In 2009, Kahneman and Klein took the unusual step of coauthoring a paper in which they laid out their views and sought common ground. And they found … - David Epstein

Whether or not experience inevitably led to expertise, they agreed, depended entirely on the domain in question. Narrow experience made for better chess and poker players and firefighters, but not for better predictors of financial or political trends, or of how employees or patients would perform.

Compared to other scientists, Nobel laureates are at least twenty-two times more likely to partake as an amateur actor, dancer, magician, or other type of performer. Nationally recognized scientists are much more likely than other scientists to be musicians, sculptors, painters, printmakers, woodworkers, mechanics, electronics tinkerers, glassblowers, poets, or writers, of both fiction and nonfiction. And, again, Nobel laureates are far more likely still.

Some people argue that part of the reason U.S. students don’t do as well on international measures of high school knowledge is that they’re doing too well in class,” Nate Kornell, a cognitive psychologist at Williams College, told me. “What you want is to make it easy to make it hard.” Kornell was explaining the concept of “desirable difficulties,” obstacles that make learning more challenging, slower, and

a system that leads people to downplay previous experiences, as if they were entirely wasted, is a counterproductive one. We shouldn’t be ashamed of broad experience, or of needing time to find match quality. Take it from Angela Duckworth, the researcher whose work popularized the psychological construct of “grit.