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December 29, 2023
Eventual elites typically devote less time early on to deliberate practice in the activity in which they will eventually become experts. Instead, they undergo what researchers call a “sampling period.” They play a variety of sports, usually in an unstructured or lightly structured environment; they gain a range of physical proficiencies from which they can draw; they learn about their own abilities and proclivities; and only later do they focus in and ramp up technical practice in one area.
One study showed that early career specializers jumped out to an earnings lead after college, but that later specializers made up for the head start by finding work that better fit their skills and personalities.
Overspecialization can lead to collective tragedy even when every individual separately takes the most reasonable course of action.
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.
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.
In wicked domains, the rules of the game are often unclear or incomplete, there may or may not be repetitive patterns and they may not be obvious, and feedback is often delayed, inaccurate, or both.
Moravec’s paradox: machines and humans frequently have opposite strengths and weaknesses.
Our greatest strength is the exact opposite of narrow specialization. It is the ability to integrate broadly.
a city dweller traveling through the desert will be completely dependent on a nomad to keep him alive. So long as they remain in the desert, the nomad is a genius.
Soliciting hints toward a solution is both clever and expedient. The problem is that when it comes to learning concepts that can be broadly wielded, expedience can backfire.
Metcalfe and colleagues have repeatedly demonstrated a “hypercorrection effect.” The more confident a learner is of their wrong answer, the better the information sticks when they subsequently learn the right answer. Tolerating big mistakes can create the best learning opportunities.*
Kepler thought outside the box. But what he really did, whenever he was stuck, was to think entirely outside the domain.
Psychologists have shown repeatedly that the more internal details an individual can be made to consider, the more extreme their judgment becomes.
If we treated careers more like dating, nobody would settle down so quickly.
Persevering through difficulty is a competitive advantage for any traveler of a long road, but he suggested that knowing when to quit is such a big strategic advantage that every single person, before undertaking an endeavor, should enumerate conditions under which they should
“The people we study who are fulfilled do pursue a long-term goal, but they only formulate it after a period of discovery,”
Adults tend to become more agreeable, more conscientious, more emotionally stable, and less neurotic with age, but less open to experience. In middle age, adults grow more consistent and cautious and less curious, open-minded, and inventive.
Because personality changes more than we expect with time, experience, and different contexts, we are ill-equipped to make ironclad long-term goals when our past consists of little time, few experiences, and a narrow range of contexts.
“Knowledge is a double-edged sword. It allows you to do some things, but it also makes you blind to other things that you could do.”
Do not be an engineer, he said, be a producer. “The producer knows that there’s such a thing as a semiconductor, but doesn’t need to know its inner workings. . . . That can be left to the experts.”
Yokoi’s greatest triumphs occurred when he thought laterally. He needed specialists, but his concern was that as companies grew and technology progressed, vertical-thinking hyperspecialists would continue to be valued but lateral-thinking generalists would not.
communication technology has limited the number of hyperspecialists required to work on a particular narrow problem, because their breakthroughs can be communicated quickly and widely to others—the
The best forecasters are high in active open-mindedness. They are also extremely curious, and don’t merely consider contrary ideas, they proactively cross disciplines looking for them.
experiments showed that an effective problem-solving culture was one that balanced standard practice—whatever it happened to be—with forces that pushed in the opposite direction. If managers were used to process conformity, encouraging individualism helped them to employ “ambidextrous thought,” and learn what worked in each situation. If they were used to improvising, encouraging a sense of loyalty and cohesion did the job.
when entire specialties grow up around devotion to a particular tool, the result can be disastrous myopia.
That’s how it goes on the disorderly path of experimentation. Original creators tend to strike out a lot, but they also hit mega grand slams,
diverse group of specialists cannot fully replace the contributions of broad individuals.
“Here’s who I am at the moment, here are my motivations, here’s what I’ve found I like to do, here’s what I’d like to learn, and here are the opportunities. Which of these is the best match right now? And maybe a year from now I’ll switch because I’ll find something better.”
if you help someone find a good fit, they are more likely to display the characteristics of grit—like sticking with something—even if they didn’t before.
“Vocational education has been promoted largely as a way of improving the transition from schooling to work, but it also appears to reduce the adaptability of workers to technological and structural change in the economy.”
As Woods said in 2000: “To this day, my dad has never asked me to go play golf. I ask him. It’s the child’s desire to play that matters, not the parent’s desire to have the child play.”
“If you’re going to write, you want to read a lot before you write, without any purpose.” Of course, the purpose is to find something that stimulates you but that you couldn’t have known to look for—an interest you didn’t know you had.
