
my parents basement seen better days but
you can see the red light is on I
flipped it on and played some Tetris
which I thought was especially
impressive because the batteries had
expired in 2007 and 2013 so this breadth
advantage holds in more subjective
realms as well in a fascinating study of
what leads some comic book creators to
be more likely to make blockbuster
comics a pair of researchers found that
it was neither the number of years of
experience in the field nor the
resources of the publisher nor the
number of previous comics made it was
the number of different genres that a
creator had worked across and
interestingly abroad individual could
not be entirely replaced by a team of
specialists we probably don't make as
many of those people as we could because
early on they just look like they're
behind and we don't tend to incentivize
anything that doesn't look like a head
start or specialization in fact I think
in the well-meaning drive for a head
start
we often even counter productively short
circuit even the way we learn new
material at a fundamental level in study
last year 7th grade math classrooms in
the US were randomly assigned to
different types of learning some got
what's called blocked practice that's
like you get problem type a aaaa
bbbbb and so on progress is fast kids
are happy everything's great other
classrooms got assigned to what's called
interleaved practice that's like if you
took all the problem types and threw
them in a hat and drew them out at
random progress is slower kids are more
frustrated but instead of learning how
to execute procedures they're learning
how to match a strategy to a type of
problem and when the test comes around
the interleaved group blew the block
practice group away wasn't even close
now I found a lot of this research
deeply counterintuitive the idea that a
head start whether in picking a career
or a course of study or just in learning
new material
sometimes undermine long-term
development and naturally I think there
are as many ways to succeed as there are
people but I think we tend only to
incentivize and encourage the tiger path
when increasingly in a wicked world we
need people who travel the roger path as
well or is the eminent physicist and
mathematician and wonderful writer
Freeman Dyson put it and he Dyson passed
away yesterday so I hope I'm doing his
words honor here as he said for a
healthy ecosystem we need both birds and
frogs frogs are down in the mud seeing
all the granular details the birds are
soaring up above not seeing those
details but integrating the knowledge of
the frogs and we need both the problem
Dyson said is that we're telling
everyone to become frogs and I think in
a wicked world that's increasingly
short-sighted thank you very much
you