David Epstein Quotes

Big innovation most often happens when an outsider who may be far away from the surface of the problem reframes the problem in a way that unlocks the solution.

Mostly, though, students get what economist Bryan Caplan called narrow vocational training for jobs few of them will ever have. Three-quarters of American college graduates go on to a career unrelated to their major — a trend that includes math and science majors — after having become competent only with the tools of a single discipline. One good tool is rarely enough in a complex, interconnected, rapidly changing world. As the historian and philosopher Arnold Toynbee said when he described analyzing the world in an age of technological and social change, “No tool is omnicompetent.” •

Twenty thousand volunteers responded, agonizing over everything from whether they should get a tattoo, try online dating, or have a child, to the 2,186 people who were pondering a job change.* But could they really trust a momentous decision to chance? The answer for the potential job changers who flipped heads was: only if they wanted to be happier. Six months later, those who flipped heads and switched jobs were substantially happier than the stayers.* According to Levitt, the study suggested that “admonitions such as ‘winners never quit and quitters never win,’ while well-meaning, may actually be extremely poor advice.” Levitt identified one of his own most important skills as “the willingness to jettison” a project or an entire area of study for a better fit.

While it is undoubtedly true that there are areas that require individuals with Tiger’s precocity and clarity of purpose, as complexity increases — as technology spins the world into vaster webs of interconnected systems in which each individual only sees a small part — we also need more Rogers: people who start broad and embrace diverse experiences and perspectives while they progress. People with range.

Winston Churchill’s “never give in, never, never, never, never” is an oft-quoted trope. The end of the sentence is always left out: “except to convictions of honor and good sense.” Labor

It’s easier for a jazz musician to learn to play classical literature than for a classical player to learn how to play jazz,” he said. “The jazz musician is a creative artist, the classical musician is a re-creative artist.

Improv masters learn like babies: dive in and imitate and improvise first, learn the formal rules later. “At the beginning, your mom didn’t give you a book and say, ‘This is a noun, this is a pronoun, this is a dangling participle,’” Cecchini told me. “You acquired the sound first. And then you acquire the grammar later.

At the first ever Girl Scout training event Hesselbein attended, she heard another new troop leader complain that she was getting nothing from the session. Hesselbein mentioned it to a dress-factory worker who was also volunteering, and the woman told her, “You have to carry a big basket to bring something home.” She repeats that phrase today, to mean that a mind kept wide open will take something from every new experience. It is a natural philosophy for someone who was sixty when she attempted to turn down an interview for the job that became her calling. She had no long-term plan, only a plan to do what was interesting or needed at the moment. “I never envisioned” is her most popular preamble. Hesselbein’s professional career, which started in her midfifties, was extraordinary. The meandering path, however, was not.

Instead of working back from a goal, work forward from promising situations. This is what most successful people actually do anyway.

The world is not golf, and most of it isn’t even tennis. As Robin Hogarth put it, much of the world is “Martian tennis.” You can see the players on a court with balls and rackets, but nobody has shared the rules. It is up to you to derive them, and they are subject to change without notice.

This must change, he argues, if students are to capitalize on their unprecedented capacity for abstract thought. They must be taught to think before being taught what to think about. Students come prepared with scientific spectacles, but do not leave carrying a scientific-reasoning Swiss Army knife.

Desirable difficulties like testing and spacing make knowledge stick. It becomes durable. Desirable difficulties like making connections and interleaving make knowledge flexible, useful for problems that never appeared in training. All slow down learning and make performance suffer, in the short term.

Above all, the most basic message is that teachers and students must avoid interpreting current performance as learning. Good performance on a test during the learning process can indicate mastery, but learners and teachers need to be aware that such performance will often index, instead, fast but fleeting progress.

Match quality” is a term economists use to describe the degree of fit between the work someone does and who they are — their abilities and proclivities.

A hallmark of interactions on the best teams is what psychologist Jonathan Baron termed “active open-mindedness.” The best forecasters view their own ideas as hypotheses in need of testing. Their aim is not to convince their teammates of their own expertise, but to encourage their teammates to help them falsify their own notions.