You have people walking around with all the knowledge of humanity on their phone, but they have no idea how to integrate it. We don’t train people in… - David Epstein

The challenge we all face is how to maintain the benefits of breadth, diverse experience, interdisciplinary thinking, and delayed concentration in a world that increasingly incentivizes, even demands, hyperspecialization.

Most problems are not solved by adding more.

They are solved by taking something away.

But our brains default in the opposite direction.

Progress often starts with removal.

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