it’s often the case in group meetings where the person who made the PowerPoint slides puts data in front of you, and we often just use the data peopl… - David Epstein

Instead, she told me, in a clever inversion of a hallowed axiom, “First act and then think.” Ibarra marshaled social psychology to argue persuasively that we are each made up of numerous possibilities. As she put it, “We discover the possibilities by doing, by trying new activities, building new networks, finding new role models.” We learn who we are in practice, not in theory.

In that way, the students had something in common with Luria’s remote villagers — even the science majors were typically unable to generalize research methods from their own field to other fields. Flynn’s conclusion: “There is no sign that any department attempts to develop [anything] other than narrow critical competence.

And yet a tech founder who is fifty years old is nearly twice as likely to start a blockbuster company as one who is thirty, and the thirty-year-old has a better shot than a twenty-year-old.